Three Spirit- co-founders Dash & Tati on building something Sexy & Weird

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 Dash and Tati, the co-founders of Three Spirit, the brand making functional, non-alcoholic drinks designed to do something, built from plants, function and pleasure. We get into the wellness boom, building a brand as a married couple, and why sexy and weird became a kind of North Star. 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. I had a strange intro to the drinks world.

0:46so let's start a bit further back so I worked in the film biz and loved that for a time working on some really interesting projects and it's a young man's game the film game during that process I started a coconut water business called Coco Face and it started as a little kind of side hustle big time it was about kind of London street food trends street food markets popping up 2012 and it was fun and it was something that I could do whilst continuing the film career but it quickly became really interesting and I was super passionate about it and I realized that I was just talking about coconut water on film sets every day.

1:42And clearly it was more interesting to me than the day-to-day film work. And that was the beginning for me getting into drinks and accidentally falling into this kind of well-being boom. I had a partner called Charlie who was a who still is a very flamboyant and interesting charismatic Australian who who basically was so confident that the time was right for the real deal super high quality coconut water to enter the London scene and we did it together and quite quickly we were picked up by people like whole foods and planet organic we got lucky and it became quite a serious business and we were importing containers and containers of coconut water from thailand to the uk so i learned a hell of a lot through that process about building a brand supply chain route to market working in premium retail and i loved it it was amazing journey and then so one thing leads to another through that I became more and more interested in functional drinks and ingredients and off the back of that week Tati and I had a kid in 2014 we got married soon after anyway it felt like a good time for a little bit of a change for me and I started working on more projects in the well-being kind of space and learned more and more about functional trends, functional ingredients, how to apply them to new type of products.

3:23So I did quite a lot of consultancy work with PepsiCo on some of their brands like Cold Press Juice or Kavita, their kombucha brand, and just started understanding, oh, there's so much value in this accrued knowledge of function. and it's people a bit slow on the uptake and there's clearly loads of opportunity here and it's nice when it's just also your natural passion i went down a deep rabbit hole on a project called champa tea which was amazing it was a project for a charity in argentina all about reforesting mountainous environments in central argentina cordoba and i learned a shitload from this amazing guy called Pablo who I work with on this project he's basically a real deal shaman but an amazing eco-warrior trying to restore natural habitats in the region where he lives most beautiful part of the world and I just learned firsthand about wild harvested herbs how medicinal plants had been used for a long time by local people and long story short wow why can't we harness the power of plants in more ways and bring them to the masses and that's the beginning incubation of how three spirit again i'll pass the mic to tatty the real reason you got into it was really funny that moment on the film sets where i'm taking baraka it's true obsessed with everyone take his barocca on the film set.

5:02And he went to meet this guy who had this tech on a lid that could drop the pill into the water. Did you see now? That was a... You put your barocca at the top. It's already like a bottle that would pre-hab your vitamin C because that's on film sets. He'd leave the house at what, four in the morning? Yeah, basically, I'll just say it. On film sets, it is unbelievable, right? So you've got big, like hard blokes. So it's full of blokes, the film world. but every morning without fail you've got this queue there's always a set medic there's someone that's like a medical officer on set legally has to be which generally luckily they don't have to do much but the thing that they have to do more than anything is dish out the barocca in the morning because everyone is either paranoid that they're going to get sick or they are already sick and you're trying to do what you can do to prevent man or hungover or really hungover that was a penny drop moment of OMG just the glimmer of potential benefit from consuming something can trigger an incredible amount of demand and don't get me wrong Brock are amazing I joined the queue as well whether or not it's helping questionable but the key is it feels like it is and once you've had it you feel good and so that was a trigger for me for oh yeah there's something in this and that yeah me i don't have a very traditional story or cv both my parents like entrepreneurs my dad had an account see if i'm someone but my mom had her own business and a market she had a shops in market so i was like had a price gun in my hand from a young age and if you want to go on holiday this year we're doing christmas fairs and i worked i think i worked from a really young age approximately but so i always was like an ideas person i think i put mud in a jar aged about seven and tried to sell it so like I've got my mum's hustle for sure I put an ad book myself in Gumtree I got two emails and I end up working with Paul McKenna the hypnotist which is classic and doing what I was a PA the MD who was hilarious and I helped run the easy weight loss day the hypnotism seminar which is seven days straight your phobia there get the spiders there find the heights it was like hilarious then i went to work in a film finance in soho but i had the best time i had a budget of a million pounds a year to take people out i was like 22 and i had a boat can i had i have different clients different needs string fellows really nice bars i did a trip to montenegra i did a trip with bear grills to like the Arctic and all sorts of interesting stuff.

