Midlife. Mid-strength. Maximum clarity - with Ryan Kutscher, Dad Strength Brewing

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 this week we're joined by Ryan Kutcher to talk about building Dad Strength, a mid-strength craft beer brand born from a real-life dad hack. We get into what it means to build a brand for a very specific kind of modern consumer, why community matters more than advertising, and what founders can learn from ACDC when it comes to marketing. Let's get into it. It'd be great to hear a bit more about your background and how you got to where you are now. Yeah, so we launched this brand, Dad Strength Brewing, about two years ago, a year and a marketing.

0:49I had my own agency called Circus Maximus, where we worked with a lot of different companies. That's how we met your partner. We worked with Coca-Cola. We did some international work for those guys. We worked with other Fortune 500 companies like Procter & Gamble and Mondelez. And we also worked with a lot of independent startups. And basically what we did is we helped them create the branding for their product and then the creative and the campaigns that they used to launch. In the context of Fortune 500 companies, they were launching or had just acquired smaller brands in their portfolio. And they were like, what do we do with this thing?

1:22Or independents were more like the venture capital style founders that had a great vision, but maybe didn't understand or know how to do the branding and the marketing for it. So that's what I did for about 10 years. And prior to that, I worked in general advertising, working at larger agencies, both in New York and beyond. So I had some background with consumer packaged goods and brand launches and things like that. Yeah. And now you've launched your own beer brand. So tell us a little bit more about Dad Strength. We were looking for an idea, some kind of product rather than working in the services industry, applying a lot of the skills and know-how that we had in the world of branding and marketing.

2:06My business partner is an old friend of mine. We went to college together and he's a marketing guy as well. He ended up working in the restaurant business where he started a concept called Big Buns, which was a burger concept. He expanded that to a handful of locations in the DC area and then sold them to Thompson Hospitality Group. And he was working at, it was an acquihire. So he was working for that restaurant group. And we had always batted different ideas back and forth, all different kinds of stuff. And this idea, it wasn't even, this idea came up where it was an accident. So he said, texted me and he goes, Hey, check this out.

2:43I'm mixing regular beers and non-alcoholic beers together to make the mid-strength beer. And I said, you're not going to believe this, but I do that too. And I'm mixing Heineken and Heineken non-alcoholic to get like a two and a half percent Heineken. So my wife was super pregnant at the time and was pretty uncool to go out and have a night drinking. And the mornings just don't hit the same at age 46. And so we were solving this problem that we had. Still love craft beer and he was mixing a non-alcoholic craft beer with a craft beer. So he was making a kind of an IPA style in that mid range as well.

3:22And we're like, I think there's something here. And that was really the inception of the idea where it just hit a lot of the things that we were thinking about in our experience as marketers. It seemed like, oh, that actually seems like a pretty big idea. And then from there we went and started doing the marketing to see if we were insane people. and the kind of the tailwinds of the marketplace suggested that there might be an opportunity here. That was really how it started. Two guys, two dads solving a problem with a dad hack and then going, you know what, this might be interesting to someone else.

3:55It's a really lovely name, Dad Strength. It feels like it's got lots of sort of layers to it in different places you could take it. Was it easy to come up with? Yeah, no, it was hard to come up with Dad Strength. We had a bunch of different ideas, But what we wanted to do, we were considering the philosophy around, we wanted it to stand out. We wanted it to zig where the category zags. A lot of beer is named either for where it's made or regional, or maybe it's categorical, Fledgehammer IPA and stuff like that. So we wanted it to speak to the consumer as to who it was for. And we wanted it to communicate why it was different.

4:36And we wanted to communicate that it was a problem solution. Also, there's a degree of irony into it. So like we didn't plan on all of this layers exactly, but we wanted it to feel like it could speak to those things. And so we had different names for it. weekday beer, week, we're W E A key, W E A K, different things that felt a little off. And then dad strength landed. And it was like, let's two dads that came up with it. It's the strength we need. So it was just like a no brainer. That said, it certainly got a little bit of challenge early on from friends and family. But what we did is we just did a random market test.

