Most Downloaded Episodes: Seedlip Founder on How to Be Disruptive

0:04Bea Brinsmead:We've recently seen a huge increase in our number of listeners and followers, and it struck me that many of you may not have had a chance to explore the incredible back catalogue of guests that we've had on Brand Growth Heroes over the past five years. So I've carefully selected a handful of our most downloaded, most valuable and most timeless interviews packed with insights that scaling founders still rave to us about. From the slow burn visionaries to the speedy disruptors, we've had intimate interviews with founders like Perfect Head, Lucky Saint, Trip, Seedlip, Wild Deodorant, Strong Roots, Oddbox, Small, Bowl Bean, as well as massive international challenger brands like Waterdrop and Midday Squares, Olipop and Tony's Chocall Only and many, many more.

0:45Bea Brinsmead:Because remember, great thinking doesn't age. And I realised recently that I've never actually shared why I started Brand Growth Heroes. I started the podcast because it physically drives me nuts and I mean that literally that there's so much wisdom out there from founders who've been through it all yet so many of us are still struggling day to day making the same painful mistakes that thousands of others have made before us so if there's something in this episode that helps you with your business then that makes me happy and if you could take two minutes to pay it forward by sharing it with a fellow founder, clicking subscribe or follow and leaving me a quick review, it honestly helps me bring even more brilliant founders on this show to share their secrets with you.

1:32Bea Brinsmead:Ben Branson of Seedlip, welcome to Brand Growth Heroes. Thanks so much for joining us today. Thanks for having me. It's an absolute pleasure. Do you know, when I wrote to you, I didn't think you were going to get back to me because you've got this kind of like mythical, mythical, you know, position in Food & Bev in the UK. And I just for some reason expected that you wouldn't. And you did. So thank you very much for responding. So many people don't. It's really surprising. So many people don't actually respond when you write on LinkedIn and say, hey, will you come on the show? So I do appreciate it.

2:02Bea Brinsmead:It's really great to have you. So listen, Seedlip is now the number one non-alcoholic spirit by value in the entire world. That is something else. You launched it in 2015 and you sold a majority stake to Diageo in 2019. How did you end up coming up with the idea of a non-alcoholic spirit? And, you know, lots of people would just stop there. How come you actually started making them yourself? Tell us a little bit about that backstory. Well, firstly, I didn't set out to create a non-alcoholic spirit and I didn't set out to create a business and I didn't set out to I don't know give to try and give people a decent non-alcoholic option if they're not drinking alcohol for whatever reason this was this was sort of born out of naivety uh passion upbringing um curiosity nothing really to do with the world of business startups uh money drinks anything i come from a farming family and uh well i come from a farming family and a design family so it's a good mix um and it's definitely seed lip is is the product of my upbringing in that sense And I do genuinely feel like, yeah, I was meant to do seed lip.

3:36However grandiose that kind of sounds when I've got mum's side that I've been farming for 320 years. And I grew up in the countryside and I live in the countryside and I love the natural world. and then my dad's in the world of brand design and has been helping people bring to life brands all over the world for the last 40 years so i kind of yeah and so i've sat on the tractors and i've worked in design agencies and you know gazed at back bars and supermarket shelves and helped founders start brands and help reposition or redesign bigger brands.

4:27Bea Brinsmead:Welcome to Brand Growth Heroes, the leading podcast for the founders of Challenger grocery brands. I'm your host, Fiona Fitz. My 25 years at global giants such as Nestle and Challenger brands such as Goo Chocolate Puds, Chobani and Strong Roots, as well as coached over 400 scaling brands, means I have the experience to ask the questions that truly matter and get you the insight that will inspire you to think differently and drive serious growth for your brand.