7:51And one day someone said to me, how do you always find the best places to take us? And like the best bars? I said, really hard. I've done a lot of research. He goes, quit your job and set up a bar guide and I'll pay for it. I was like, no. And then our office burnt down and I actually, yeah, got a horrible new boss and my boss left and I just suddenly was really unhappy. So I was like, fine, I'll quit my job and set up a bar guide. So I was working with some really funny people. there was a company called wine chap and we called this company bar chick and i was like the bar chick it was anonymous and so we built this app and then a friend of mine from school said oh my friend works at the evening standard she wants to interview people that go out on their own and so she interviewed me and i got an email being like yeah it was a really weird article in the end but my editor loved your story would you like a column in the evening standard so I went to suddenly having a column every week in the Evening Standard and I think because it was anonymous and it was almost like a brand name, Barchair, it allowed it to have a bigger trajectory.

8:54Like I was quite big on Twitter. I think with the app we had like almost like 750 ,000 downloads. But timing wise it was like the moment where cocktail bars were having a renaissance. It was like the beginning of the gin boom almost over here. You had people like Ryan Chetty, Tristan Stevenson like opening like bars where cocktails are becoming like really interesting or the old fashion coming back and I guess the beginning of bartenders beginning to be names that people might know so timing wise I was just lucky and I was very obsessed with the consumer always I wrote as if I was talking to someone who was like asking me a recommendation but I began to get a really deep understanding of the drinks industry and started working with more and more brands I I think someone pulled out of a trip to Jack Daniels and Nadal, who is still at Brown Forman.

9:44He was like, take a chance on this person. So I went to Tennessee. I got to go to like world class. I got invited by the spirits business to judge their kind of the spirits awards. And I was doing the kind of liquor category and I didn't realize the bucket was to spit in. So I definitely was out of my debt. But I got so deep into the world of spirits and drinks and I loved it. I had the best time and that was my degree in consumer drinks, alcohol, socialising, going out. And then I'd get like vials of drinks on my desk or things sent to me. And one day I got a thing of seed lip in a little bottle.

10:29I was like fascinated by this kind of new thing. And whether I like that liquid or not isn't really the point because it just blew up and you'd see the adoption of it and lots of really amazing bartenders. But also, and it wasn't framed as a gin, but for me, it was a bit, I guess, like it's a tonic. It's botanical. And I was always like, if I want a pint, I'll have a pint. If I want a drink, I'll have a drink. and meanwhile I'm married to Dash who's busy with coconut water or some yeah the Marte or whatever he's got going on there was a benefit to the consumer there was it was with versus without and so we just were like could we make a drink that was about what was in it not what had been removed because not drinking is always just you're not doing something it's not got something in and when you the language around drinking is oh god I need a drink after my day or I need to pick me up or you have a shot of tequila and yes it's got alcohol but there's something about that action that moment and that liquid that like puts you in the mood and I think not on alcoholic drinks which is so not about the moment and the mood and the vibe I went to a pre-hype which is a company that basically is like founders or brand builders or business builders who work with corporates so they had a corporate client that would have like corporates can see white space and problems better than anyone in many ways because they could see there's we've got a problem in our business we can't solve for it so I work with Coty Beauty I work with Diageo of my first projects in New York I got to work with Lego which was like my dream person to work with it's called Beyond the Brick and it was like there's not enough space or time to build Lego for everyone anymore it was their first ever project to think about going beyond just like brick building in space and pretty hard to have a methodology where you have to reframe the problem.

