Ovo Energy.

A new supplier with no customers, launched with the founders' own savings, into a market the Big Six had to themselves. As recently as 2004 they held almost the entire market. Founder Stephen Fitzpatrick had been a frustrated energy customer himself.

Nothing anyone believed. The incumbents were complicated, sold far too many tariffs, and weren't trusted. The category's real message to customers was: it's a mess, and switching won't help.

Cheaper. Greener. Simpler.

Three words, each one ground the incumbents couldn't take without breaking their own business model. They couldn't claim simpler while running dozens of tariffs, cheaper without repricing millions of customers, or greener with fossil fuels in the mix. The launch position was built with Stephen around his founding mission, then turned into a platform the business could live by.

Two plans instead of twenty: standard and green. Prices at or below the cheapest in the market. And giving back money the rest of the industry kept. From 2010, Ovo paid 3% interest on customers' credit balances, the overpayments its rivals quietly held on to. When new regulation threatened it, Ovo applied for formal permission to keep paying, and won.

The position held for more than a decade. By 2019 Ovo was the UK's largest independent supplier, with 1.5 million customers. In 2020 it bought SSE's household energy business for £500 million, becoming the second-largest supplier in the country.

Of the challengers that launched in that era, most were bought or went bust. First Utility, a year older, was sold to Shell and its name disappeared. Twenty-nine suppliers failed in the 2021 energy crisis, Bulb the biggest of them. Ovo went the other way: it bought one of the Big Six it had launched against.