Allora, Building a modern legacy brand- Co founders Dom & Jamie on redefining the Spritz category

0:14Hello and welcome to the Tomorrow Brands podcast where we explore what it takes to build a brand of tomorrow. I'm your host, Ruth Vitock, and today I'm joined by Dom and Jamie, co-founders of Allura and lifelong friends who finally decided to build something together after 30 years of knowing each other. In this conversation, we unpack how a holiday spritz turned into a challenger brand, taking on one of the most iconic categories in alcohol. We talk about the naivety required to start, the experience needed to scale, and the surprising observations that helped them reinvent the spritz serve entirely.

0:43We also get into what it's like founding a company with your best friend and why they're deliberately building for the long game. Let's get into it. Before we start, I'd love to hear both of your backgrounds and how you got to where you are now. I actually studied drama at university. The issue being that I was very bad at it, so I'm not a very good actor or director. So I fell into PR as a creator. I worked at a boutique agency called John Doe, all about marrying brands with contemporary culture. I was the MO there. I cut my teeth on brands like PlayStation, Adidas, Pony Ricard, which is grateful for this.

1:13Then I went on to an advertising role as a creative again, as a CD. then went on to an executive director and then left that in July 2024 to Sir Laura. And my background, if I go right from the start, I studied theology, certainly just as useful as four. I then went into a career in supply chain with Nestlé. So I joined the graduate scheme straight out of uni. I was there for about six years in various different kind of roles and their warehouse, which is my final role at Nestlé before I took a leak into the startup up the world. Joined a brand called Bear, Bear and Edmund Fruit 12, 13 years ago as arts director.

1:50Moved across to be director of international for them, which was amazing. And then moved into a business called Soul Fresh, which I set up in the UK with a good friend of mine called Natalie. And then I moved on to Trip. I was currently there being a director. And then I set up Aurora. Very different backgrounds. How did you guys meet? We went to school together. Yeah. So we were seven. Oh. Yeah. Which, considering my eldest son is nine, nearly ten, says me. So yeah, over 30 years ago, because we were 37, going on 38. So yeah, we met us in junior school, and then we've stayed basically pretty much best mates ever since.

2:28And we've not worked together until Laura, so this is our kind of, the last two years has been the first time we've actually worked together. We've just been amazing to now. I think we don't hate each other now. Yeah, it's a quite big risk, Stein and business, our friends. we've had people who've done it as friends and then people have done it as strangers we'll get into that we'll get into that so question for you dom is it a big leap to go from working in brands to founding a brand so we've had quite a few people on who've talked about i had no idea what i was doing and actually if i did i probably wouldn't have done it and like that naivety is a superpower obviously coming in eyes wide open there's loads of benefits but has there ever been times where you feel like you're too much i don't think i've ever felt i know too much, but it has not been so much of a leak for me because the last three brands that I were in, I joined when they were very small.

3:14I think I was employee number seven or eight at Trip. I was employee number one in the UK at Solfrid. I was fairly early there. I've always been in found, all three of those as well were founder-led brands. So for the last 12, 13 years of my career, I've been in similar type of environments. So I don't think it was a leap from that perspective. And I think it's helped me in terms of how much I know. I think where it's good to have the naivety that maybe you refer to is before you take the leap. So I think it was probably harder for me to take the leap in the first place because I am more experienced.

3:49So I do know how hard it is, probably more so than some of the younger founders who just go into it. It's just been super helpful, to be honest, because it's, I think, helped us avoid a lot of the pitfalls that we would have naturally fallen into. And it probably helps give me perspective that I think a lot of other founders wouldn't have. So tell us about the background of Allura. How did it come to be? What started it? What was the idea behind it? Probably about three or four years ago. It was actually just during, I started after COVID. My wife and I were on holiday called Procida, which is just off the Gulf of Naples.