12:21There's about a thousand post-it notes on the wall and you really think about the problem and who you're solving it for. Is it the grandma? Is it the child? Is it the Lego brick or whatever it was? And that was just fascinating for me. And then after a week in a room, everyone would have to pitch, the clients in there, everyone would vote. And then we'd go to 30 days signal mining. We were testing to see if this is a good idea. And that's where I met Mita, who's our other co-founder. so it's almost like my degree of like how to think about things differently how to go out so we'd even run like adverts when we first launched three spirit to like under a different name to even to see this website just to see do people care about this message online are they clicking through didn't care where it's going to but you would just be like figuring out as quickly as you can if there's a signal that this should be something you should go and build and so that was the beginning of Three Spirit and Dash met Mita and Mita's like phenomenal we were all quite different people but she's like a driver and like a force and my mum would used to say thank god for her you guys are a complete disaster and so we started with this idea of with versus without could we make a drink that does something I think we came from quite a hedonistic lens initially but we i guess that was like beginning of three spirit and us will be like come on fuck it let's give it a go yeah that's where we are and that was eight years ago back then functional wasn't it was probably was barocca wasn't it it wasn't and coconut water but beyond that now we have functional soft drinks that's booming snack bars us functional is everything gummies So that wasn't a buzzword then like it is now.

14:03Did you face resistance in the early days? We launched from e-commerce, from D to C ads, at a time where I think it was much easier to do that because it was more affordable, pre-iOS 14 RIP. Just from a commercial point of view, it was an interesting better time maybe. but we started by running adverts and we stress tested the like value proposition i definitely think it was one drink it was rooted in like social occasion the liquid has definitely evolved it was a pretty funky liquid back then still is it was really funky and definitely like marmite that drink for sure because it was like people loved it or hated it but people were like interested in something that was new and a value proposition that was interesting and i think it went a lot not better than expected but it went i think the pushback was more non-alc more than function it was sometimes difficult to get people to sit up and listen of why it was important that they had a non-alc offering on menu why they shouldn't just make something simple themselves we focus on how do we launch with definitely as tatty said direct to consumer, digital, growing a community online, but also trying to get into really good bars, work with good barmen to create our liquids.

15:33We worked with amazing world-class bartenders from day one, people like Tristan Stevenson and Thomas Ask, Matt Hastings, because we knew that But coming back to the seed lip story, there was a lot of pushback when non-alch spirits entered the scene. And you had some early adopters and it was just like, this is great. Win-win. We're selling more. We're offering our customer more choice. And then you get a lot of maybe bartenders that didn't like seeing a non-alch liquid costing X when they felt that they could do it better. or it didn't even have the right to exist so i think we knew that was what we were up against which is partly why we decided to do something completely different and try and grab the attention of anyone and everyone like this is a potion in a bottle i think the challenge for us we're drinkers we love and respect what alcohol does and can do if you're going to try and compete with it and create a good alternative give it some welly like it has to be potent in some form it has to have impact ideally it makes you feel something it has to be worthy of the glass and so i think being a bit provocative with the initial product the positioning the language that we used i think it was very effective and not drinking just got interesting i think i was on a lot of and but the challenge was over the years of just guys you need a non-alc you need to take it seriously.

17:16Infirm that the Leibner works so I told you this story I took a work trip with somebody to go to a party it was in Germany you had to fly there in the morning go to sing I was like I don't want to drink probably the conversations are going to happen late at night the important ones so I took a like hip flask full of the Leibner before we went and I was just swigging that basically and so I didn't sleep I got an email from an 80 year old woman at three in the morning saying hi I just want to say how happy I am to have found this drink because I always fall asleep when I have people around for dinner next time I won't drink so much yeah because I can't sleep but well just be aware I'm delighted I'm delighted that this exists because I could now have people around for dinner and not worry about but it does you can tell you've had it it's not like It definitely works.

18:08Yeah, Leidener is an undeniably functional drink. I think our original drink, Social Elixir, as it was called at first, it's more nuanced. It's the drink, it's the one that affects me the most still, but maybe it's the hardest to explain how it might make you feel. It's funny because at the beginning, the strategy was like online, find the consumer, validation from bars, bartenders. So as Dash said, we work with great bartenders. And then Agoparoni, like fell in love with it because his meditation teacher loved it and so it was this really interesting full circle of an ago if you know who he is at the corner is like probably one of the most wonderful men and bartenders and just like amazing with drinks and probably one of the most respected bartenders in the world but and i knew of him from bargey but the way he came into our liquid was from meditation so it's interesting that i think timing wise not just the consumer but the industry as well, right?

