As Poslovni Dnevnik/Sergej Novosel Vuckovic writes, young Slavonian Luka Soldo (21) got rid of his own nicotine addiction with a few innovative herbal preparations that he makes himself. Making rolls like cigarettes, from plants, and without tobacco, he realised they were helping him, so he designed his own project.
He and his family invested 5,000 euros and in Podolje in Baranja back in 2019 and then they started to procure, mostly from their own home fields, various herbs, which they picked, cut, dried, chopped, processing everything by hand. They then packaged them and presented them as the Herbie brand, not for smoking, but for drinking – a mixture of teas. With that move, the first Croatian stop smoking teas were born.
Last year, Herbie was crowned the best entrepreneurial idea and awarded 25,000 euros in an international competition of the Crown programme of the Sisak-Moslavina County Development Agency Simora.
The market has somewhat recognised these truly unique Croatian stop smoking teas, they are available through the Herbie webshop and in a couple of specialised stores in Zagreb, Split, Rijeka, Osijek and Zadar, but the goal is to work on the visibility of the brand. As of today, Herbie is also heading for the increasingly popular Kickstarter, with a crowdfunding funding campaign, Soldo wants to raise 1,500 US dollars to invest in marketing.
“We set that amount so that we’d manage to reach it on the very first day, we want to introduce the brand to the public and make people aware that there are herbal mixtures with which people can stop smoking,” explained the young entrepreneur.
He recently presented the Herbie brand in Barcelona at the world’s largest mobile telecommunications fair, the Mobile World Congress, and agreed on placing the product in Spain.
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