How To Actually Build a Global Brand And Sell It (In Just 7 Steps) | Ben Branson | Seedlip

0:00If you create something of quality that has meaning and relevance to enough people, you can have a fantastic business. That's Ben Branson, the entrepreneur who built the world's first non-alcoholic spirits brand. We were growing faster than Brewdog, Fevertree, Innocent. Took it global and sold it for millions. My first thousand bottles sold out in three weeks. The next thousand bottles are sold out in two and a half days. The third thousand bottles are sold out in 30 minutes online. People were queuing outside Selfridges, 8 o 'clock in the morning, to come and try and get their hands on it. In this episode, Ben reveals the three rules for creating an exceptional product.

0:36The way to make ideas travel, the way to build great businesses is to... How to build a brand that can go global fast. If you are thinking about disrupting a category or creating a new category, two things are really important. Number one, there must be familiarity. And so much more. I mean, we wouldn't have any of this without people who thought differently. Who the fuck has created this? So I got in the front. What is the point? And he started taking his clothes off. Why would you do this? Kate Moss wanted to learn how to make non-acolite cocktails. I went and spent an afternoon with her. It was a life-changing amount of money.

1:14Bad fucking idea. Stupid idea. I really hope you enjoy it. If you do, please subscribe and let's dive in. The question on everyone's lips is, how much did you sell for?

1:48Hey Callan, welcome to the lab. Awesome. Come on in. Thank you. So this is home? This is home and work. okay yeah this is this is like an estate right it was like a it's 25 acres four acres of woodland we're on the grounds of a monastery benedictine monastery from the 1100s that would have sat or is marked out the footprint just outside there wow so yeah we're in just on the edge of uk's oldest village incredible yeah it's heaven yeah so you built this incredible global brand seed lip you grew it took it global sold it i'd love to get into your new ventures because they are like incredible and super cool but maybe should we start at the beginning of this story with the first product yeah and the first brand which is is seed lip yeah this is our little i guess a little show and tell table of probably the four most important things from the beginning yeah first thing was this little copper still so this is a distillation piece of equipment it's tiny i was growing herbs at home i wanted to maybe do some experiments and i'd come across basically old herbal remedies yeah featuring in the 17th century and this was apothecaries and alchemists who were distilling and working with lots of different herbs and spices and so I just wanted to give it a go this was not about creating seed lip this wasn't about a gap in the market this was a hobby a passion um and I guess I believe that the way to get good ideas is be exposed to lots of different things rather than just what your competition is doing, just what the category is doing.

3:49Go and be interested in loads of different stuff. Yeah, cool. So this was kind of like a nerdy kind of hobby on the weekends. You come across this really interesting book and you're kind of like experimenting at home with distilling stuff. Literally taking mint from my garden and I had no idea what I was doing. A few YouTube videos, there's some drawings in this book and I started, it was magical being able to make a liquid from a plant that smelt and tasted like that liquid. I was hooked. I just wanted to keep doing it. Yeah. And what was the breakthrough moment where you're like, actually, I do need to make a product from this?

4:31I can remember crystal clearly driving to London to go out for dinner in a nice restaurant in King's Cross. You sit down, people come and ask if you want to have water, sparkling still. You get the menus. I'm looking at the drinks menu. Amazing cocktails. Sounds great. Great wine list. I'm driving, so I'm not drinking alcohol. Nothing for me in the menu. yeah and I asked and I wouldn't usually do this but I did ask the waitress can I have you got something that's good that's non-alcoholic she said sure we can make you something anyway rest of the table overcome their lovely cocktails nice glass of red and there's mine pink tall sweet full of fruit juice and sugar Yeah, I've been there.

5:25It's awful. And I just felt like an idiot. I just, I was sort of embarrassed. I didn't finish it. It didn't go with the food. It didn't fit the occasion. No one else on the table was like interested in what I had other than kind of smirking and pointing out how ridiculous it was. And I left that meal driving home thinking only one thing. Why is it so hard to get a decent option? I don't care why someone's not drinking alcohol. Like, why are the choices so poor? This was 2013. And then the dots began to join. And I sort of thought, maybe there's something interesting in what I'm doing with this distillation.