19:07Beginning to shift to like the slightly healthier view on how things should be done, a bit more responsible, but also people looking at ways to feel good and still work, like chefs and bartenders. Those jobs can go many ways, right? And I think they're a much healthier industry. That's what we definitely tried to tap into at the beginning, which is what you're talking about, this hedonistic angle or healthy hedonism. And so I think free spirit, we wanted to be the naughty choice in the non-alcohol realm i love that idea if you're like vice and virtue i'm not drinking but i'm getting high on this and the ultimate dream is can you give fomo to alcohol drinkers and that's like the ultimate goal is oh what are you having so i think that's what we try to achieve with our product range it's like this is something beneficial, additive, pleasure-driven, not abstinence.

20:02That's key. It's not about missing out. It's about experiencing something. What was the line you said, Tati? That drinking just got interesting. There's a few of them. I just remember some things which really pissed people off that performed really well. And then COVID happened. We were set up to sell online. The bid, the auction on Facebook, I'll never say meta, I hate it, that was like so much cheaper that lockdown that we'll never do we'll never do sales online like we were doing at that time I don't think in the UK because it was just like cheap to acquire customers like you think about no one was really advertising like restaurants bars cinemas anyway so it was just and actually why that was key is because timing wise for what we were doing it was just a really interesting time for like consumer adoption people think about their health their sleep their stress alcohol and so that i think really propelled us you said that look the challenges came from non-alc being not accepted now it's like a category that's just boomed in the last sort of probably year two years has that been a rising tide lifts all boats it's just made it really crowded it's a bit of both we were on a tv show the other day where there was some kind of slightly older people hosting it who like oh non-alcoholic don't like not for me and it's still thing in a mass market and in America where there's even less adoption it still can be what you mean you're not drinking what's wrong with you but I think it's changing really quickly and I think I don't always think of non-alc and out I don't always think about it as a category like that I think about adoption of people look like how people are doing things differently matcha right really interesting or what do you do to sleep or maybe people are taking mushrooms and not drinking.

21:47I just think the toolkit is changing for different occasions and moments and pleasure is spoken about a lot more. We were in a kind of sex toy guide the other day in The Guardian, which wouldn't have happened 10 years ago, I don't think. Well, socialistic gives better orgasms. Right. Yeah. I think to your question though, so is your kind of focus on consumer there, but in terms of hospitality like yes it is so much easier over the last few years so i think it switched quite quickly whereas like trying to convince people to take non-alp seriously and if i'm just thinking about on menu restaurants bars hotels on then all of a sudden almost everyone in the uk understand pubs pub groups they really need a non-alp menu so i would say the UK is incredible at how quickly it's actually flipped and adopted, not just like its basic level, we need non-alcon menu, then it's more how far can we go into developing a really interesting non-alcon menu.

22:57So I think that we've seen it completely change. It makes our lives much easier, but it's more competitive out there. And then the next frontier, which I think the UK is still trying to catch up with compared to the US is function. So the early pushback for us, I think, was non-alc in terms of like, why should we even bother having a non-alc menu? Whereas the consumer, because we launched direct to consumer, we could see that there was huge demand, especially for our weird and wonderful functional elixirs. So that wasn't the problem. People were into function from a consumer level but the hospitality industry was still trying to get to grips with how seriously to take non-alc and now because we are functional i think we're able to carve another space on that menu that is fit for the future let's talk a bit about co-founder dynamics married couple how do you keep a boundary between work and home tatty has some good techniques on this front she's probably the person to speak to but i would say that when i met tatty she had this thing called bar chick and i thought it was amazing it was awesome i learned so much it was a great date yeah basically ultimate date super cool i'm all of a sudden going to these places that i've never even knew existed speakeasies meeting the bartenders drinking amazing cocktails learning a lot about cocktail culture so i was like wow you're cool this is inspiring it's probably one of the big reasons i got into this industry and then all of a sudden my dad i remember him saying years ago dash yeah you just need to start business with tatty and i at the time i was probably like yeah whatever but it was it's been an incredible wonderful journey that i've really enjoyed it does get tougher it has become more challenging factor to overcome and and make space for and running a business is stressful having children stressful it does bubble up so i think what i'm say is at first it was just plain sailing but yeah it's something that i think we're having to manage a bit more carefully and just the truth is if we're kind to each other and make time for each other then it's all good we can handle it i might be guilty sometimes of being frustrated and letting it spill out and there is no divide right your home life your work life i don't fight really nice and he's the least confrontational person in the world sometimes confrontation is useful so yeah that can be one of the challenges it is a interesting balancing act that our kids are what 10 and 8 like when they're small it's easier and you're like oh this is doable when they get to this age you they really need you i need them i need them more and sometimes i can get really pissed off and upset when my work is pulling me away or making me feel guilty on both sides feel like i'm not working to my best and i'm not being the best dad and that can create stress that's hard to manage but i keep trying i don't like to travel with dash like the royal family I don't want to talk about the kids on the way to work.