4:59Bea Brinsmead:You ended up in brand design yourself, didn't you? Yeah, so I kind of, you know, school holidays, sitting on tractors and stuff and then left school and did not want to do that um and you know being up in lincolnshire sitting in a tractor on a farm at 18 years old was not the cool kind of interesting thing to do sure um what about traveling the world and working jobs and maybe getting into the design world that was what I was more interested in doing. So that's what I did. And then I ended up running my own design agency back in kind of 2013. And that's when I also developed a bit of a, I don't know, fascination for what else I could grow in my garden that wasn't kind of just standard plants.

5:56And just thought maybe we've lost and forgotten stuff. And maybe there's things out there from flavor and a taste perspective that would be great to have a go at growing i had a big garden i lived in the woods you know it was it was a great opportunity um to just sort of flex a bit of wikipedia clicking around and and opening this kind of incredible box of you know herbs spices um and edible plants that i'd not really ever come across you know i grew up learning about potatoes and turnips and uh and barley and combining my love of history my love of nature and my I don't know just insatiable curiosity to kind of go fuck I want to learn more about all this stuff I want to know stuff and grow stuff and oh my god I'm now looking at thank God someone had scanned in a book from the 1600s called The Art of Distillation.

7:03And if you Google, if you're listening, if you Google The Art of Distillation PDF, you'll find what I found. And in it are 200 ingredients, which is brilliant. In it are recipes for herbal remedies using distillation as the method of extraction using all these wonderful plants and some of these recipes used alcohol and some of them didn't and I was just kind of like hey look I recognize some of these drawings there's copper stills and distillation equipment and I've got all these plants and here's some recipes uh oh you can buy a copper still off the internet in the UK for like 50 quid just give us a go like i like you know i've got a little had a little kind of workshop at home uh learned how to do taxidermy about 12 years ago i you know like trying to carve a spoon out of wood bows and arrows as a kid you know making stuff and playing around and tinkering so i bought a little two and a half liter copper still and i just started playing around with with herbs from the garden because I wanted to because I wanted to see if I could do it and I wanted to see what the process of taking a plant and capturing its character in liquid form I wanted to see what happened like watching a YouTube video was not enough like I wanted to I wanted to sense it and and feel it and it's magical you know and I wanted to do it again I wanted to try a different herb and I wanted to look more into it.

8:40And that was like evenings, weekends, aimless, you know, didn't know where it was going, no ambition in mind. It was just the alchemy of it

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9:27Bea Brinsmead:Recently, I asked Jolson's managing partners, Phil Hellsmith and Paul Chappie, whether it really can make a difference from a commercial perspective if you work with a corporate lawyer who not only understands your business, but also knows you and what you're trying to achieve. The deals that you can negotiate can deliver massively different results because you've got someone that has lived and breathed that for decades alongside you And you're often behind the scenes, so you're not actually going to be visible. It's like having kryptonite in your pocket. Exactly. That's what Jolson is. Kryptonite in your pocket.

10:04That's it. Thank you very much. Okay, we can finish now. Job done. I'm going to get Paul a special t-shirt with kryptonite written on it now.

10:13Bea Brinsmead:Yeah, maybe not in your pocket though, just kryptonite. Huge thanks to Brand Growth Heroes podcast sponsors Jolson. Now let's get back to the show. what were your first tinkerings with um distillation and all these beautiful botanicals like what what would it taste like rosemary mint rosemary thyme stuff that i had quite well embedded at home growing in the garden you know i got far more adventurous um as time went on and was playing around with you know peppercorns and twigs and grass and pebbles and bark and anything like, you know, anything I could kind of get my hands on. I just wanted to give a go.

10:55But that was, you know, I did that sort of, I don't know, three months, quite, quite fun, just experimenting, still nothing to do with drinks. And then I guess the dots started to join when I was out in London, um, drove, drove to London for dinner, uh, nice restaurant in King's Cross and obviously not drinking because I was driving and got served this just excuse my language fucking monstrosity of a drink that was pink and fruity and sweet and childish and treated me like an idiot and didn't go with the food and didn't fit the occasion and I couldn't finish it. I didn't want another one. I just thought, why are the options so poor?

