Future Chateau: Tom Benn on Emotional Centres, Earned Attention and Building Momentum

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's guest is Tom Benn, founder of Future Chateau. What if the most modern luxury wasn't more, but less? Less alcohol, less consequences, less I'll regret that tomorrow. Tom spent five years in three continents creating a wine you can drink on a Tuesday night without sacrificing the ritual, the taste or the feeling. We talk about emotional centres, why earned attention beats paid media, why slack is the enemy of progress and of course what the future of wine looks like.

0:46Let's get into it. Hi Tom, welcome to the podcast. It's great to have you. Before we get into it, can you tell us your background and also introduce us to Future Chateau? Sure. So my background is food and beverage. I've always been obsessed. I fell into FMCG when I was 18 and got a job, part-time job selling coconut orders of doors of door for Vitagoco. Figured out I was good at that and kept going. Was the first employee at Pippinut. So I had the job title deputy squirrel for six years loved that loved that business yeah incredible product and people and then during covid started drinking wine every day because the world was ending and why not when the world stopped feeling like it was ending i stopped drinking wine every day because you know 2020 right like we understand now that you're not supposed to drink wine every day and then just missed it so heavily and yeah obviously we were just talking about the difference being like Friday night wine and Sunday wines.

1:45I was really thinking about Sunday wines and Monday wines and Tuesday wines when I started the business. I wanted to be able to drink wine on those days and not worry about it. So left Pippinut to try and figure out how to make the first good, in my opinion, the first like good wine that you could drink any day of the week. It took me five years and three continents. I made kind of products in South Africa, Bordeaux, Burgundy, the UK and Australia. And then also during that time, obviously you know i had to pay the bills but also i was lucky enough to get to work for some amazing businesses so did a lot of work with naked wines for them did a lot of work with freya foods the bone broth business incredible business and also mini ways the again amazing business chewing gum brand so yeah always been in food and drink it's kind of home for me and now finally after five years of development i have my own little business too i have to give the context to that Friday night, Sunday night wines in that you kindly sent me some to try.

2:42And I was just saying that I opened the red, which is my favorite. I can't really drink red anymore because I love it, but it doesn't love me back. It gives me terrible hangovers. And I opened on a Friday night and I was going out and I was a bit like, I just want a big glass of normal wine, actually. I'm not sure I get this. And then Sunday night when I was cooking, it was on the side and I thought, aha this is the occasion so it's low strength isn't it like five percent five percent so about a third of conventional wine which also kind of accident makes it that third of calories which i'm learning is quite important to customers but yeah it's not it's not zero we have no intention to ever get to zero for a few reasons it's just wine that you can drink any night of the week and can confirm that it does not well one glass for me but absolutely fine the next day So that was like being able to go back to something I've had to cut out and drink more wine, not less.

3:36Yeah, and that's exactly what we're about. You know, we're quite unusual in this space and everyone else and we get put in the no and no category, although I kind of hate that. But everyone else in that category quite rightly cares about moderation, the drinking less and all that kind of stuff. And I feel a bit guilty sometimes, but it's not us at all. We are about drinking more wine. and you know I started the business so I could drink more wine and yeah we are simply a wine that you can drink more of as opposed to a better for you wine or something like that. Love it let's go back a minute and talk about your background and how that's informed what you're doing now so I mean 18 years old starting out at Vitacoco that is you're really a sort of FMCG lifer at this point that is amazing experience end-to-end and some other great brands in that mix as well what did working at brands at that stage in that really fast growth stage teach you about how brands really grow oh so much i mean i think something those are really early experiences taught me like fight cocoa and pip and that is actually the power of momentum and how both businesses reached an inflection point where everyone believed they were going to be the category hero is the next big thing and obviously we had to work really hard to create that momentum but then it's amazing how self-fulfilling it can become you know even small stuff right like buyers don't want to say no to the brand that's going to become the category hero because you don't want to be the buyer that said no to fever tree 10 years ago and then watch every other supermarket list them like but even down to on a consumer basis like individual consumers if you think something's gonna be the next big thing you give it a lot of benefit the out so that was definitely one thing in those really early years and then as I got a bit older and worked for lots of different types of businesses and you know worked for businesses that weren't necessarily growing learned a lot about how much more valuable a good idea is and good creative is than big budgets and I think back to like some of those really scrappy experiences in like small businesses where we didn't have any marketing budget but we had like really really good clarity on what our emotional center was and how to convey that to people and And so we would earn hundreds of millions of impressions because people wanted to share it with each other versus experiences that like much bigger brands where we didn't quite have the same emotional clarity.