5:17Yeah. A lot of people were like, I don't know. But anytime you have a creative idea, of people that are like that. So we loved it, but we tested it. We shared it with about 150 guys and periphery. And of all the names that we had, it was the overwhelming winner. And then again, it was really just about, it was the only one that really told the story of the product. And since storytelling is really the most important thing that you can have when you're trying to introduce a new product, it was an easy call. And once we got into market, it's proven to be it does all the things that you need it to do and you guys are mid-strength there so you're staying in the moderation space not low and no not how is that a space in the u.s it's emerging i'd say no no here is taken off yeah so there's literally nothing in that space you have this idea we walk down the beer aisle and it's 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 0 and you're like there's literally a whole physical hole in the marketplace.

6:16And it's so obvious that it makes you second guess yourself because you're like, certainly someone would have done this if this was a good idea. But we looked, Australia has a very robust mid-strength beer section. In fact, it's probably their most popular kind of area. There was an article about the 25 most popular mid-strength beers. They call them middies in Europe and in the UK for different reasons, both cultural and historical as well as tax reasons. There's a strong mid-strength kind of section. And even some of the most popular beers like Guinness are on the lower end. And then from just like a categorical standpoint, the craft beer drinker is aging.

6:53They look a lot like me. They're in their mid-40s, early 50s, late 30s. Young people aren't refilling that category as much as they used to. It really is connected with the person in the life stage who's encountering this problem for the first time and you're 35 years old and you have that first two beer hangover because you had two 8 % IPAs and you're like, wait, what just happened? And if you have kids that compound that problem and you're up in the morning, it's pretty brutal. So all of those things, the fact that there was nothing in this space and the fact that we felt like consumers of this product or of this category were unintentionally asking for it was like, oh, I think this is good.

7:32And no one else was doing it. But we ended up, we do look a little insane for sure. But it's proven to connect with consumers. And is the vision that people can keep all the good things about drinking beer and all of the kind of ritual around that and the socializing and the connection and the taste experience without the bad stuff? Yes. As we get older, it just becomes too high a price to pay. It's too high a price to pay. I think health-wise, there's certainly a lot of evidence to suggest it's not really surprising. Alcohol is just not great for you as you age. It's not great for you when you're younger.

8:09And we know that. But from a social standpoint, it plays a pretty important role, right? It's social lubricant. It's part and parcel to socializing and connecting with people. And that is important from an anthropological standpoint, from a social standpoint. It has a meaningful role. It's ritualistic. And so it's hard to give up one and still enjoy the other. And that's what the beauty of this product is that you get to have both. It's a classic better for you product story. And I think that really resonates with people because we hear it all the time. It's like, I'm trying to drink less. I'm not necessarily trying to drink nothing.

8:48And so from a statistical standpoint, it's interesting as well, because there's a lot of articles that have been written. There's a lot of news about the rise of non-alcoholic beers. The fact of the matter is over nine out of 10 people, so 93 % of people that drink non-alcoholic beer still drink alcohol. So we're going, what's going on here? What are they doing? Why are they using this? What's the job function of this non-alcoholic beer if it is not to completely replace alcohol? It must be to extend that social moment where they're going to have a drink or two and maybe they're going to alternate.

9:22So that's become very popular. We call that malternating. We call it zebra striping. I think because we like puns because we're dads, malternating is just so much snappier. But there's also zebra striping is also related to I'm going to have a beer and I'm going to have a little bit of THC and I'm going to blend that way. And I think that our product is effectively alcohol's answer to microdosing. It's a tool for moderation. and right now, like we were, we're forced to like Frankenstein some solution in our kitchen by mixing beers together when we can see what the consumer is trying to do and what they're interested in and they're underserved.

10:07So problem solution. So this is probably an obvious question, but who are you building the brand for? People ask, because we do all these tastings in grocery stores and moms will come up to us and say, what about mom strength? And our joke is, if it was mom strength, it'd have to be twice as strong because moms are doing twice strong. twice the word. However, that's not what we want, right? We want that just that little bit of social connection or social release. So the short answer is that it's really for anyone that's looking for moderation, anyone that loves craft beer, but doesn't love craft hangovers, anyone that wants a slightly better for you option, anyone that's looking to moderate their alcohol intake and still get the benefits of an absolutely delicious craft beer that's made with 100 % craft beer technique.