11:46And that wasn't the eureka moment, but it was the beginning of just joining the, making the connection, I guess, between my career and my experience with brands and design and my mum and the farm and that legacy. and obviously the pot still at home and all the ingredients that I was learning about. It was just sort of that fusion then kind of happened over the coming months. And it was like, right, I'm going to, this is going to be fun. I'm going to do something on the side. And I've got my design agency. We're quite busy. We had some nice clients. I'm going to do this on the side. I've never done my own brand.

12:31I can make the product. Maybe take it to a farmer's market. You know, it's not going to cost very much to do. I can do it in six months. Hey, I'm going to do five products. And fuck, I'm going to do them in two sizes, actually, as well. And I'll launch it and that will just be a bit of fun. And then... So where did you launch them?

12:53Bea Brinsmead:Where did you launch them? And what was the feedback? That didn't happen. Um, what happened was, uh, I, I gradually fell, I guess, absolutely head over heels in love with the project to the point where I exited my design agency. I put my life savings into seed live and just wanted to spend every kind of waking moment working on it. And we ended up launching one product in one size in Selfridges two years later, having learned a hell of a lot, but with no real idea still of what was going to happen. But with a thousand bottles that I was really proud of. So is what you're saying that your first listing or your first sale was in selfridges yes wow we i wanted to start at the top and i wanted to test whether i should keep going and whether i should bother and this is you know you cast your mind back seven years there was bex blue on a shelf uh that was about it maybe maybe some non-out wine products but no one was talking about this there were no drinks in menus there was nothing there were no conferences there were no books there were no searches there was no hashtags no hashtags no influencers no none of this I know I know so so who had tried it up until this point not really anyone um i was quite um what's the word i didn't want to do any yeah it was quite precious i guess i i didn't want to do any research i'd done enough i'd been in and done enough focus groups uh you know with domestos um buyers and dairy lee mums and you know over the years to kind of just understand the pitfalls and potential problems of doing, you know, consuming research for something that, you know, what the hell's a non-alcoholic spirit?

15:12Sure. You know, why do I need it? So I, I went to see, I managed to get 15 minutes with the Selfridges buyer in the summer of 2015. And that was, that was everything that was kind of like, go, no, go. depending on her feedback. And she ended up giving me an hour and wanted to, and took the exclusivity to kind of launch it as soon as I was ready. So that gave me a lot of confidence. She then introduced me to five top bartenders in London, very kindly and unprompted. And so I had five more acid tests, I guess, to go and taste with the trade.

15:55Bea Brinsmead:And what did they say? and that led to five more kind of meetings and you know and the snowball began um i just kind of went with it i guess and uh yeah it kept building confidence in hey i'm gonna make a thousand bottles like and i think they might sell in five months and that would be a really good result and i haven't got a team but that's okay do you know what's really striking me as you're talking, it's this idea that I keep coming back to on these episodes, which is when the proposition is right, when you go and knock on those doors, you will get airtime. When it's right and when it's unique and when it answers a friction that is not currently being answered in the market.

16:41Bea Brinsmead:And people say all the time, you know, oh, but the buyers are too busy and they don't get back to me and stuff. They do when it's a product that answers a friction that is currently not being answered in the market if it's just another product answering the same friction as somebody else well why would they really bother because so this is a perfect example of that no one else don't get me wrong like i had plenty of you know i remember stand very clearly standing you know on the floors of selfridges wine and spirits department you know which i did like solidly for the first three weeks and people getting angry that seed lip existed oh it was they were angry they were so angry that a product like this existed okay an inanimate object that they do not have to consume um sadly they were all the same kind of person they're all middle-aged men um and this was a bit like maybe perhaps holding a mirror up to their own drinking behavior But it's amazing when someone says to you, I mean, who the fuck founded this?

17:51Whose stupid idea was this? Why are you working for this company? And you're kind of like, I'm that idiot.