5:54And you would have to spend a fortune and still not get as far. Right. Like, so, yeah, that's that's the big thing I've really taken away from me over the last five years is. Earned media beats paid media every single time and you just you can't buy it. And I guess your point being being clear on that like emotional center of the brand and that idea, that's where the value comes from. Having an emotional center. Yeah, having an emotional center, being clear on how your functional benefits map onto emotional benefits. I think about that all the time with Future Chateau because we're in a category where there are no functional benefits.

6:30No one can tell you why Chocolate Block is their favorite wine or Spring Engine is their favorite wine because there are no functional benefits in wine. It is all emotion. And we need to be really careful, I think, as a brand that even though we do have some functional benefits, you know, we are a third of the alcohol, a third of the calories. I think the second we start talking in those terms, we're going to lose people forever. And we need to work out how to map them onto emotional benefits and convey those in engaging ways that like speak to people's lived experience, you know. What are the biggest differences between building a brand for someone else, being Deputy Squirrel, and doing it for yourself, doing your own thing?

7:08stakes and the like personal nature of it and i wouldn't say that either are helpful i kind of wish that i could not feel either of those things but obviously the stakes when it's your business is so high and that can be a little bit paralyzing and similarly i i realized in the early days of future chateau that i've always been a good salesperson right like that's how i got into the industry i figured out when i was 18 i could sell coconut water door to door and so it never occurred to me that I'd struggle to sell Feature Chateau and then I realized quite early on that I was like procrastinating selling and I didn't want to go out and do it and I was like what's going on here and I realized it's because I was so afraid of people rejecting it because if they'd rejected Feature Chateau they'd be rejecting me at such a cool level like it was such it was so my baby I spent literally five years working so hard like by hand figuring out how to make this stuff and if someone took a sip and was like ew gross that would like be such a dagger through my heart that I didn't want to hear it and so therefore I like didn't put us out there as much as I would have done if it was anyone else's brand which obviously is so silly and unhelpful and you know people don't say that when they try it people invariably try it and go oh my god that's actually nice but yeah it's just the like the personal emotional stakes are so high when it's yours have you got over that now yes I've had to I forced myself to exposure therapy yeah exactly i've now done you know a thousand samplings and selfridges and so i've experienced every type of customer obviously selfridges has some very specific types of customers with very specific views on wine you know the person who comes in and buys their 80 000 bottle of chateau merceau once a week isn't necessarily thinking about a brand like future chateau you're going to get a specific type of feedback from that type of person and the thing i've learned over time is reality is the product is good enough that I just never get the like reaction and so you know what am I afraid of what have you consciously left behind from your previous life at working for brands slack channel yeah I hate slack I not just because of what it is I think slack is such a I think it's like a way of role-playing work and i think that in and not so much in startups but a little bit in them too particularly in bigger businesses i think slack becomes this thing that people you know slacks all day and they certainly don't feel like they're resting they're not getting any nourishment but they're not driving anything forward they're not achieving anything they're just on slack and i suppose i hate that approach to work right that approach to like i'll do the things that are beeping at me i'll do the urgent stuff i'll do what's on everyone else's to-do list whereas obviously in super high-growth startups you have to have such a bias toward progress and achievement and achieving things that you're really really proud of and so as i'm starting to recruit my team at future chateau i never want us to have something like slack because i want to be able to ask them every week what have you achieved this week that you're proud of and i think that having processes like Slack, systems like Slack can just eat half a week.

10:21All of a sudden, there's no time to achieve something you're really, really proud of. How will you communicate? Will you just talk? Yeah, we'll just talk. Sometimes pick up the phone. It's crazy. And also, if you're going to communicate via email, for example, it makes you consider it more. Actually, this never got accepted. But when I was at Naked Wines, we had a global leadership office every year. And every year, you could have 10 minutes to pitch something for the company. And every year, I would pitch that we should charge people to send slacks and send internal emails. I was like, it should be like 5p per slack, 10p per internal email, all goes to charity.

