‘You’ll be out of business in six months’: How EasyJet proved the doubters wrong
Twenty-five years on, EasyJet’s third employee looks back at how a mixture of bombastic ads and guerilla marketing helped the airline overcome its ‘David versus Goliath’ struggle.
From its eye-popping bright orange hue to bombastic ads targeting British Airways, EasyJet entered the travel market not with a whimper, but with a very big bang.
On 10 November 1995 the first EasyJet flight took off, just six months after the company hired its third employee, sales and marketing director Tony Anderson.
Flying from Luton to Glasgow for the “cost of a price of jeans” (£29 return compared to BA’s £120 one way), EasyJet would spark a revolution in travel and begin the journey of an instantly recognisable set of brands. However, at the start Anderson was wondering how he would explain “this gap” in his CV.
“I remember sitting in Glasgow Airport the day of the first flight and I was reading the Scottish papers about this plucky new airline that had just launched, but was destined to go bankrupt and I remember thinking ‘How am I going to pay my mortgage?’” he recalls.