18:01Bea Brinsmead:Yeah, I'm that idiot who sold to Diageo four years later for I have no idea how much money. So screw you. I was as much as I was you know make more thin-skinned at the beginning yeah I was so you know I was so kind of incredibly amazed that regardless of love or hate there was love or hate You know, there was a real reaction and discussion that I thought was, yeah, could be incredibly powerful to harness. They were really receptive and very supportive. And yeah, whether it was Selfridges or whether it was Top Bars and Michelin-style restaurants. Yeah, it was amazing. What were they doing with your product?

19:01Bea Brinsmead:Because I always think this is really interesting. When you take those people who, you know, the bartenders, the top cocktail mixers, what did they start doing with your product that surprised you or that showed you the way? I remember meeting this guy, this young guy in New York. This was a few years after we launched. and um we'd arranged to meet he he was a pastry chef but had launched a new business that fused kind of arts and and food and was looking you know we were going to talk about a partnership anyway i hadn't quite realized that he used to be the sort of head of pastry at 11 mambison park you know one of the best restaurants in the world and he he came he sat down and he just put this lollipop in front of me and i was just like what's going on he's like i made you a lollipop out of seedlip garden and i was just like oh wow that's what what a way to to meet someone um but these i mean there was when you're working with you know top bartenders sort of like they they can make great drinks right but they weren't used to making great drinks with a non-hark spirit so it was nice because we could collaborate and and work together on what do you think works well and and obviously a simple seed lip and tonic is is a really simple thing that people could have in their menus uh but i played around with a few recipes they then had their own ideas and it was it was nice they it wasn't kind of like oh i'm just going to put it in x because i know that works so it was a good i i would hope they would say it was a good learning experience for them as well because this was a a new territory and a new way of thinking about uh making a cocktail without alcohol um but yeah they're they're pro at what they do which is uh yeah it's good it means you you know that your business is in kind of good hands if you're working with top restauranteurs and top bartenders so how did you go about getting distribution then when did things start taking off and what did that mean for you and how many people you needed to come in and help you manage that growth I um I didn't really do that well in maths at school but um yeah and so i i kind of was quite nervous about the the financials and the forecasts and the commercial side of the business but i i remember a friend of mine jess showed me talked me through what a value chain was and showed me some stuff on excel and i was just like I was, I'd already fell madly in love with PowerPoint, right?

21:58From the kind of design agency days, but Excel took it to a whole nother level.

22:04Bea Brinsmead:And so you're just a total geek, really. That's what we're really saying here. I just, I think Excel is the coolest thing ever. I loved the planning and I loved, you know, just learning how to do a P &L, and what a balance sheet was, how to manage cash. And it felt so empowering, partly because I was on my own, but also to be able to make decisions. And so I had a forecast that was 1 ,000 bottles were going to sell in five months. And as far as I was concerned, that is how it was going to go. It was going to go as the spreadsheet said it was going to go. Those 1 ,000 bottles sold out in three weeks.

22:52and it bearing in mind was taking about six weeks to make a batch um i've made another thousand

22:58Bea Brinsmead:bottles and they sold out in two and a half days oh my god and this was just selfridges and then the bars and restaurants that uh we were getting into and it was it was hell it was like i just didn't expect it i didn't have a team um you know it was i remember kind of hiring a white van transit van and putting 7 000 bottles in the back of it and driving it up with a friend of mine to a bottler in lancashire and renting their line putting liquid in those 7 000 bottles and then not labeling them, driving them back down south and then having to label the 7 ,000 bottles. And that was the first step up of scale.