10:52I think it would make the company so much more efficient and effective if you have to really consider what you're going to say because you know that it's going to cost you 5p. And yeah, I, you know, I'm on my soapbox now. It reminds me, my old boss at Popchips, I remember saying this was like a pre-slack, pre-WhatsApp world, but him saying once that emailing is not working. And I was like, I spent, you know, six hours a day emailing. How is that not working? But I guess it's exactly the same thing as you're saying. It's just communicating without actually moving anything forward is not working.

11:28But it is modern working, isn't it? But it's not progressing anything. And it's so easy to fall into. And it expands limitlessly to fill the number of hours there are in the day. But yeah, I want us to always be focused on what can I achieve today? And chances are, nothing on Slack. I like it. So let's talk a bit more about category tension, because you mentioned that earlier, and that sort of philosophical break from the rest of the category. So you don't want to be positioned as low or no, or kind of mid strength. You've talked a little bit about why, but do you want to expand on that a bit?

11:59Yeah, I think that the kind of low, no mid category in booze has been defined really poorly the cynic in me would say that was done on purpose because it was it was created by the alcohol industry and i'm not sure that they really wanted to succeed whereas for example you look at like decaf coffee right no one thinks that a coffee should cost less because it hasn't got as much caffeine in it that's not the thing you're paying for in coffee and you're choosing in that moment to have on with less caffeine great why isn't alcohol the same way but from the get-go the booze industry categorized low and no as a compromise and so they made poor quality products charge less money for them they trained customers almost that if it had less alcohol it should be worth less and i know there's some duty implications but i mean like barely the cost difference in duty versus all the other costs and making low and no wine that's way it costs way more to make a good low and no wine than you save on duty and so i don't want us to be thought of as lesser than wine or like a reduced compromised version of wine because we're not and and some like some no no wines are right some no no wines are conventional wine that's sent off to a chemical plant to have the ethanol stripped out and if that's what you are then it makes sense to consider yourself like a compromised version of a wine but future chateau isn't you know we are grown to be less alcoholic we are an amazing wine in our and right we just happen to be less alcoholic we're not less than we're not a compromised version of so i i want us to be artists just think of ourselves and people think of us as just a great wine that you happen to be able to drink on sunday nights it's reminded me a lot of how you're talking about all of the better for you brands i've worked in in more indulgent spaces because in crisps for example i've spent a lot of my career and it's exactly that same thing as as soon as you start to say to consumers less than it people think it doesn't taste good and then you're kind of losing that whole you know the occasion of that treat mentality and and the challenge has always been how you communicate better for you without it sounding like a less than version and it feels sort of quite a similar challenge that you're going to have and has it been because you're mentioning kind of non-alcoholic wine there and I've pulled a face which no one can because this is a podcast.

14:16But have you found that to be a challenge because traditionally non-alcoholic wines, especially some of like the big major brands that have done, is that a big barrier to trial, do you think? Poor innovation. Yeah, it's the single biggest problem. People assume my products will be gross because they've tried low and no wines before that were gross. And there's another reason why I don't really want to be thought of in that category because people have such low expectations of low and no wine. And there's lots of reasons for that. One is that, frankly, the people who make low and no wine generally don't expect it to be very good so they don't use the best grapes they don't use the best barrels it's a box-taking exercise for a winemaker who didn't get into this industry to make low and no wine they're just doing it because someone in in the corporate structure said they have to and you know lots of other reasons but they're it's not unlike low and no beer that we can make really good substitutes at this point there is no zero percent wine that you could fool someone thinking is wine.

