Booyah! For the New Year!
MEL STEEL
Lisa Driver, founder and CEO of local business success story Booyah! Vitality, is passionate about nutrition, fitness and helping people to feel better. When I meet her she has just delivered her first Pilates class of the new year and is glowing. “As we get older it’s really important to focus on muscle strength,” she says, “especially for women. Walking is not enough! And don’t think that just because you don’t drink, your liver will be fine – diet can really affect the liver too.”
So is Dry January pointless, then? “No, not at all!” she says. “It’s good to take a break from toxins from time to time, for at least 30 days – three months if you can manage it. It gives the liver a chance to clear out the sludge, and a break can act as a reset on your health. Just don’t overdo it. It’s all about balance.”
Lisa didn’t have the easiest start. The youngest of seven in a north-eastern working-class family with an absent dad, she says she “did terrible at school”. Her mum died when she was 10 and she was brought up by her older sisters, moving to Hastings when she was 16 to live with a sister who lived in the Old Town and ran Porters Wine Bar.
After a few aimless years – a hairdressing apprenticeship in Bexhill; working for a record label in London; sailing around the Caribbean as a galley skivvy on a yacht – she (quite literally) jumped ship and headed back to Hastings, where she worked for her sister at Porters. Here she learned a lot about running a business, as well as a lot about the impact of drinking on health (“not that I don’t enjoy a glass of wine!” she’s quick to add).
Around this time she also started noticing that her own gut wasn’t feeling right and became interested in ways to improve her own health. She knew she wanted to run her own business and dreamed of opening a health centre, but had no idea where to start. Then the Hastings & Eastbourne franchise for Rosemary Conley’s pioneering diet and fitness empire came up, and she jumped at the opportunity.
She ran the franchise for 15 years, during which time she learned a lot about business management and nutrition and became a qualified fitness instructor. But as time went on, she found herself disagreeing with some of Conley’s ideas about nutrition, particularly her advocacy of a low-fat diet and the use of artificial sugars. With two young children of her own by this time, Lisa could see the impact of artificial sugars on their health and behaviour and thought there must be better alternatives.
She sold the franchise in 2009 and focussed on looking after the kids while her husband Philip, a commercial diver, worked abroad. Then in 2014, she started a 3-year course in nutrition at the College of Naturopathic Medicine in London, and absolutely loved it. Its focus was holistic, and it treated food as a medicine. It aimed to find ways to keep the whole body in balance, something that absolutely made sense to her.
Booyah! started off as a hobby. She was already working as a nutritionist and fitness instructor and had started making kefir (a curdled milk drink) at home. But her husband and daughter didn’t like the taste, so she started experimenting with making turmeric shots and kombucha – a fermented probiotic-rich tea packed with organic acids, vitamins and antioxidants, great for the gut and for boosting the immune system. She shared it with some of her Pilates clients who were complaining about joint pain, and they swore it helped. “But I didn’t for one second think I could ever make it into a business,” she says.
When the pandemic hit, the family found themselves at home in lockdown, Philip trying to work remotely and Lisa teaching classes on Zoom. “You’d better start learning to make kombucha,” Lisa told her husband. So he did, making it up in the kitchen and brewing it in the garage. They sold it mostly to people they knew, by word of mouth. Then they got a kiosk on the pier in the summer heatwave of 2020.
“That first summer, maybe 10% of people we spoke to had heard of kombucha,” says Lisa. “But by our third summer, it was more like 60% – and a lot of people told us it had helped them get over Covid.” A local marketing professional got in touch and offered her help with branding. They became a limited company and moved out of the garage and into a small unit in Silverhill. Then in 2022 they moved again into larger premises on Ivyhouse Lane.
Now they bottle 8,000 units of kombucha per month, compared to the 50 units they were selling on the pier. Booyah! is stocked in independent shops, cafés and bars from Chichester to Margate and right up to Sevenoaks. It’s still a family affair – alongside Lisa and Philip, their children Leon and Phoebe both now work for the business – but they have big ambitions. This year they plan to hit London, get into supermarkets and launch their new limited-edition alcohol kombuchas, featuring gin and rum.
“Well if you’re going to have alcohol, make it healthy,” says Lisa. “My kids are sick of hearing me say it, but good health is all about the gut!”
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