26:42I want to walk in the office. But I like to walk in the room as the role that is required. So if Dash walks in the door at home, I'm like, oh, I'm your wife. And at work, it's like, hey, morning. How's your evening? No, I think that divide is important. I cannot stand going to work with Dash where he's asking me about something. I'm just like, this is meant like your commute. It's like your moment. I've got I don't know many people Who have got kids Who don't like Feel pretty strung out At a certain age Where your kids are like Maybe not quite Self-sufficient enough And school Drop Pick up Oh shit Someone's sick I'm going to go get them Or Oh my god Did you not Text the school to say Jackson's mum's doing pick up It's just like That's just life And I don't know many Of my friends who aren't And I think it's really nice That we have something That's just like that we do together because you actually see someone like being amazing like when I see Dash doing a trick I'm really like proud and impressed and I think some of my other mates they don't see their other half they just do the pissed off morning and the pissed off evening so I think it's important to like I always think I think I really miss not seeing Dash being him every day but I'm not his wife or like the mom of his kids or whatever because I see him being like a different person or we get to go and do things and you can feel proud and wow and I think I actually think that could be helpful because you're reminded of someone that you actually look up to and respect maybe you don't in the morning when they don't do their laundry but that I do think actually can be helpful people I don't know how you do it but I actually sometimes I think about it this morning maybe that's useful that's a really good point not it's a different aspect of yourself isn't it it's not just parenting adminning yeah and you can't really be a complete arsehole in the office not many people really are but at home people the wheels can come off not that i'm saying dashes or i am but i'm just saying you generally put your best self forward when you're around people that you love or know or work with and our team's amazing it can rub off and create a nice environment for others i don't know i'm projecting here but like it's quite unique to be working with a couple and sometimes that might be really challenging if it's if there's a toxic toxicity going on but which sometimes i might be in a grump and that is not a good environment but generally speaking i do think what you're saying no but it's the same it goes both ways i love seeing tatty like just nailing it on like this this one tatty is the most incredible she's like water she's impossible to pin down but she can almost adapt and cope in real time with any situation and that is incredibly impressive seeing her like just on freestyle a nail just like smashing it and i'm always like wow respect i've got i should not be worried about anything we've got this hello the dishwasher let's see what talk about dishwashers let's move on so we talked earlier about coco face second time founding a fmcg business what were there any unexpected strengths or weaknesses of being a second time founder i think the big difference for me was having like two co-founders that are just mega mega in their own right tati mentioned this earlier meet her our co-founder who's based in new york originally from the tri-state area and we're all very different we're all very different as people tatty and i have much in common but what we bring to the table with three spirit was three very different and useful corners of expertise interest so i think the main difference for me was like wow i this is like supercharged tati and meter had been working together at prehype so they had this model of how to build which was awesome and we collected a lot of people that we had either worked with before so for instance sam you're worth mentioning an amazing friend and designer who designed coco face he also came on board to help us with the original branding for three spirit so we were able to bring in some trusted people to help in the kind of incubation stage and we just had we had like really good pieces of the puzzle and yeah i just think it was this unique having three co-founders which can be a big challenge in the long term but at the beginning is it was a really interesting way to start building and it felt i felt like i could be very free and creative tapping into tatty's network and bartenders and me exploring the realm of plant scientists and able to go deep down the rabbit hole of where i like to go which is like research working with eclectic mix of people which i think was really important in the beginning stage of three spirit was this idea of alchemy like bringing different things and fusing them together and for me that's about very different brains different experience and expertise and i think we just got we got the recipe right from the get-go and a big part of that was helping to de-risk it and testing it online signal mining helping us navigate the way forward and just having really cool people to work with at the beginning is it called three spirit because there's three of you it's one of it's one of the reasons it's deliberately ambiguous but signal mind particularly well there's three of us and there's three core drinks and three core mood states and i like this idea of mind body and spirit it was important for us to get spirit into the brand name because we wanted to do a lot of the work in the naming this notion of the third way like between drinking and not drinking it's something we always use but it's this it's not like here or there i can't look at the third space right yeah and in america especially look at what's going on with cannabis thc it's just not as simple as I was saying before what people are doing anymore in many ways so that's where it comes from so you mentioned the US a couple of times you guys launched there how did that come about?