23:49And that was the beginning of 2016. And I got invited to Buckingham Palace and Kate Moss was buying cases of Seedlip off Selfridge's website and wanted to meet for a two-hour one-to-one show me how to make some non-alcoholic cocktails with seed lip and we got some good press and we heard from 100 countries in the first you know three months it was there was no like there was no easy gentle way in it then I had to really wriggle of team investment you know scale of production um and I'm going to ask you about that in a minute but I'm just really

24:33Bea Brinsmead:keen to understand what did you make of all of this response this crazy welcoming by consumers and the press and the world you know this fanfare almost that was saying something to you about what people needed so what did they need it told me that there was this incredibly powerful latent demand and it it told me that yeah all the things that i saw the all the trends of health wellness moderation alcohol volumes declining you know teetotalism on the rise um social media and our appearance and what's cool now versus what was cool 10 years all that kind of stuff was was yeah was coming to light of like yeah this is this is what it means this this is kind of there is a space for for great non-alcoholic options and and people are for the most part you know ready for that um was it because the only alternatives at the time that were kind of offering an inverted commas solution to that need for you know i'm not drinking at the moment or i'm driving and i want something that is i'm going to have in a glass that's going to allow me to sip it gently and savor it and and the only thing that was offering a solution to that was kind of a schlur or a a non-alcoholic wine or what else was there besides schlur what was what are all those other i mean you've got else you know elderflower cordial uh But there wasn't anything sophisticated in an alcoholy world.

26:23Bea Brinsmead:If you were to put these people, I can imagine they were going to go to these focus groups and they ask you to brainstorm, you know, whose friends, who would be the friends of this brand? And everyone ought to put a post-it note on the wall. What if this brand had friends? Who would they hang out with? You know, Schler, you know, would kind of hang out with like the Brat Pack from the 1980s, wouldn't they? All those boy Brat Pack films. and elderflower would kind of fit in with your mother-in-law on a Sunday lunch, right? But there was nobody who was the non-alcoholic version of alcoholic spirits, was there?

26:57Bea Brinsmead:There wasn't anyone in that bunch. And when we're doing the growth strategy programme, we use this kind of magic formula to distill the consumer insight. And it's basically, I'm the kind of person who likes X, right? right um and i like to do why you know and then you say um uh however right there has to be a however and that's the friction and then you say i wish there was dot dot dot so was the i wish there was in this case just i wish there was something growing up and sophisticated that lives in the alcohol world yeah the the uh that what else i feel i feel good about drinking it's sort of like observation tension need of well actually i don't i like alcohol but i don't sometimes i don't want to drink alcohol but i still want to feel like i fit in and like i belong and like i'm part of and have a good time uh but i don't want to just drink something that's plain or full of sugar or childish yeah or or teenagery or grown-up version of childish like you know the beautiful cordials that are bottle green i adore them um but i do serve them at sunday lunch whereas something like your product or mother root which i can give a big shout out to because i love that too yeah it's amazing uh i have mother root every evening on ice with tonic um or seed lip of course because actually it fits that alcohol moment whereas elderflower cordial doesn't for me Yeah, it's different occasions, right?

28:33It does depend on mood and occasion and what you get with alcohol and cocktails is ritual and theatre and, you know, just a different energy that's just less casual in that sense. And yeah, a bit more grown up.

28:56Bea Brinsmead:How important was price? So, I mean, you know, it's an expensive product if you think about it being a cordial, right, which obviously it isn't because it's distilled, et cetera, et cetera. But imagine you didn't know that about it. So when you launched, did you launch at the price you're at now? And how important was price in terms of positioning the product in the spirits friendship group? So yeah, we're still$29.99 on Selfridges, even though we're now in Waitrose and Sainsbury's and Tesco and Cardo and now across 40 countries. Keeping price high has actually been the challenge as the category grows, as more people come in, as the average price, average unit price of the category has sort of settled and come down a bit.