4:22And the reason we went there is because big film fans. She found out it's where they shot handles Mr. Ripley. Oh yeah. Right? How cool is that? So we were like, cool, we'll go there. It'll be like going to a film set. How amazing. And it was like our first big holiday after COVID and stuff. And we got to the island and we started drinking limoncello spritzes. And at the time, that wasn't a thing in the UK or anything like that. And we were probably on number four or five. And she was like, why is no one drinking limoncello spritzes in the UK? I was like, it's a really good point. What a great idea.

4:53So we started looking around this kind of catalyst of a thought. Let's say, Holly, I'm a creative in brands. Holland's a strategist in brands. So the idea of doing something was, we could probably figure that out. No idea at all how to actually produce a liquid or any of the actual realities of running a business. Pretty stuff, strategy stuff. We got down. Anything based in reality, not a clue. Dominied for years where we spoke about doing something together. Never really landed on anything that we thought was great, but always talked about it. Got back home and I think we just had dinner and start talking about this kind of initial thought and this guy was like a dog with a bone basically yeah so i suppose that had been a lot happened from that point to actually i suppose launching a brand but we went on a bit of a journey to be like initially thinking we were create a basically a linoncello brand to the hero the kind of aperitif the spritz rather than the free shot on the end of the meal realized quite quickly that there's a reason actually why linoncello spritz isn't that popular like one limoncello is just way too sweet for a spritz it's generally full of sugar it's luminous yellow so flavor profile if you compare it to an alcohol spritz it just doesn't have that complexity in the body and then the other problem with it is it's naturally quite high in alcohol so limoncello is between 25 and 35 percent which doesn't naturally lend itself to a spritz because most people want a spritz that's a little bit lower at abv So we realised actually that the big opportunity was to create our own liquid using a similar process to the mincello, but that was much more like a lemon alternative to a Campari or an Atoile rather than a cool mincello brand.

6:30And that's in a nutshell what it was. And you've got really deep FFBCG experience. You mentioned a bit of experience in booze. Yeah. Alcohol is quite different, isn't it? Is there anything that you've had to unlearn? Yeah, it is very different. I was quite lucky in that we focused quite a bit in the trip on the on-trade. It was a part of my, I oversaw the commercial team as well as ops and finance. And so my sales team had an on-trade, with on-trade people. And so the trip was actually a great experience for me in that it was my first kind of proper experience of the on-trade. So that was very helpful.

7:02But it is a very different world. It is a lot harder. I do think it's still a bit of a shock as to how closed it can be. Like it's dominated by three or four massive companies, the likes of Diageo and Perno and pretty much all the brands that you'll see on a menu in Pablo Rabara restaurant. 90 % plus of them are owned by three or four companies. And that's not really the case in non-dos. You go to a supermarket, there's tens, hundreds of brands that have founder-led brands or independent brands. So it's a lot harder in that respect. And then I suppose the other thing that's quite different is the margin structures.

7:37But the way that the entree has to just make a lot more, operators have to make a lot higher margin than supermarkets. And so there's a counter-pricing challenge there that we don't get in the off-tree. But I think the principles of the way to run a business pretty much stay the same. I mean, from a brand perspective though, throughout my career, from PR going through to advertising, I've worked in the alcohol industry across the whole plenary of art, across the agiliter innovation, all these different areas. Probably my wife is one of the fans of my life. Jen, Don's wife, is a brand strategist in a predominantly world to the Azure for the last two years.

8:10So from a brand perspective, we know our stuff a little bit, which is super helpful. So from your intros, very clear roles and an easy delineation of roles, I imagine. So you've got to boil it down, creative and operational. Those two things can clash occasionally, often. How have you navigated that tension, especially as friends and business partners? and how do you balance feasibility versus sort of aspirations for the brand? Do we argue, John? We're trying not to laugh, by the way, for people that can't see. We don't really argue, to be fair. I think... Bicker, maybe. I think we joke and eat bicker.