6:08But it wasn't, oh, my God, I'm going to do some big global takeover of the world. It was keep my day job, do this evenings and weekends, maybe take it to a farmer's market. it just creep out there start slow okay interesting so you didn't go i'm gonna go all in on this no this is like i'm gonna build this on the side and see how it goes and it's like a side project absolute side project absolute um this will be fun to create my own liquid and create my own brand and then i could tell my clients pesto i wouldn't say that i'm entrepreneurial i wouldn't say that I've wanted to create businesses I've got zero experience in science distillation liquids I wasn't from the drinks industry my naivety I think was the most important thing that I could embrace and like dine out on as ridiculous and stressful as that felt at the time actually not coming from drinks was massively helpful yeah the product itself when you taste it is amazing but also there's so much that's gone into the brand and the story and I think you're an exceptional brand builder thank you um the design everything can we talk through like how you come up with the the brand and the product itself yeah so the first thing I did was I emailed and called 500 of the best bars restaurants and hotels in England and I asked them or wrote to them and said a bit of a white lie my friend's pregnant we want to come for a birthday drink what non-alcoholic options do you have this didn't cost me anything and the answers I got back gave me the most confidence ironically that I needed to do something and I needed to create seed lip so most people didn't reply which I thought was pretty dreadful a lot of people said we can make you something on the day which just feels a bit like an afterthought which just feels like a bit like yeah we could do that but not yeah of course here are loads of great options and then the third set of people uh sent me through or talked me through their drinks list and it was soft drinks or some horrible sweet mocktails and so this was literally like wide open book nobody had great sophisticated grown-up options so that was a big very free piece of research that gave me a lot of confidence to kind of go there's a there's got to be an opportunity here people are not being offered great options in terms of the brand and the product I am from a farming family I do love nature and working with quality ingredients was really really important I definitely broke down the psychology around going to a bar and so for example the smallest words on the label other words non alcoholic mm-hmm it's a glass bottle it stands up beautifully on a back bar and looks part of a set of premium spirits regardless of whether it's got alcohol in or not so everything from like having a tall profile choosing the right bottle to then having great label space with which to communicate I guess what we were doing down to then the name which needed to kind of serve two purposes one it could literally explain that we take things from seed to lip with the botanicals that we use and then secondly I guess I'm more below the surface was the fact that when my family and lots of other families started farming you would do everything by hand and you would sow seed by hand from a basket called a seed lip and so that coupled with my ancestors initials hidden in the label all these bits of detail were so massively important to me not that anybody else was going to see them necessarily know about them but i do think if you are creating your own product it's got to be personal and you can put yourself into it without that having to be front and center i'm really proud of what we did um and i'm really proud that I could build in my family's kind of heritage without that being the number one reason why I think you should drink seed lip yeah there's something magical you've got a seed lip here haven't you I do yeah should we have a look at yeah let's go have a look so I found these we've only got two but I found this in an antique shop really heavy they were called a seed lip because when you literally look it's the shape of a lip yeah and it would carry your seed and so yeah you would string this over and then you'd literally what they call broadcast your seeds yeah pretty magical I first came across them actually in the Museum of English Royal Life in Reading yeah they I have about 12 of these.