33:29Mita's from New York so she was living here with her family and she was moving back like anyway and I think we we had it on the horizon and Kinyu Forox and us launched it literally the same time we both dropped sleep products I think on the same day randomly and I think it was helpful to have this like current happening over there and the non-art bottle shots began to pop up over there. So me to move back there and we were soft launching in January 2021, which didn't go soft because the New York Times ran us in an article. That was just like, boom. And then TikTok, we had two viral TikToks back to back, which was just nuts.

34:08So we had our soft launch is hard in America, which is awesome because, again, it just need that like signal. And it's really hard when it's hard. It's just great when stuff like goes to plan and it works or goes off plan, but it flies. And so America has been great. And we have lots of the non-alc bottle shops popping up all over the country. The US was well ahead of dedicated non-alc bottle shops, high-end premium little retail shops with a very curated selection of non-alc. So we were selling to these bottle shops from day one. The UK is the home of non-alc, I would say. It's where a lot of the innovation has happened.

34:53And it's where the early adoption from the hospitality industry has happened. but the US for some reason got way out ahead with dedicated non-out retail and they're way ahead with function and so we were well placed to do well early in the US but we began by working with several non-out bottle shops before we started any direct to consumer. What would your top piece of advice be for a UK brand considering a US expansion i think there's many parts to it but i think a lot of uk brands will work with an importer we didn't do that so we're quite unique we had the confidence because we have a founder based in the us and we knew that we were going to build a us team i just think you need to go there i think you need someone to be there i was told that from an early stage i remember ben branton didn't want to move then he spent loads of time there similar with the moth guys right if you want to crack it yeah you have to be there we've been thinking about talking about for too long moving our family to the states it was something that might still happen but so first of all yeah you got to be there you got to live it and breathe it i think that you need to it's such a beast you get this advice all the time but it's true each state is like a different market and it probably is easy to fall in into the trap of trying to be in too many places at once and different states are very different by nature i think in terms of like brand building new york is the place to build a brand if you want to focus on-prem and bars and bodegas as they're called they're like there's lots of really cool opportunities to sell an interesting product and huge density so if you could just focus on that for two years you've got the well-being consumer in theory is west coast you blur the lines everywhere the well-being boom is so huge it touches everyone and everything so a direct-to-consumer you can meet the consumer wherever they are that's obviously super attractive but to enter any state in the u.s and do well it's expensive and yeah i think the advice is pick those markets carefully and prove that you can succeed before moving on to the next one what's the biggest thing you've learned about yourself or sell as founders throughout this journey i think i probably just realized that how much i think about people i'm quite intuitive and so i guess i've realized like how much i care about consumers and that's a strength that i have i think i go straight to how they might think or perceive maybe not the business and i think we've had a bit of like support or work with more I guess I don't know what you'd call it like hre professional development things we did this like thing called tt3a which identified our strengths and weaknesses and it's fascinating because I'm like a two percent finisher or something you're like a one percent I don't know but our co-founder like 99 and it's useful sometimes to know like your strengths in a certain way and your weaknesses and maybe it'd be like yeah maybe I'm really bad at that and that's okay but also through the team we have these things called user manuals at work which everyone has in our business I realized more and more how useful it must be for people that come in and like dealing with all of us and different people but also knowing who you're working with it's just like knowing a bit more about who you are being real about that I think maybe I don't know I don't think I've changed building a team getting it's challenging the bigger the team the bigger the business the more all of those factors come into play and tatty's very good at reading the room and trying to find the harmony with people which is so important i think for me i would say i need to be passionate i can't fake it i can get stuck quite quickly if i'm trying to do things and tasks that are not connected to the whole reason why we did it in the first place so it's always quite a revelation to step back and to try and stay motivated is so important and for me that means connecting to the why the product what we can do for the customer for the consumer i love talking about the product to people i love educating people i love learning so for me what's amazing is the journey and trying to remember that it's important to keep learning keep remembering why you did it and not get lost in scale and because it will tie me up in knots so it's again it's like having the right team to help you keep moving forward without losing the fuel.