8:43We do our team and we'll probably roll our eyes because we definitely bicker a lot for the first five minutes of most meetings. But it's all in a very best mate from school kind of way. So I think we've spoken before about this and I actually think, without being too cheesy, because our friendship is more like being like brothers, we are quite comfortable with arguing with each other. We're quite comfortable with kind of telling each other that we think the other's got a stupid opinion or is wrong. And we also, despite the fact that we wind each other up, we also very firmly recognize that we're the experts in our own areas.

9:15So I would, although I joke about inputting on creative, I would absolutely never dare to input on creative. I will listen to you if you have an appeal. Yeah, exactly. But yeah, he won't. So we have a good balance there. And I think, you know, what's important for us is that although we are quite different in terms of experience and also in terms of interests, factoring, et cetera, we share exactly the same values. So unlike the really important stuff, we almost never disagreed, but we've never disagreed on team or culture or values or any of that kind of stuff. So I think that's the stuff that if you just disagree on that, that you agree on the superficial things, it probably creates a difficult environment.

9:53whereas we actually probably disagree on a lot of superficial things that at the core we're pretty much always aligned. I think we can break it down a little bit as well the way that we've started talking about is like business and brand and then even at the level below that is we refer to Dom as the head of the brand as in he's the brains and I'm the heart so I do all the emotional kind of brandy and tangible stuff which works really well and I also think trust is such a massive thing for us we had a meeting the other day and don was like my gut tells me to do this and i'm like great you should follow your gut that's you have all this experience it cv speaks for itself if i was trying to go to push against that more for me and i think we have that mutually as well and i think another part of that question you touched on was about was it feasibility so i think that's actually a really interesting question because i don't think we ever have come across a point where we're talking about feasibility as such like the way we're building the brand from the start has been is the business side of it and brand side and brand is just as intrinsic to how we're building Allura as the liquid and the product itself so the brand is a huge part of it and I've always had in the back of my mind that I want the brand to be appearing in certain places and factories inevitably as the liquid is in glass so when it comes about feasibility it's not necessarily about feasibility it's more about selecting what we want to do in the right ways.

11:16We've never actually said no to something I don't think we've actually really wanted to do because it hasn't been feasible. We did a project in July at Spotify in the Can Festival. Doing that in our first year, a lot of people would say it's completely ridiculous and unfeasible. But we were like, no, it's brilliant for the brand. So we figured a way around it. We might admit we didn't do something else, but it's those sorts of decisions that we discuss. And again, I think it goes back to that trust in each other's areas to go, So, okay, let me should do this. I love that head and heart. Yeah. Splits.

11:48Question for you, Jamie. With your creative background, is there anything that surprised you when it comes to creating your own brand? Good question. How scared I would be at certain points? I think so. I've spent the last 15 years, so I have this whole thing about whatever the creative work is for whatever brand, you should always try and make the most of the opportunity of that brief and create something truly original. Because if you're just in a cookie cutter stuff, like more support that's not creative you should always be striving to do something different i actually have a creative studio there's two mates as well but i'm currently running on wonderful things which is a lot of our creative work through them we're advising brands regularly on how they should do their creative works in that space when it comes to doing your own brand you'd second guess yourself a little bit more and by a little bit more every waking minute because there's something about when it's your own brand and we have dom and i will discuss creative or something with Jen, Holly and Jacob and Jade and Becky and T.

12:44But it's very much, here's my thought process and here's my heart, what I think the brand should look like, how I think the brand should feel. And you're putting it out there subjectively into the world without a lot of protection barriers around. And that's a bloody scary thing. Obviously, you feel that same thing from doing it for any other brands, because you're playing on someone else's money, but when it's your money and it's your art and you're largely good on the line, it's a bloody scary thing to be putting forward. Has it changed the way you approach creative briefs for other brands now?

13:13No. It's more about how I have to, I would say, ask my girl for a Laura as much as I would for another brand. So you've got a great tagline. I'm going to butcher this now because I can't speak Italian. Non patuti. Better than my Italian. Yeah. Non patutti. Feel free to say it again if I got that wrong, which means not for everyone. Very strong line. What does this mean in practice? for how you build a brand, choose partners, communicate, even price. Yeah. Only price it did all. From a brand perspective, the actual line was something that was knocking around into my head before we'd even done our first photo shoot.