15:11And so if people put me in the same category as 0 % wine, it's really hard to get them to try, like to give us a go for the first time. So we've talked about enabling more drinking, not less. How is that going to play out with how you market the brand and talk about the brand? Well, we obviously have to be careful because the ASA won't love that message. So we need to figure out ways to do it, which are responsible and compliant. But when I talk to our core consumers the thing i hear from them over and over again is how much they miss wine like my core consumer which tends to be a 40 to 60 year old high achieving successful woman in general often who in their early parts of their careers and early parts of their adult lives it was normal to come home from work and open a bottle of wine have a glass wine and that was the ritual that settled them into the evening and in the last five or ten years have stopped because i don't know you like i don't know anybody under the age of 60 who still regularly drinks wine most days and i know a huge number of people now who miss that so badly and what future chateau does is lets them say yes to this thing they've wanted to do anyway for years and have given up because of sleep and tomorrow's obligations and all we understand now about the health implications of drinking alcohol future chateau is below enough alcohol level that people feel comfortable saying yes or days they wouldn't otherwise if you have half a bottle of future chateau it's like you've had less than about can of lager type worth of alcohol so yeah like our message is not that we are a better for you wine for friday nights our message is that we're a wine that you can say yes to when you feel you should say no to most wine your core customer women 40 to 60 was that as you expected it to be no hence the original branding during the five years i was developing it everyone i spoke to told me my core consumer would be young people all the data all the experts everyone in the industry and so no i thought my gamma would be 35 and below it's why the original brand was this you know set in the world 2086 i was going to build this like big brand universe kind of like beaver town mine figures have done so well and then got to market and just immediately realized that my demo was older and almost exclusively female and that also they weren't interested in wine from the future because no one thinks the future is going to taste very nice people think the future is going to taste like silicon and ai so we are obviously pivoting all those things and i basically have two core consumers now the biggest are kind of similar to who i described earlier successful successful 40 to 55 year old women who have lived a bit have had a bit of a unique experience because in general they watch their parents sort of have it all and then they've lived through 9-11 global financial crisis impending ecological disaster covid smartphones and what that's done to like their kids and anxiety and all that kind of stuff ai now like house price boom they're they're looking at the world going i don't understand i've done everything right i'm successful why does life still feel so hard and why does it feel like i'm still not able to treat myself why does it feel like i'm always saying no to the thing i want and so for that consuming future chatto plays a really simple role which is we're just the thing they can say yes to we are the exact treat that they miss from earlier in their careers earlier in their lives then they now have permission to say yes to again they've had to say no to it for 10 years now they say yes again and then my second biggest demo which i feel quite ignorant for not knowing this before i launched but there's very little talk about it in like society i had no idea how many women lose the ability to tolerate red wine after menopause well sometimes all wines but particularly red wine something about the kind of acid tannin alcohol ratio and so now i meet lots of consumers who have just simply had to give up red wine and haven't had it for you know 10 years and then they discover future chateau which they can drink and it's a godsend and you know for that consumer base like walk through fire to get future chateau like and i completely get it i love red wine i love wine which is why i started this company if all of a sudden i just had to give it up i'd feel so cheated and like so unfair and if 10 years later i discovered suddenly a wine that i could drink i feel exactly as they do and i've literally met women who start crying like in selfridges having tried the product for the first time.

19:38And I think I'd be exactly the same if that happened to me. I just had no idea how passionate they would be as customers and fans. And yeah, couldn't be more thrilled that we can have such a beneficial impact on people. Yeah, I guess that generation you were talking about, it's that first generation of women who were told they could have it all, you know, the career and the kids and then realize that actually that was just a nightmare. Yeah. And you can't even self-medicate with alcohol anymore because it makes you feel so bad the next day. Yeah, I think that's a very good summary of it. Yeah.

20:14Wine is amazing. I often think this. There's almost nothing else that humans have been this incentivized to improve for this long as wine. You know, it's like 3000 years old. And for all this time, we've been trying to make, we're so good at making fermented grape juice. Think about it compared to any other product, how nuanced and sophisticated we've made fermented grape juice. We're so good at making it now. And wine is so awesome. It's so amazing. And yet you're right. For a lot of people, the main association they have with it is how nuclear the hangover will be. If we can have one without the other, then that's the trick.

20:49So how are you planning on building the brand with this audience? Our next big frontier will be the entree. trade so first vintage we deliberately self limited to 25 stockists because we didn't want to expand beyond our ability to be present like if we were going to get a listing I wanted to be there and want to do something to myself and I wanted to meet customers I wanted to hear from them and learn so we had 25 stockists plus a website second vintage which lands in May we're going to be looking for 200 stockists and I'd really like them to predominantly be in the on trade because I can't be in 200 places, but sommeliers can.

