‘Laying people off is the hardest’ – The Happy Pear on business struggles, big egos and going back to basics

By | April 18, 2021

Want to know what the opposite of social distancing is? The Happy Pear twins Stephen and David Flynn, 41, are sitting out the back of their vegan shop in Greystones, Co Wicklow, on a glorious spring morning, eating the same wholemeal falafel pitta. Not a pitta cut in half, you understand, but the same pitta, with its scalloped hem of sibling-bites.

If one of us is eating something, it’s naturally shared,” says Steve.

“There’s an entitlement — half that’s mine!” agrees Dave,

We are drinking our coffee,” explains Steve, after reaching over to steal a sup from Dave’s oat-milk decaf.

We are also talking about how the pandemic has eaten away at their plant-based cooking and lifestyle business over the past year, snatching two stores in Clondalkin and Dublin Airport and devouring 39pc of their workforce.

“Laying people off is always the hardest because you’ve got personal connections and relationships, and you feel a responsibility. You feel like you’ve let people down,” says Dave, who opened the original vegetable shop with his twin in 2004. Since then The Happy Pear has grown into a full-blown wellness brand, with cafes, ready meals, sauces, cookbooks, courses, a podcast and more.

“It’s horrible as well to look to your team and go, ‘We need to cut costs by X. Who do we keep? Who do we not?’” Steve says. “Especially when we’ve always tried to foster close working relationships.”

At the end of 2019 they had 118 employees “and now we’re at 72 or something,” says Steve, who had to personally let people go a number of times. “It’s horrible. You hate it but you have to just put your hand on your heart and go, ‘Listen, ultimately we’re a business. I have to be financially responsible. We have to pay the bills, we have to be a responsible business. Unfortunately, your role is being made redundant.’”

Were there tears? “Oh yeah, always,” he grimaces. “It’s horrible. Especially when it is someone you’ve worked with for a number of years and had a close friendship. If you know you have to do it, you’re nervous for three days beforehand. It’s like breaking up with someone.”

“Yeah, it is similar to that but a little bit more functional,” agrees Dave.

Like a relationship break-up, there also “needs to be space first” before friendships can be salvaged from the redundancy wreckage.

“For some people it’s easy and they get it. But then there’s other people and it might be six months or maybe a year or it might be a few years, I don’t know. But eventually you’re friends.”

There is no talk of getting back together in the future either — and later we will get to the brothers’ Damascene conversion to downsizing.

On the job cuts front, they purposefully did not break the bad news to employees together, and routinely had their financial director in the meetings to talk systems and procedures to devastated staff.

“With two of us there, it’s unfair to one person,” says Steve.

“Just power-wise, if there’s two of you and you’re both strong, confident loudmouths, it can be intimidating, no matter who the other person is,” agrees Dave. “But laying people off is worse when it’s down to our poor leadership rather than an external creature like a pandemic.”

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This is not their first rodeo, you see. Before the pandemic hit, the brothers had other business trouble. Five years ago they borrowed €1.5m through the Employment Investment Incentive scheme “trying to pursue as much opportunity as we could”. They opened a cafe in Clondalkin in 2017, sold their products into Waitrose in 2018, and opened another cafe in Dublin Airport in 2019.

“We expanded in the UK, we’d lost lots of money and we were up at 200 staff and it was wobbly,” says Dave.

“I remember figures coming in and thinking, ‘Jesus, that’s not so promising’,” winces Steve.

“We had over-stretched ourselves and I guess Covid-19 really fast-tracked knocking the house of cards,” says Dave. “Now we’re back on a solid foundation, going, phew, that was a wild ride.”

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The Happy Pear twin brothers, David, left, and Stephen Flynn

The Happy Pear twin brothers, David, left, and Stephen Flynn

The Happy Pear twin brothers, David, left, and Stephen Flynn

Now they want to work with what’s left “as opposed to getting caught with these big, audacious goals,” says Steve. “Any business that’s over-extended during Covid-19 has had to pay the price.”

He had a bad feeling about their expansion at the time. “It’s funny, you know in your gut. I remember when we were opening the airport and Clondalkin I was just kind of like, I don’t know if this is right. Sometimes you don’t have the courage to stand up and to question it because there’s so much momentum there.”

They say they won’t be opening any more cafes post-Covid-19.

Uncharacteristic silence follows a question about whether they ever cried in the past year. “When you start a business called The Happy Pear, people expect you to be a certain way so it has kind of held us accountable,” says Dave.

But both agree that no one can be happy all the time.

“I feel happy now because the sun’s out, but an hour ago I felt overwhelmed because there was so much stuff going on,” admits Dave.

Steve turns to Dave and adds: “Even walking up the road there I was saying, ‘You know Dave your goal for the year was to enjoy the journey. I think you’re trying to do too much. Just relax. It’ll happen’.”

Mental health is on their minds. Last month, they launched their very first Happy Mind course, featuring performance coach and psychologist Gerry Hussey, “to help people improve their relationship with themselves and learn mental resilience”.

Aside from work stress, Dave is now doing up a house he bought “11 doors down” from their shop on leafy Church Road. Steve, his wife Justyna and three kids aged 10, seven and four live “three doors down” from the shop and Dave’s estranged wife Jan and their two children, aged 10 and seven, live across the road.

The twins’ closeness — geographical, emotional and around a sandwich — can be a “hard dynamic” for their other halves.