40:05Otherwise, how the hell are you going to get there? So for me, it's trying to remain passionate and interested and close to the product. I'm going to do a few quickfire ones now. One word that sums up three spirit. Sexy and weird. That's what you used to say. That's two words. Sexy and weird. That's fine. The drink you're most proud of and why? nightcap it was all even on paper it was so delicious and it was always going to be a winner just ticked so many boxes for me personally and it's i'm glad to see that it ticks boxes for a lot of people but yeah like social elixir the awkward middle child that's always the one that goes viral and also the people like social divest are like real people so i'm like you must be a good person because you like the weird middle child but it's it's a drink that people that get it I'm just like you've got a good heart and that would be the sexy and weird response is how we began with a plant potion that is sexy and weird.

41:05I took a bottle of Social Lixit to a quiz at my school one of those PTA run and I was like again I don't want to drink room temperature Prosecco so I'm going to take this bottle. You get sexy and weird

41:20I don't know if I can answer that Grand you love right now any category I just I think American brands are amazing I think grass are killing it I don't necessarily think they're particularly good but I just I want it on my shell Fly by Jing I love Fly by Jing Hayley Beebe Road I just smashed it like exceptional Burberry killing it I like the fact they've got like Cole Palmer fishing or whatever they're up to but I just I like brands that get social platforms and use them well and do weird stuff and have some fun and i always feel slightly impressed by brands that are doing that sexy and weird i i it feels boring but liquid death is like such an obvious choice but i just love their their brave and they're very disruptive and have amazing content like never-ending opportunities to to do fun stuff i love it if you could collaborate with any brand in the world Who would it be?

42:28I would have said Balenciaga, but they had a bad moment about a year ago, so maybe we can't say that anymore, because they're pretty sexy and weird, and I can see them with the plant potion. So Balenciaga in 2023. Pre that shoot that they did. Yeah. Who else would I want to collaborate with? We always talk about who our celebrity would be. I was going to say, so Lady Gaga. I think with Three Spirit, what's amazing about it is people that love it and get it, particularly socialists, they might be willing to maybe have been the odd one out. That's changing all the time. But the people that just adopt and get it, I might just think they're great people because they're not necessarily a sheep.

43:10It's like the weird and the wonderful is where Three Spirits has been. Yeah, so I think we've been a bit hesitant, but sexy and weird, Lady Gaga, just a little left turn here, aura ring in terms of like partnerships like for us that whole trying to navigate function and present it in an interesting way to the consumer let's be honest like people are so interested in their performance and health and sleep tracking it would be sensible for us to partner with someone that could help bring that to life and final question we ask every guest in your opinion what makes a brand of tomorrow? I think rip up the rule book.

43:52Do something different and daring. I love seeing brands that just like completely shock and surprise and succeed by doing that, thinking liquid death again. Just are you joking? Yeah, I think conforming is like really hard not to do sometimes. Like debating that post, can we say this or can we not? And I think you've got to try and be bold and know your consumer and look after your consumer and love your consumer and I think whether you're like a milk or an olive oil or sexy and weird like there's an element of try and stay true to who you are because it's really easy to conform and sometimes it's good at the beginning it's so much fun and it's keep that energy and we don't always do it for sure but it's like you always got to try and make sure that you stay true to who you are because otherwise it gets a bit bland it's easy to get bland i think nice thanks so much for coming on guys thank you hope you enjoyed this episode of the tomorrow browns 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 thanks for listening and see you next time

45:14Bye.