21:32And if we hold those relationships with SOMS, then we can hopefully hear secondhand almost like, what are you getting back from customers? So the next big thing will be restaurants and bars where hopefully we can be quite useful for the restaurant too. You have a lot of customers who used to come in and buy a bottle of wine who now buy a glass of wine. Our launch partner for the second fidget, who I won't name because we haven't announced them yet. And when we spoke to them, they were really clear on the fact that the appeal for us is that it used to be that if someone ordered, say, a glass of Chablis, we knew they'd probably buy three glasses of wine that day.

22:07And now they buy two. And so the appeal for Future Chateau is they might buy four if they get a glass of Future Chateau. So, yeah, expand that world. Hopefully be useful for our partners there for those reasons. But most importantly, hear back from them. What do customers think? What do they say? what problems are we solving for them and ultimately this is a business that's going to be built on insights and learnings and understanding like the specific areas that we add value i think a lot about again i won't name names but a particular non-arc beer brand who have the insight that something like 80 % of the time someone drinks their beer in a pub it's instead of water or like a lime and soda or something it's not instead of beer and it's That alone makes them this like powerful, valuable thing, right?

23:00We need to learn what our versions of that are. We need to learn how are we valuable to customers, how are we valuable to our partners, and build around those areas of strength rather than trying to be everywhere immediately, rather than trying to be everything to everyone. Yeah, we're going to build really, really solid foundations and gradually put things on top of them. I think Entrade, I was going to ask you about Entrade because I met a friend of mine and it was like a Tuesday night and it was like an early drink. And I was like, this is when you need it. It's like a perfect midweek. And it could be, you know, the saviour of hospitality, basically, along with some other great low and no brands like Botivo, which I also really enjoy.

23:38But you're getting people back to the pub because for a lot of people now, you don't want to go to the pub because you know you're going to have like three glasses of wine and feel awful the next day. But actually, we love the pub and we love the vibe and the experience and everything else about it, except for the booze. So I think that just makes so much sense. And of being that then for your audience of it's not just letting drink wine again, but it's also making those spaces, the places that they really enjoy going to, but feel a kind of inaccessible now. And like work drinks, work dinners, you know, all of a sudden you can kind of participate without the alcohol.

24:14there's a number we haven't yet learned but i want to learn because i have a hunch it's going to be positive for us which is how much more likely someone is to go out in midweek if they know the venue has future chateau because i suspect it's a lot more likely and you know there are i i've met people who specifically go to certain restaurants midweek because they have good corkage fees and it means they can bring future chateau because before you know 10 years ago they just went out midweek and they had wine shared with pot of wine with their partner and then five years ago they stopped doing that and they'd get water and gradually the evening got less and less fun and felt more and more that the more and more the feeling of the evening was what they were saying no to not what they were saying yes to and the beauty feed chateau is all of a sudden they're back saying yes again right without all the compromise we talked about how the audience was changed and the original branding was sort of designed for a different audience you rebranding you alluded to it yeah talk to us about that yeah so like i say the original brand was quite fun and had potential to build a really interesting world around it but i realize now not very true to either the customer or the problem we're solving the kind of central piece of the original brand was that the product sucks better than everyone else's that we must have come from the future and so the business was built in the year 2086 and all that kind of stuff i look back at it now i'm like what an arrogant brand customers don't care about that why should they care that the products from the future and so the next brand is going to be much more built on what we see matters to consumers which is like fundamentally that the luxury that we are selling is the freedom to enjoy things without consequences that have your cake and eat it feeling that we all associate with like the super rich and yet here's a way that you can have it on a tuesday night and so we are yeah reshaping the brand into more of a i think of it as like a modern luxury brand for everyday people we have been really really lucky in that dream studio we're not only really interested in the project but ended up like coming in as part of our investment round as well so we have really high levels of alignment with them and it means they've been able to really help us out on cost and so we're going to do this in a two-stage process so we've taken a big creative step forward that will land in may based off everything we learned to date and then we're going to continue refining based on things we're going to learn between now and the third vintage and we'll do kind of a a second brand evolutiony type project for the third vintage because we just looked in my language we don't know enough yet to do our big rebrand as it were but we know enough to know that we're miles off where we should be i love that it's like let the market decide like sometimes and you have to be open to that as well right so that kind of humbling experience of putting something out there and then being completely wrong but actually seeing that there's a massive opportunity just in a slightly different direction and then kind of going back and adapting on that I think that you know test learn pivot is so important for early stage brands of listening truly listening and this is a really good example of that what does success look like for you future there's a number of different kind of versions of that in terms of portfolio i would like us to build something that's got real breadth and real depth you know the moment we have a red and white and sparkling we're about to release a much improved red and white new sparkling and a rose as well but there is so much variety within wine that we should in the future have something in the style of a mendota style malbec for example or a sicilian style griot we should be able to do real versatility as well as depth of quality and price point we're blessed in wine the customers understand that you can have wildly different quality and price points within the same brand in the way you can't really in other categories it's normal for a wine brand to have a 25 pound product and a 10 000 pound product and i would like us to really stretch upward what is the limit on how great a six seven percent alcohol wine can be this is not going to become the core of the business but i would love to make something that's truly great enough that it can be some auction i'd also like to have something a bit more accessible at some point and then more broadly really like i would just like future chateau to be something that lets people say yes at scale um that feeling i described of like the luxury of being able to just have the thing you want without all the consequences you come to expect is such a beautiful modern feeling and I would love much more people to feel it.