10:51There's no weird ingredients. There's no strange sugars or anything like that. So it serves anyone. But obviously we targeted dads because as we mentioned earlier, that's really your core demographic. It's the numbers break down like this, where 70 % of craft beer drinkers are men, but 50 % of our buyers are women. So it's interesting because we also see a lot of women buying this, yes, for themselves, but for their husbands as well, making that grocery decision for them and their husbands thank them. It's like just a nice option to have. Short answer is dad's, mom's, longer answer is anyone looking to keep that social moment without the social consequences.

11:33Let's talk a bit about brand building, especially because you come from a background, very strong creative agency background. What did you, what lessons did you bring with you and what have you left behind? So I think that the big shift in the way that brands are built is social media. And social media operates very differently from if you're my age or older, you probably associate brand building with large advertising expenditures that happen through TV, billboards, traditional media. Whether you like it or not, that's how you're influenced. And the fact of the matter is That stuff doesn't really build brands.

12:13The way that brands are built these days are through community and basically like social acceptance, targeting. And so I think that advertising has shifted to operate in a lot of the same way that social media has, which is social media breaks consumers into niches. niches are important because you have very specific groups of people that have very specific worldviews very specific beliefs very specific problems and they will share content with one another and so if you're building a brand you really need to build it for a niche and you need to build it for a specific person with a specific problem that you're offering a specific solution to you can't start broad i think once you get to a level that you're speaking to everybody those traditional media work really well.

13:02So I had to leave a lot of that stuff behind and dig into the niche and the sort of the consumer category mindset, like the community building mindset. And that was another reason why Dad Strength made so much sense is because it's a community of guys that are largely underserved by content and society in general. We've met a lot of people, the Raleigh Stroller Society is a group down in North Carolina that's a group of dads that get together every Saturday or once a month or whatever it is. And it's like 50, 75 dads who bring their strollers and connect. Like the dad community is one that's thirsty for connection.

13:41And that would be the extrapolation of what you ask, which is how do we serve a community with messaging and content and stuff that's valuable to them, as opposed to advertising that's historically been one-way communications operating without a lot of feedback and living in channels that are one-dimensional television, out-of-home radio. I think it's a really good point about that consumer being underserved. I remember when my kids were young, even now my husband will say everything is set up for the mum. You'd be the only dad at the mum and baby class. Some of them are still called mum and baby classes, and it hasn't caught up with the fact that we parent a lot more equally these days, and dads are more involved than they probably were 20 years ago, but there are very few brands talking to them still.

14:29It's very mom-focused. And statistically, that's true. Our generation, if you're a parent now, if you're a father or a male parent now, you spend on average about 30 % more time with your kids than our parents' generation did, which is a tremendous leap, which means by the age of whatever, six, you've spent as much time with your kid as your parents spent with you until you were 18 and probably left the house. which is an insane statistic. But I don't think that guys generally are as good at seeking community. If you look at the other numbers, you find that men our age typically have less friends than they used to have by the generation prior, probably because they were all hanging out with each other and not with their kids, but they have less friends, less close friends.

15:15So these things are like definitely on the periphery. It wasn't, we weren't thinking about this stuff when we were processing this brand or thinking about how to create community or any of those things. It started a lot more simply, but once you start to think again that there's a lot happening at a socioeconomic and cultural level that is playing into this kind of opportunity. But yeah, I think dads are largely underserved. They're not going to seek out community dads and men in general. We're not good at that. We tend to be more solo focused. And so this is an opportunity to create those moments.

15:47And that stuff is where I think it gets really interesting. And like you say, traditionally, that would have been in the pub with, you know, a full strength pint or seven on a weeknight. And people just don't want to do that as much now for various reasons. Price, also health. Busy job the next day is not going to work, is it? So if you can recreate a moment of social connection without the literal headache that follows, then win-win. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know a single dad that's going to go hang out and watch Thursday night football for four hours. It just doesn't exist. You're probably meeting up with someone at the park or you're doing after school sports or you're doing soccer on Sunday or whatever it is.

