We're really excited to be sitting down with Priya Pankhania, Founder of PrePear, on building the UK's first pre-drinking brand. Building a brand new category is never easy, and we've been impressed by the packaging format, the pouch feels like a real point of difference needed to bring attention to the space, and we think this new category can be carved out in major retail too.

Check out PrePear: Website - LinkedIn - Instagram

You've spoken about a decade in marketing and always saying yes to both work and socialising, until it stopped being sustainable. What was the moment that pushed you from living that tension to actually building a product to solve it?

“For years I thought the answer was simply choosing, the promotion or the dinner with friends, the workout or the late night. Somewhere along the way we'd all accepted that a full life meant something had to give.

After a decade in marketing, I was constantly compromising between a career I loved and a social life I wasn't willing to give up. We prepare for almost everything else in life, why not our bodies for a night out?

That question led me to the centuries-old Korean tradition of drinking Korean pear juice before alcohol. I flew to South Korea to understand the science and source the right pears, and that's where PrePear began, not as a personal fix, but because I could see there was no category in the UK addressing this at all. No/low alcohol was solving a different problem: abstaining. Nothing was solving for people who still wanted to drink, just without the trade-off the next day. That gap is what made this a business, not just a personal project.

I didn't start PrePear to encourage people to drink more. I started it because people shouldn't have to choose between making memories today and showing up for tomorrow.”

You were told early on that the pouch would never sell in the UK. What made you finally back the packaging, and what has it taught you about standing out on shelf versus fitting in?

“Almost everyone told us to put PrePear in a bottle, bottles felt familiar, safer, more "premium." But the pouch solved problems bottles couldn't: portable, lightweight, easy to slip into a bag or jacket pocket. It's also the traditional way Korean pear is enjoyed before drinking in South Korea, and because we're committed to an authentic product using 100% Korean Shingo pears, keeping the pouch felt like honouring that heritage rather than diluting it for shelf convention.

I worried early on that people would reject something unfamiliar. Instead, I learned unfamiliarity is an advantage when you're creating a new category. If we'd packaged PrePear like another juice shot, shoppers would have filed it under "juice." It isn't. It's something else entirely, and the format tells shoppers that before they've read a word of copy.

Launching a challenger brand has taught me that consumers are more open-minded than established businesses give them credit for. Standing out feels uncomfortable as a founder, but it's exactly what gives shoppers, and buyers, a reason to stop, look and remember you.”

Pre-drinking isn't a category that existed in the UK before PrePear. What's been hardest about explaining a completely new ritual to retailers and shoppers who don't have a reference point for it yet?

“The hardest part hasn't been convincing people they want the benefit, it's helping them understand when to use it. People instinctively look for a comparison: is it a juice, a supplement, a functional shot? It's none of those. It's designed to be taken around 20 minutes before alcohol, which meant we had to create the behaviour before we could create repeat purchase.

Retailers faced the same challenge, because there wasn't an obvious shelf for it. We made a deliberate call to merchandise PrePear alongside beer, wine and spirits rather than juice or soft drinks, because that's where the purchase decision actually happens. Once people understand the ritual, it becomes intuitive fast.

Building a category means constant education, but that's also the opportunity. Every retailer conversation, every piece of content, every customer is another chance to define what "pre-drinking" means in the UK, and to be the name people default to when they do.”

From DJs to parents to students, you've talked about PrePear slotting into very different nights out. How do you design a product and a brand that can flex across that many different rituals without losing what makes it distinct?

“We never built PrePear around one consumer type, we built it around a universal tension. A parent who has to be up at 6am, a founder with investor meetings, someone training for a half marathon, a group meeting after work: most people don't want one evening to compromise the next day. That's not a niche.

That insight shapes everything, including the brand itself. It isn't built around excess or party culture, it's built around saying yes to life: the spontaneous dinner, the wedding, the festival, the Sunday morning that follows. The product stays exactly the same because the need stays the same. The context changes, not the consumer.

By designing around that emotional truth rather than a demographic, we've built something that reads as relevant across generations while staying instantly recognisable for what it stands for, which matters as much on shelf as it does in a pitch deck.”

You've gone from indie stockists to Selfridges, Harrods, Fortnum & Mason and Ocado. What does the next chapter look like, and where do you want PrePear to sit in people's lives in a few years?

“The ambition was never to become another drinks brand. It's to establish pre-drinking as an entirely new category, the way "meal kits" or "functional beverages" didn't exist as shelf categories until someone built the first credible brand in them.

We have a lot of exciting opportunities on the horizon, from major supermarket listings to expanding the PrePear range with new formats that support more moments around socialising.

But the bigger goal is behavioural. I want reaching for PrePear before a night out to feel as normal as putting on your shoes before you leave the house. If we've done our job, people won't think of it as something they occasionally remember to buy, it'll be part of their routine.

For PrePear, success isn't measured in listings or sales alone. It's measured by changing habits at scale, and proving that even in one of the world's most established industries, there's still room to create an entirely new consumer behaviour.”

Check out PrePear: Website - LinkedIn - Instagram

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