29:48It's not a cheap... We work with nearly 18 different ingredients and sourcing those and finding the best allspice berries that come from Jamaica, for example. And then the processing required and the amount of raw material required um yeah that's not a cheap kind of thing to make okay i always kind of say to people you know if i could give you an amazing grown-up delicious non-alc option every night of the week and it costs you one pound 50 every time does that sound like a good deal and i always get the answer yes yeah because that's there's 14 drinks in a bottle of seedlet and you know you add a mixer you add tonic as well you are about one pound 50 couple of quid yeah i think that's a good deal you know i think it totally is versus what you spend on your starbucks in the morning or you know

30:59Bea Brinsmead:a soft drink again it's all about the frame isn't it the positioning of the product in a frame of it's an alternative to a spirit and an evening drink rather than it's another type of core deal. If this episode is inspiring you to think about new ways that you can drive growth for your business, don't forget to click follow or subscribe on your favourite podcast app and even leave a review. Your small gesture has a big impact on me and my business and will be truly appreciated. So, okay, let's go back to your scaling then. So, crazy, crazy growth at the beginning. you must be like okay shit I'm gonna have to find some resources to help me drive this what did you do well I cancelled my plan of my first hire was going to be a part-time intern was in my house you know that that's what excel said that that's what excel said yeah we we probably went from within a year there were probably 12 of us by the end of the first year um we Diageo came on board in the summer of 2016 uh with a minority stake so they took a minority stake in the business straight away you weren't even selling a year at this point exactly oh my goodness okay that's a brave decision did you was that a risky decision for you um yes and no I think on the one hand I was really clear that I didn't want to do this forever I was really I am still increasingly clear that I'm really good at the beginning sure and I'm not good at scale you know I'm not good at big business I've never Seedlip's the biggest company I've ever worked for um but there are people out there like Diangio who are terrible at the beginning but world-class yeah and so I I kind of yeah I did believe the more I learned about the drinks industry, the more, yeah, the more kind of consolidated actually you see that it is.

33:27And the pathway becomes or became clearer of needing a big strategic corporate that had, you know, a lot of credibility that could really, yeah, accelerate and kind of scale the business and have the fun

33:48Bea Brinsmead:And, you know, to have sales teams to go in and see this type of bar and this type of hotel and this type of restaurant and sales teams for wholesalers and sales teams for B2B and you name it. Whereas, you know, if it was just you and your own, you might just have one sales function, right? And have to make choices. Yeah. And then it would be all about, you know, who's going to catch up with you, right? Unless you got that scale really quickly. Yeah. Yeah, and to Diageo's credit and to my team's credit, for the first four years, Diageo just provided the funding. Okay. That was it. Not even the field sales team or the sales team?

34:29Bea Brinsmead:Nothing. Wow. We built, yeah, we went and built the business and learned the model and opened the markets and, yeah, drove the business forward. And Diageo played an incredible role of being fantastic support, but having the funds to then give us the freedom to go and get on with it. And I don't know if that would happen if we were alcohol, but certainly no one had a clue or a crystal ball on non-alcoholic spirits. And how should they launch? How should they grow? What does good look like? What metrics are we measuring this on? So yeah, they gave us real fuel to kind of go and find a new way. And probably I imagine that, you know, you're bringing in a big company like that early on, albeit with a minority stake.

35:34Bea Brinsmead:You have very many values around ingredients and craftsmanship and sustainability and regenerative agriculture. It gave you time to establish all of those as part of the brand essence. Boom, boom, another boom, boom. There's loads of boom booms in this whole distillery distilling section of the grocery category, isn't there? So by the time they actually became a majority stakeholder, you'd already set up something that was so rooted in good that, you know, big food or big beverage is not going to be able to change that without an outcry. tell us a little bit about those values and what goes into your product and i believe that even now some of the peas that you grow yourself go into the garden i do have i do have peas tattoo in my knuckle for the first four years we as a team um yeah as a seed lip team would go up to my farm and handpick the peas and there you know it's a lots of peas and it's hard graph but they're 90 minute peas so they've got to go from field to freezer uh within 90 minutes to to kind of lock in all that that freshness um we we couldn't continue it just wasn't sustainable to do it longer term um but the our cult i guess we built seed lip into you know i think we had 30 we got to 35 countries by august 2019 I had a team of 75 people with three offices, one in Beaconsfield in Buckinghamshire, one in Sydney and one in LA with teams of people, you know, fully dedicated to C -Lip.