16:31There's much more community focused opportunities. But yeah, I think lifestyles have changed dramatically. You also have to work 100 % more to make the money that you need to survive. All these things kind of layer on top of one another. And it's probably too dynamic for me to unpack, but it's under there. Does anything surprise you when it came to applying everything you need to your own thing? So when you do your own projects versus working with clients? Man, social content's really hard. It looks easy. And when people are really good at it, and when you see, I have a lot of respect for creators who have shouldered the responsibility to come up with so much content.

17:09It is a full-time job and it's really challenging to continually come up with formats that perform and feel good and look good. So people out there, they're quite talented. I have a lot more respect for the creators. Just, yeah, the appreciation for how full-on the title of creator is. It's a lot. It is. And they keep changing the algorithm and the formats and just when you think you've got it cracked. It's a land of confusion. Yeah, the algorithm of people telling you the algorithm likes this or the algorithm likes that. No one knows, but you just default. If it's pretty interesting stuff that you're creating and it captures people's attention really quickly, tells a little story and gives a little distraction, but every platform is different.

17:59So you can create something for Instagram. It's not going to work on TikTok and vice versa. Sometimes it doesn't. YouTube, completely different channel. Email, it's complex. So you recently went on Shark Tank, which in the UK we have, it's called Dragon's Den. Can you tell us a bit about that experience? Yeah, I'll tell you what I remember. It was a blur. They found us, to their credit, they're probably crawling all over the internet to find up and coming brands because they found us quite early on through social media, a lesson about how important it was. We were filming our tastings, our demos, and turning that into content.

18:31And they discovered that. They invited us to go on the show. And then it's a lengthy process by which you have to submit a video and you go through all these different kind of hurdles and gateways. The production staff was awesome. And yeah, against all common sense and thought, like this is like, wow, this is happening. We're going on Shark Tank. And then you go on and it's a blur. You don't get a lot of, it's so early on, you're forced to do a lot of, You have to figure out what you think the valuation of your company is. And you don't really fully know. It's so early in the business. And you go on and the sharks are pretty aggressive.

19:05But it was a fun experience. I think we got to do some really interesting stuff. We walked out to our theme song. We had a great experience where three sharks were interested in doing a deal with us. So that felt pretty validating and good. We had done like a Shark Tank kind of themed competition early. And we got just laughed out of the room. So it was nice to go on Shark Tank in front of the national audience and get that validation that we had three sharks that thought this was a pretty good idea that they wanted to be involved in. And so we did that handshake deal on the show and the bump thereafter was great because certainly it gets you that awareness.

19:41It is like a classic, like I think 5 million people watched the episode. So you get pretty good visibility and we were able to connect with some distributors. I will say that one of the things about alcohol and the beer world in general is that we're very highly regulated. So we don't really do any direct-to-consumer sales. So that's one way that our business is fairly innovation resistant. And so we didn't get to experience the big Shark Tank sales bump, but I think we definitely capitalized on that awareness bump. And I think that it's like social proof. So it's a great thing for people to say, oh my God, it was on Shark Tank.

20:17And then if they want to learn more about us, there's plenty for them to discover online and social media and stuff like that. So it's a really interesting part of the overall story and the mix and the way that it works as part of our marketing. And it just is a life experience. It was pretty cool. Again, Shark Tank, it was like, oh, my God, people are going to be seeing that in the dentist waiting room for 15 years to come. I think they will as well, won't they? Those sorts of things just have that kind of evergreen, aren't they? sit on YouTube. Someone else I know has been on the UK once said that a few years later, suddenly just have like thousands of views again for some reason.

20:48That like weird algorithm thing where it just popped back up on the newsfeed. Yeah. Someone's, Hey, remember this? This was a good idea. The discovery happens over time. And by the way, going back to social media, for example, if you have a post that reaches 4 % of your own audience, you crushed it. 4%. So another lesson is that like, basically no one is paying attention. Even the people that have raised their hand and said, hey, I'm interested in what you're doing. No one's looking. No one's watching. No one's really participating. You just have to keep going and keep telling that story. Shark Tank going on rerun.

21:20Hopefully we'll be part of that overall telling the story over and over mix. What's been the hardest part about building this so far? Probably the fact that I had a successful career that I gave up and moved into my brother-in-law's basement apartment. We left our home in Austin and we'd moved to DC and we moved literally into my brother-in-law's basement one room apartment with my wife, my son, our dog, my wife, very supportive wife, big believer, which was critical behind dad strength. There is two strong moms that are rooting us on. So we're doing that thing where it's basically like midlife crisis, midlife, mid career crisis.

