James Eagle started smoking fish in his backyard in Camberwell back in 2014.
As a medical device salesman, James Eagle traveled Scandinavia and was frequently seen with salmon or gravlax as the “main event” on menus.
Back in the UK, he felt the thinly sliced smoked salmon was a secondary note on our plates. “I always thought it was a shame,” says Eagle.
Redundancy from his sales job in 2013 allowed Eagle to start a smokehouse out of a small shed at the back of his garden in Camberwell, London, which turned from a hobby into the birth of his craft brand – The Pished Fish.
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“In the UK, when you get a bagel with smoked salmon and cream cheese, you can taste the cream cheese and the bagel,” adds Eagle. “How I likened it to the wafer-thin smoked salmon that almost melts into the bagel.”
Eagle, who didn’t finish college, worked for drum and bass label Good Looking Records in the early 2000s and was a PA at LTJ Bukem before turning to a career in sales.
However, being fired at the medical device firm left a “sour taste” and taught him a lesson about “how to look after my staff now”.
In late 2014, Eagle ventured into farmers’ markets with house-smoked salmon, made in what he describes as a “glorified filet” smoker. It would start at 1am for the laborious 16-hour process.
The direct-to-consumer side of Pished Fish’s business has skyrocketed since COVID.
It produced three different flavors, sold out every weekend, and gave Eagle confidence that a more profitable business was in the works.
The Pished Fish’s USP uses botanicals and alcohol – hence the fun company name – such as whiskey, aquavit and vodka to flavor its Scandinavian-style, booze-infused smoked salmon. “The ones I thought were more fun were made with alcohol,” he recalls of his early tests on smokers.
After meeting his now wife Hermione through the dating site My Single Friend, the couple attended a course on how to set up a food business. Eagle’s main takeaway was not to be product driven, but to have a compelling brand.
He spent £4,000 on a design and logo. “Having someone to properly envision what it could be was really important,” he says. “I felt it was an awful lot of money at the time, but it was the best money you could spend.”
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When a fishmonger at Selfridges later spotted the brand, the Eagles moved to East Sussex and went full-time to expand the business. The start-up was housed on his father’s land near the Sussex Downs, initially in two shipping containers, before moving into an adjacent building, where Eagle today employs eight full-time staff.
The smoking technique has also been simplified with two stainless steel smokehouses costing £18,000. The company uses a mix of Faroese and Scottish salmon, with concoctions ranging from whiskey and maple syrup to honey and bourbon. No wonder the brand praises the salmon as having a “rock and roll personality”.
When COVID hit in 2020, online orders grew rapidly and profit per pack soon surpassed the 5p he was earning from supplying a supermarket deli counter.
In 2022, their biggest order was marked by sales of £10,000 in one day, alongside the founder’s wedding anniversary promotion. Eagle says the e-commerce side has been beefed up considerably since then, with email distribution now at 50,000.
Pished Fish now has a smokehouse on a farm in Upper Dicker, East Sussex.
In Christmas 2024, the business raised £40,000 in one day and had to close the site.
“Email is a great way to get to know your customers. It’s a nice touch point to make it more human,” says the founder. “I think a lot of customers see e-commerce as a bit faceless, but I always try to respond personally.”
Pished Fish’s most difficult period came in 2023, without the tailwind of consumers spending online at home, and then the following year when the price of fish reached record levels.
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However, the Sussex firm has grown by 20% year-on-year since 2020 and is set to break the £1m barrier by 2025. It was forecast to generate £5m in revenue based on pandemic forecasts, but Eagle was encouraged to take a slow and steady business outlook on tracking growth.
This has helped The Pished Fish as Eagle targets a £2m turnover over the next three years by retaining customer acquisition, spending more on advertising and growing its email list.
“Before we didn’t treat it as an e-commerce business, we were a smoker and we were selling to the general public,” he says.
Start-up mentality
I still feel like we’re in the start-up zone and that means being the face of the business and interacting with customers. We have always tried to keep a sense of humor with the brand.
Solving problems
I am constantly trying to solve problems day by day. The dream of being in a small smokehouse, cutting up fish and putting it in packages has to stop if you want to grow.
The biggest thing I still find stressful is letting people down or if an order didn’t reach the customers. There’s always something that keeps you up at night.
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