11:46And yeah, it just, it felt like a really good fit name-wise, I guess, meaning and substance for me. Yeah, it's the beautiful thing about this brand. And I think for anyone watching, like one of the biggest lessons I'm already taking away from you is the storytelling and the purity of the original vision. You know, this is something that you're playing around with. Yep. um distilling experimenting at home then we've got your family history we've got like you actually researching going looking into it actually getting a physical seed lip yes um and all of that stuff it just feels like beautiful kind of product creation i think i think we have this idea that in order to have sort of scalable businesses um you can't it can't be personal yeah and you can't have all this depth and substance and like why have you hidden what who cares about hiding initials in the design but actually to me the the beauty of a great business is that it can and founder of lead businesses is that they are personal and there is a founder involved and so whilst that's not the most important thing necessarily for the consumer and in Seedlip's case this was about what to drink when you're not drinking alcohol that was why someone was going to buy it and why someone might be interested not because Ben's family were farmers and he's hidden the initials in here but to have that level of depth a gave us loads of different stories we could tell and b when you're talking to bartenders who know about drinks this is an expectation yeah there will be substance they can tell the story they can and so for example even the six botanicals we used for the first seed lip spice were deliberately focused around how could i simply tell my mom about it and tell a consumer really simply that there's loads of grapefruit and lemon and allspice but I could also tell a bartender about cascarilla bark that we used to source from a family of maize farms in the Bahamas and they they would go well I've never heard of cascarilla bark before wow that's really interesting and so but the consumer wouldn't want to know about that no so it's building having layers and having substance ultimately gives you choice It gives you choice per channel, per media channel, and within your marketing mix of what stories you bring alive, when, how, and to who.

14:32I've got to tell you this story about this design. We were launching Seedlip in China, and I'd never been to Shanghai. I was really excited to go. The cocktail scene there is brilliant. We'd just come off doing these events in Macau and Hong Kong. arrived in Shanghai and someone was going to pick me up there was a driver that was going to pick me up so get through with my bags see my name on a board walk up to the guy great let's go find your taxi and he asked me to sit in the front and I had not been Shanghai before I didn't know if this was part of the custom or what you usually do so I got in the front and he started taking his clothes off what the hell and i was kind of like sorry what i didn't know actually if he spoke in i was sorry i don't know what's going on anyway he had the seedlit fox tattooed on his arm oh my god he was not a taxi driver he was a bartender in shanghai wow i'd heard we were coming and launching crazy and wanted to surprise me so yeah definitely brilliant sense humor but that yeah that kind of level of I guess effort that you put into design packaging that can yeah mean somebody wants to permanently put that on their arm yeah I think it's really important yeah you've created the product the brand we're now taking it to market yeah so I would put bottles in this little kind of carry case and and then I would go round some of the best bars best restaurants and I'd turn up and I'd start talking to people the the key the number one key one was I was offered 15 minutes with the Selfridges buyer yeah Dawn told me I don't like anything without alcohol in but I'll give you 15 minutes.

16:38And so I walked in with this carry case. I didn't even have the beautiful bottle. I had a bottle of liquid and literally with my laptop open with some pictures, sat down, tasted her on a seed lip and tonic. And she immediately wanted it, immediately invited other people in to try it and wanted the exclusive. And so I walked out. I can remember it really clearly. I walked out of Selfridges, I walked across the road onto Duke Street, there was a coffee shop there. I sat down to just take a moment and my inbox went boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Dawn had introduced me to five of the best bartenders in London.

17:22Wow. And said, I've just tried this, you've got to meet Ben. Wow. So I then had five more meetings with the Savoy and all these top places. and I walked into the Savoy to meet Eric who was the head bartender and he said I've already heard about you I heard about you last week in Greece and I was like well how this industry is really small and word had started to get around and that snowball just I guess I just rolled with and just kept tipping up turning up and yeah wanting to learn and see what people thought of the liquids this was probably six months before launch we obviously went in selfridges we kept selling out we got into all these amazing accounts and i hated it yeah let's talk about that let's talk about the growth quick one if you're enjoying this episode and getting lots of value i'd love it if you subscribe to the channel it means the world to me and helps us make bigger and better episodes every time for you and now let's get back into the episode let's just touch on the importance of selfridges because how you think about brand building is around association right and so you wanted to be able to sell this without having to tell people how good you thought the product was yeah talk to me about your approach there and kind of what you were aiming for and how can other people learn from that so I'd had such mixed feedback before launch people told me I was either a genius or this was the most ridiculous idea they'd ever heard it would never sell a bottle and there was no point in me doing it and so I was constantly in this sort of push-pull confusion of is this any good is this needed I don't know sometimes I thought it was a dreadful idea sometimes I thought it was a game-changing idea but when it came to then getting standing there in Selfridges and if you're launching a product or you've got a product there is absolutely nothing better than standing in front of the public and seeing what they think and so I stood there every day for three weeks and I met lots of different people and we sold lots of bottles but I also made a lot of people angry so I had this one guy that came up to me with already what's this yeah already like I'm on slightly on the back foot and I was learning how to talk about Seedlip to the public.