21:58And suddenly I went from work that we're talking about in industry publications and stuff like that. And then suddenly I'm standing in the beer aisle of a grocery store in the middle of a new city that I have no friends in, living in my brother-in-law's basement apartment, trying to get people to try this product. I'd say that was pretty humbling, for sure. Awkward. I think there was some family members that pulled my wife aside and were like, we're not so sure about all this. Putting that level of risk on the table at this age with a young kid, I would say that's probably a stressor. other than that I think it's all just par for the course probably a lot of stuff other people deal with on a day in and day out basis but that was the big gamble for sure that was the big like chips to the center of the table moment maybe everything else feels easy in comparison to that it was just like hey how many hard things can we do at once let's just do them all at once and if we survive we'll be stronger for it but yeah move to New York now move from Austin Cost of living tripled as we moved to DC.

23:03It was like complete blowout, midlife blowout. So that was hard. But it's been fun as well. And we like a little adventure. Both my wife and I have pretty bad ADHD. So when you start throwing a bunch of variables at us, it starts to feel comfortable in a way. Overall, good. And how are you approaching growth? So you said DC isn't really a thing for alcohol. What does growth look like? Growth happens at the store level. So growth is all about getting into a retailer, demonstrating that you have velocity on shelf, meaning people are coming in and buying this product and rebuying it. People really like our product.

23:36Our rebuy rate is quite high. So our chain rebuy, for those that don't know, that means our retailers, when they run out of this product, are they buying it again? We have 100 % rebuy at the chain level. People have adopted this product and made it part of their weekly grocery run. We do a lot of demos. we let people try it it's a physical food item or beverage so people need to try it and we leverage that sales data to bring it to new retailers and say hey so the big one that dropped first for us the first big domino for us was whole foods who discovered this product and said we'll put you in all eight of the whole foods that there are in dc and for a small city eight whole foods who is our core consumer really is like a slightly higher household income craft beer drinker, that was gigantic.

24:25And what we started to see was like, oh, this stuff sells really well. How well? It sells better than athletic brewing in many cases. Our products sell better than all but one of their SKUs, meaning faster. So that's pretty exciting for us because that's a big success story in the beer space is non-alcoholic beer. So that was great data for us to then leverage to get into other retailers. And then we went through what's called the annual reset in the United States. And I don't know, maybe this is true everywhere. Typically twice a year, moving more towards once a year, retailers will make a very big decision as to what products they're going to put on their shelf into what they call the plan-a-ground, which is literally a map of the beer aisle.

25:06Boom, boom, here's where everything is. Here's what we've got. Here's where it goes. And so we use that data to apply and get into a bunch of new retailers. And we're going through that process now. And the results have been quite good. We feel very confident. And that stems from that shelf data that we talked about earlier, as well as how we're supporting the brand. That's how we grow now. And are you taking that sort of city by city or region by region? Yeah. So we launched in Washington, D.C. So we were just exclusively in one city. It's an interesting city because it's one of a very small handful of places where we were allowed to self-distribute without getting too deep into the tide laws and the three-tier system and how it works.

25:43Now we have distribution and distribution is the unlock to grow into new markets. We have a distributor in Virginia. We're now complete coverage in the state of Virginia. We're about 80 % of the coverage in Maryland. We have total state coverage in Michigan. And in the spring, we're going to be in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee, also full state. This is where it starts to get fairly complex because a retailer might have, say, 100 locations in a state, but that state might be broken into 10 different distributors. And so you need all those distributors because the retailer says, I want this to be available at every location I have.

26:17And you go, okay, that means I need all of these retailers to say, or all of these distributors to say yes, to handle all of this retail. So it's this kind of constant like puzzle that you're putting together. But anyway, we're launching a new three new States next year, and we're trying to grow conscientiously where we think we can support it. So yeah, that's our goal. I think we're trying to grow as fast as possible without growing too fast, without getting out over our skis and supporting this brand that we think there's a lot of excitement for. And we do get requests all over the country. California, Wisconsin, those are big ones.