13:53So back when we officially launched in April 24, we did a content shoot a couple of months before. And again, it was Holly for this, on a late claim to the creative thought, had this idea of an amorellamone spritz in a sea of reddy orange other spritzes you can see what we're getting at that and that was the idea of like us standing against the grain it's actually inspired by an old bbh ad for nevis which was a black sheep and it's like a little zigzag brilliant work so that's like where we took that thought process from and the idea of like non-patuity came from that because if you look at how we do things both from a brand perspective and a business perspective we go against the grain all the time and i suppose it's that kind of like third originality right and again it comes down to having your own brand you can build things the way you want to build things so the way it shows up from a brand perspective is from everything to how we shoot our content to how we do events to how we even do like the small touches that you might find to pos instead of doing leaflets we do postcards like all these little points which kind of just gently edges away from maybe what everyone else is doing and that kind of from a brand perspective also feeds through into the liquid yeah so even with the product we took the view that if you try to get involved obviously in beverages and creating beverages and the temptation is to create something that like you think everybody likes or everybody loves which is pretty much impossible and what you end up doing with if you try if you aim for that and you aim for something that everybody loves is you end up with something that nobody loves so you We always say we would much rather that some people really don't like our liquid because it's too bitter or it's too complex from a flavor profile perspective.

15:36That is most likely going to result in a lot of people liking it and a lot of people not liking it. As opposed to if we've tried to create something that everybody liked, it would basically taste like lemonade, which would just be washed away in a sea of kind of blur ingredient products. One of our first investors, Penner, with one of our best friends from school, very sweetly, put some money in because they believe in us as a foundman pair and then tasted the liquid and was petrified and terrified to tell us that they actually didn't like it. And then we dug into it like, do you drink a cup of water?

16:06Oh no, I can't stand that. I can't stand complying. You've got yourself into it. Obviously it's hilarious and it's lovely and we've actually found some serves now that they love, which is great. They did the drinks at their anniversary party a few weeks ago. We left some negroni. Exactly. I think that's a good example of, you know, if the temptation is to create something that just everybody liked. And for us, we try and almost do the opposite. Price, I think is important to touch on there because the non-patruci kind of line, in our opinion, doesn't necessarily apply to price. So we very deliberately positioned ourselves as no more extensive per serve than Apple, which is a mainstream brand in our category.

16:44We can maybe dig into kind of that at some point if it's relevant, but we're not saying we're this super premium brand that like only the top 5 % and can drink. It's actually not that at all. It's more in relation to the brand and the product that James mentioned. Do you know about the Aparole? It's ringing a bell, but tell us from the top. So this was, like I said, the whole idea of the standing up from Cram and Non-Patootie stuff was this nugget of an idea from like a year and a half ago. Earlier this year, we started running some social ads with that image that was like Non-Patootie. and think about a month later, AppRoll launched a global campaign that was built around being for everyone.

17:26Yeah, I did see that. And it was like, oh, okay. It could have been better time. It could have been better time. We genuinely have, we put the ads up first. It was like, it's hilarious. It wasn't a reactive thing. And I think everyone thought it was reactive. Yeah, it is hilarious. Because I think that's it. And we respect one. We always talk about, if we can get to 10 % of the global revenue of AppRoll, we're more unhappy. So we think what they've done is amazing and they've created the Spritz category from basically scratch. But it is just so funny that the whole counter positioning comes from two years ago where we had was yellow and a sea of orange from Image.

18:00And then after almost exactly the same time around, it was National Spritz Day. Both of our kind of counter-pagents were out and they're just completely counter-positioned, which is quite interesting. So we've talked a bit about a TiVo category and how there's some huge incumbents there. And alcohol generally being dominated by massive brands. And there's also some pretty well-established category norms. So, seco and a spritz. You guys have a different serve. I bought a bottle and was making it and then was like, whoa, half, half soda. Okay. Obviously simplifies things. Have you faced any resistance to that?