20:07I was learning what messages worked, what didn't. So I explained that this was a distilled non-alcoholic spirit. Would he like to try Seedlip and tonic? And he just looked at me with absolute disgust. What is the point of this? Can I swear? Yeah. Who the fuck has created this? Why the fuck would you work for a company that makes this? What is the point? Why would you do this and I'm there kind of just going uh well it's my company um wow and I was I was really struck by the power that an inanimate object could have I was really struck by how ingrained alcohol is in our culture that means that something that doesn't have alcohol in could be so threatening to somebody to elicit such a strong reaction you know and i i i do i and that was in selfridges that's in a nice place with full context um but i definitely held on to the worst bits of feedback that i've had and the guy who said on twitter seed lip tastes like witch's piss will be forever imprinted in my memory because it kept my feet on the floor and i think when you're trying to build a brand and a product that's premium and that is different or new you know we spent a lot of time taking our associations and the company we kept and our customers really really seriously so being featured in the right publications being at the right events being endorsed by the right people being in the right bars being in the right restaurants being in the right retailers which ultimately meant we never had to say that we thought seedlip was brilliant because we were relying on the fact that if you go to the fat duck you walk in that's Heston Blooming Falls restaurant right?

22:15Heston Blooming Falls restaurant one of the early stockists that's two Michelin stars? that's three Michelin stars three Michelin star or Tom Kerridge's Hanlon Flowers two Michelin stars two of our first accounts you are walking in there expecting to be absolutely entertained delighted and that everything is going to be absolutely first class so therefore if you're presented something new in a situation where you're in one of these amazing venues by just automatically you're going to be thinking that this is going to be good otherwise they're not going to serve anything rubbish and so yeah we wanted to be judged by the company we keep it's a model that i'm still using today with our new brands uh it works and there's this idea of halo and habit so we started at the top because guess what the section of bars restaurants retailers who are not three michelin style restaurants look to the three michelin style restaurants for what's good and what's what's coming up clever and all the way down so that the average kind of pub group is looking to the nice cocktail bar group the nice cocktail bar group is looking to the best bar in the world And so you have this trickle-down effect that I can tell you hand on heart works.

23:43And we then replicated that model in 35 countries around the world. Which meant, actually, only a thousand people mattered. Only a few hundred accounts initially mattered because the best bar in the city, the best restaurant, the best hotel, and the best retailer, you get into those, you get the keys to the city. Incredible framework. That is something that someone can take and replicate in any niche, any industry, isn't it? Across any category, it doesn't matter food and drink. I think you're starting from influence. You're starting from basically beg, borrow, and stealing credibility. And obviously if you've got a product that is good enough and that is enjoyed and liked, then adopting that strategy and staying really focused on it instead of some of the received wisdom that says, oh no, no, you've got to go narrow and really deep.

24:43So stay in the UK for five years before you think about export. we actually we were first the category was just starting and the best bars restaurants hotels in the world they all talk to each other we can do that via social now we can all see what everyone else is up to and so no i don't want the best bar in hong kong to wait five years they're already they already want it i heard from 100 countries in 90 days wow insane so this you get a good thing that can travel and yeah with how connected we all are now even though it's a physical product the word can travel incredible where does the growth trajectory take place are you sat at your desk here uh i spent 600 days out of the uk in three years i was doing a lot of traveling and that was pretty brutal yeah because you're the basically you're the fastest growing company in this segment ever right quicker than fever tree innocent we were yeah we were growing faster in our first three years we were growing faster than Brewdog, Fevertree, Innocent, Hendrix.