28:50I would like to be a staple in people's homes around the country serving up that feeling. I'm going to do a few quickfire ones now as we're coming to the end. Biggest misconception about what it'd be like to have your own brand? This might make me really unpopular with other founders. Having been very close to the founders of lots of different businesses. I always thought the fundraising was hell. Like that's the perception you get from the outside. And don't get me wrong, it's a bit stressful, but I loved it. And I don't know if I just got really lucky with my investors, but I've never met such interesting people.

29:22And I never would have been able to get a meeting with them at any point in the previously in my career or my life. And yet all of a sudden, these legends of the game want to sit down and have a conversation with me and want to tell me their thoughts. So yeah, like I say, that might be that might be really unpopular but my big misconception was how much i enjoyed fundraising maybe we'll ask you again in like five years time when you've done a few rounds

29:48favorite brand right now any category white box cocktails i love their products i love their brand um the freeze martini i just think is one of the greatest packaged products in fmcg are those the little tiny ones like the pocket negronis yeah yeah yeah best business book you've Red. Radical Candor by Kim Scott. This summer. Most underrated skill in brand building. I'm really bad at this one, but simplifying is something which my investors, they're really good at. My chairman, who's a legend, is amazing at it. And, you know, I'll talk for ages about like, oh, how do we convey this simply in as few words as possible?

30:22And then he'll just say something off the cuff like, oh, just call it All Day Rosé. It's like, yeah, that is what it is. yeah simplifying i'm excited for all day rose i have to say and finally a question we ask every guest in your opinion what makes a brand of tomorrow i think that customers attention has never been harder to grab or to hold and therefore it basically can't be bought anymore like inserts as an example 10 years ago you could just get customers attention by putting a marketing insert inside a delivery they were getting from another company because they got so few deliveries that when they opened it they were excited and they'd look at everything inside and they go oh here's a here's a flyer for a different brand interesting and now no one looks any of that stuff it all goes straight in the recycling bit and there is no media field left where you can guarantee someone's attention just by having bought it and so the only way to get attention now i think is to earn it by saying something that truly strikes their experience and engages them.

31:27A most powerful label makes them want to share it with someone else. And therefore, A Brand of Tomorrow is a brand that is really clear on its emotional center and how that relates to its customers and how to package that up in a simple way so that it can earn attention. Thanks so much for coming on, Tom. My pleasure. Thank you for having me. Hope you enjoyed this episode of the Tomorrow Brands podcast. If you did, I'd love it if you could rate or leave a quick review. It really helps other people find the show. And if you're curious for more, check out the other episodes. We've had some brilliant founders and operators share their stories.

32:00Thanks for listening and see you next time.