18:31We have, yeah, definitely. And we were developing it and we've had this kind of initial light bulb moment around, okay, limoncello doesn't actually work in spritz, despite the fact that we get limoncello spritz all over the world. That was the first light bulb moment for us. The second was when we were really challenging the norms in the category, which was we were testing a little with Prosecco initially. So we were just following the norms of Apple and forest fruits, which are three parts Prosecco, two part, Apple or Campari, one part, cellular. And I looked at it and I just remember, I remember where I was when I called Jane Hark about it.

19:03I remember this guy's genius idea. And I was, I bet you if we could get an in, if we were in Campari group, which obviously they own Apple and Campari in a meeting room now looking at it, it's actually pretty crazy when you think about the fact that there's more Prosecco in an Aperol Spritz or Campari Spritz than there is an Aperol or Campari. When you think about how much money they spend on marketing to sell Aperol Spritzes and millions and tens of millions of Aperol Spritzes they sell across the world, they're actually selling more Prosecco than they're selling more liquid. And from a cost of the Spritz, whether you're in a pub or a bar or a home, basically half the cost is the Prosecco and half the cost is the Aperol or Campari.

19:40So a Spritz cost a pub or you at home maybe one pound six to make 80p of that goes to Aperol and 80p goes to Prosecco with obviously the soda being a kind of negligible part so we're like actually that's a problem right if you can't change the Aperol spritz now because it's been around for a hundred years and you just it would be a nightmare to change that perfect serve but if we can create a liquid by working backwards from what we felt a perfect linen spritz was that didn't eat Prosecco then a it makes it much simpler for half-bars restaurants, which is obviously great, particularly when they're short-staffed and busier than ever.

20:13It also makes it much easier to make at home because most people don't drink Apple Spritz at home because you don't want to have one Apple Spritz on Friday night. You've got to open a whole bottle of Prosecco. It goes flat. You've got to keep it cold. So unlike something like gin and Tomek, which kind of everybody drinks in home and out of home, pretty much all the Apple Spritzes that are drunk, or Spritzes in general that are drunk or drunk out of the home, And then it also means that from our perspective, commercially, whereas Apple get 50 % of the revenue from every spritz sold, we get 95%.

20:43So we talk quite a lot about if we want to hit, eventually you hit the same global revenue numbers as Apple. To do that, we only have to sell 55 % of the amount of volume spritzes and it costs the consumer the same. So to the point of the day about prices, we know we can't be more extensive than Apple spritz because it's all quite extensive drink to buy. And so usually with a challenge around a ball of bean or a trip or whatever, you have to persuade the consumer to pay more for the product because it's better. We actually don't have to do that. The product costs the consumer exactly the same, but because you don't need the preceptor in it, you're getting a much better product, completely natural with iconic provenance for basically the same price.

21:22And that's actually been the biggest thing commercially that's allowed us to scale quickly and launch into our first ever customer really was Young's Pubs, who had 300 pubs across the UK. and we launched into All Young's Pub's last April. And I think that's one of the reasons it allowed us to stay together quite quickly because we're not a set of fridges brand or a big brand that might only exist in that kind of high-end bar environment. That's genius. That's why it's the head. Yeah, I see that now. It's the benefit. I love when there's innovation in categories. When you look at it later and you go, that makes so much sense.

21:56Why has no one thought about that before? And this feels like one of those things that no one's done that roundabout thinking. And I wonder if there are any other things that serves as well. Yeah. And so I suppose to the original question, which I've said and answered, we have faced resistance because I think that historically you think of a spritz as being a drink that contains Prosecco. And so there's a bit of resistance there around, okay, you're calling it a spritz, but it doesn't have Prosecco. But actually, I think that's a problem from five, 10 years ago, because people selling spritzes with no alcohol in them.