“That’s why my first marriage [split up],” says Dave. “One of the contributing reasons has definitely been that Steve is my first. If I have a problem, I’ll talk to him because he’ll understand it way more. I can just look at him and he’ll probably get it. Whereas Jan had expectations of something else and I totally get it.”

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He is now in a relationship with Belgian Sabrina Vande Cotte, a product marketing manager at Google.

There is one enormous bonus for everyone living close to the shop: They don’t have to cook — ever — which must free up a heck of a lot of lockdown headspace.

“My wife hates to cook,” says Steve, almost proudly. “So Justyna would be over [at the shop] for lunch, over for dinner, she feeds the kids here. This is like part of their kitchen. We never do weekly shops or even a meal shop. We’ll just come over and get things as we need it, which is wonderful.”

For anyone still wondering how Dave could buy an expensive house while the pandemic streaked through the books like a tornado, The Happy Pear brand has had one particularly successful pivot.

Sales of their online courses skyrocketed as people stuck at home finally tried to sort themselves out with a Happy Gut, a Happy Heart, a Happy Shape or Happy Skin.

In 2019 revenues from ‘ancillary activities’ — mainly these courses — totalled €843,000; in 2020 that income “nearly tripled” to in excess of €2m. Throughout 2020 over 30,000 people from all over the world did their courses, for which they partner with nutritionists, dieticians and other experts.

“Covid-19 has taught us to work with what we have and do better,” says Steve. “We’ve been doing courses and online courses for almost 10 years, but me and Dave had never had the time to really commit to it because we’d be on the road or doing this talk or doing that talk. You get caught up by some other shiny project. Going over to London with this and that — ‘Oh fabulous, we’ll be there!’ And there goes three days.”

Customers with their newly happy insides and outsides now extend right across the globe.

“You can imagine getting people from the UK or Canada or Australia because there are Irish people there. Then you see Afghanistan and Iraq, you see Ivory Coast and Rwanda and you’re going, ‘Jesus, there are a lot Irish people all over the world’.”

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The brothers prefer to use the term ‘plant-based’ rather than ‘vegan’ about the food they sell

The brothers prefer to use the term ‘plant-based’ rather than ‘vegan’ about the food they sell

The brothers prefer to use the term ‘plant-based’ rather than ‘vegan’ about the food they sell

They also brought out two bestselling Happy Pear cookbooks, last July and December, and opened a sourdough bakery in the shop, which is Steve’s baby. Throughout the interview he is the one who brings out the steady stream of delicious food, even by a non-vegetarian’s standards: a tofu wrap with a light mayo, a reuben sandwich, a vegan chocolate cookie straight from the oven and two types of coffee, with passionate descriptions of everything. He goes back in for a second tray of grub featuring the infamous shared pitta. Those lads can eat.

But hasn’t veganism had its (narky, self-righteous) day?

“I don’t think veganism has necessarily had its day, I think it’s gonna continue to grow for the next while. But I think plant-based is what we prefer to focus on because it’s more inclusive and it’s got less baggage,” says Steve.

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Has veganism had a rebrand?

“Being vegan is very much about what you don’t eat and plant-based is more focused on what you do eat,” he explains.

“Vegan in its core concept is more about animal ethics and it kind of focuses more on, ‘Did you eat a bit of cheese?’” says Dave, wagging a finger.

“The intentions behind them are slightly different,” says Steve.

Traditionally their customers — up to 80pc of whom are female — came from outside the 5km lockdown limit. “A lot of the local community stopped coming here because it was too busy,” says Steve. “There were big queues and they couldn’t be bothered. Or they’d say, ‘Ah, the lads are too big for their boots’ or whatever judgment they had. Now we have to be relevant to the local community and that has been a silver lining.”

The happy pair (get it?) admits that actually, yes, they may have got too big for their boots, flip-flops and Toms. “You’re getting lots of praise and, ‘Ah, wow, look at ye! How many people are working for you now? Oh my God you’re at 50 people now!’ And you kind of go, ‘Ok, people think it’s good when you’ve got lots of employees, so if I have more employees people think I’m better. Cool, let’s do that’,” says Dave with faux enthusiasm (they have two main settings: faux and genuine enthusiasm).

Was it hubris? “Cultural programming,” reckons Steve.

“Ego and cultural programming and insecurities,” says Dave. “We’re all fumbling along wanting other people to think we’re great.”

He reckons the twins are “like Marmite: people think we’re great and other people think we’re weirdos”.

But back to business. “I feel a lot better at being smaller now,” says Steve. “We went way up and now we’re at a way more manageable size.”

In a conversation about the collapse of British chef Jamie Oliver’s restaurant chain in 2019, they reckon “it also could have been hugely relieving for him as a person because he probably had all the responsibility to go to visit all these places. There was a moment of pain for a few months but he probably feels much lighter”.

Are they themselves relieved?

“Totally,” says Steve.

“Definitely,” says Dave.

The pandemic has made them ask searching questions like, what is happiness? What are we doing this for? “The big thing was to reflect on what’s important in life and how we want to live our lives,” says Dave. “This isn’t exclusive to us because I think a lot of people had to do it. I think most people realised that commuting seems to be a waste of time and that they can work more from home and have a better local relationship.”

The Happy Pear now intends to “recalibrate and get back to the bones of the business,” says Steve. “I think we were on that journey anyway but the pandemic expedited it.”

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