22:25We had a trip spritz, which was with no alcohol, it was a lower nose spritzes. So that word Spritz maybe used to mean including Prisetta, it just doesn't anymore. So that was any resistance we would get was because of that. But from an operator perspective, they do love the simplicity of it. And then like Jamie said, we've ended up in a position where we launched with a very clear, if you look at our kind of original decks and our investor decks from two years ago, it was very clear like Lennon Spritz. But ultimately, our audience is 90 % capacity of that category. They're the only brand really in Spritz.

22:54we felt that there was an opportunity to create something alongside a role within that spritz space and what's ended up happening which is really cool actually is we've encouraged bartenders and people at home to play around with the liquid and to use it in other cocktails and that's ended up with us we now have more than 30 cocktails on the menu and various parts parts right onto from the gronies to palomas to margaritas what started as a kind of as a spritz ingredient is now actually just a spirit that is used in loads of different cocktails, which also gives you a lot more kind of versatility when you're making cocktails at home.

23:29So that's another thing I suppose that we've done a bit differently. Yeah. So I thought that someone had talked about this on the podcast before, but maybe they haven't, and maybe they just spoke to me about it directly. So we're going to talk about it now, which is your exceptional, apparently, D2C model. Someone has definitely mentioned this to me and I'm going to find it, but it's fine.

23:49We're going to talk choice to launch a D2C and lean into it. Tell me more about it. It's not our main channel. There's a few reasons that we wanted to focus on it. So one, I'd seen the power of D2C as a trip. I always use two examples of brands that scaled D2C alongside for them retail, trip and cure. So that's one sort of holistic reason that we wanted to focus on it. From a boost perspective, you don't build a brand in supermarkets, build a brand in the on-trade. So for us, year one strategy was very clear it was focused purely on the on trade ignore retail and then d2c becomes our place that people can buy a bottle basically which kind of is it lends itself nicely to d2c because then you have that level of exclusivity where if you want to buy a bottle you can't buy it in waitrose or sainsbury so you have to go to our website and it's the other reason it works for us is simple unit economics because our hostel is 25 pounds price for more naturally lends itself to direct consumer because obviously you don't really sell anything under 20 25 pounds on d2c so there's a number of reasons it's a photo it's one it allows us to find volume shelf and talk to consumers directly and two everyone else in that space is really doing it well and for whatever reason booze brands are not doing d2c i don't understand it because the mechanics of booze should lend itself to b2c but i think a lot of it's just that the big guys haven't figured out d2c and just don't see it as an important channel where focus on volume through supermarkets.

25:17I guess that's the benefit of your FMCG background, bringing it to a new category and taking some of the things you've learned and thinking, why is there no one doing this here? Yeah, I think so. And it's been great for us. We by no need claim to be DTC experts. We've learned loads along the way, but it also allows us to, from the marketing stage of this is what tripped in masterfully is we can spend on social, make it our Instagram ads. And that kind of performs two functions. Yes, it's like acquisition of a customer and you can bring customers in directly through the advertising, but it also allows us to brand awareness.

25:50And that's what Tricked did. Most of all of our trips to marketing budget in the early years went to Pins to Routes. So it's performing two functions, which when you're a smaller brand, you have to think creatively about how you stand upon marketing. So you mentioned grocery. Is that in your future? So we launched this summer into sort of what we call premium retail. So we launched with booths, which obviously a lot of people refer to them to the waitress. They don't like that. I laugh with them about that. That's actually a funny story. Pete, the buyer at Booth's, he's an actual legend. We met him at an activation on Friday night in Sale.

26:24We were doing activation at a pizza restaurant and he sat for dinner with his wife and two friends and we started selling the dream to him, assuming he was a normal consumer. And he started asking questions. I was like, this guy's in the industry. Anyway, that ended up being our first kind of proper reseller. It seems like this is amazing. Can we list it? So with auction booths, what's been great about booths is they allow us the, when we talk about this sort of from a strategy perspective, we want to be, only want to be in retailers where we can top up and we can actually do grassroots marketing, like tastings.