26:04It was fast and it was relentless and that meant, yeah, I was on a plane a lot and it was pretty stressful. Yeah. It's super interesting though. You just said that that six months was super intense and you basically hated it, right? Yeah. I was on my own, number one. And that's quite lonely and difficult. And secondly, I had a plan. I had a really amazing plan. And ultimately, my plan was that my first thousand bottles were going to sell in six months. So that meant, God, I spent two years creating this. Now it's launched. Let me learn what the hell a business is. Let me learn what a drinks business does.

26:57Let me just feel my way through this. The market, I guess, said, no, sorry. The thousand bottles that you've made are sold out in three weeks. The next thousand bottles are sold out in two and a half days. The third thousand bottles are sold out in 30 minutes online. People were queuing outside Selfridges at like eight o 'clock in the morning to come and try and get their hands on it. It's incredible. And I was not prepared for that, number one, because that the plan went out the window. And ultimately, I had to seven to 10 times scale production within the first three months. Wow. Which was kind of wild and find investment and find employees and an office and scale everything really fast.

27:42Secondly, it hadn't quite dawned on me what this founder thing is. So I wanted to be behind the scenes. I wanted to concentrate on the product, concentrate on loving nature and testing stuff. But actually, rather naively realized, oh, well, this is my company and I've put all of me into it. And therefore, people are maybe interested to talk to me about that. And I have to, who else is going to talk about it? so there's suddenly this whole you know I was invited to Buckingham Palace I'm just like what am I like what is going on here I don't like this what's the lowest moment in all that are you just kind of every day being pulled pillar to post and you're kind of burnt out knackered tired and yet on the face of it you're having all this success yeah it's a strange like thing to deal with psychologically it was it was I found it really difficult and I did genuinely want to close the business every week I did want to stop and that gradually moved from a day a week to a day a month and that was good you know that was a good sign to me that I and ultimately thinking that you want to stop thinking that you want to give up and thinking that you want to close the business are very different from taking the action to do that and so I'm not my thoughts and I didn't act on my thoughts I kept going yeah and I didn't close the business yeah

29:28see I guess this where they say the magic happens this is the lab this is kind of in some ways uh our playground yeah uh in some ways this is where yeah we are testing and trialing i mean hundreds of different varieties of wood and cereal yeah it's a place of of experimentation and and also production yeah a lot of kind of entrepreneurs and marketers out there will say one of the ways to build a great business and sell it like you did and we'll get into the details of the sale later and and and how much you sold it for um is be first in a market or jump on a trend it's very easy to say that it's very hard to time it yeah and you were the first non-alcoholic spirits brand yep and today there's got to be thousands of those right there are i I mean, you've got nothing to drink in 2015.

30:33Bex Blue had launched. Yeah. And then there were juices and soft drinks and sparkling water. You've now got a category that's gonna hit 30 billion probably this year, is global. And you've got well over a thousand new brands in it, which is wild and still only about 2 % of alcohol. So you think about the headroom there is enormous and that actually this category is just getting started. How should people think about parallel movements and entering a new market or trying to create a new market and then breaking it? What are your thoughts there? I've heard you talk about technologies coming 100 years ago or products coming 100 years ago, then having a moment and now they're really having a moment.

31:23Yeah, so the free from idea is pretty interesting. And when you apply that, when you look at that, as I've done, across cars, tobacco, dairy, meat, alcohol, it's beautiful. It was a beautiful moment when it all joined up. Basically, to give you the headlines, over 100 years ago, we had the first electric car. we had the first electric cigarette we had the first alcohol-free beer we had the first dairy free milk we had the first meat-free sausage over a hundred years ago then what happened is obviously they didn't get any traction so then what happened about the 70s we started to get corn vegetarian kind of soy based meat product we got things like Alpro we had the Prius launch which wasn't electric but was kind of dual fuel was sort of starting to take into that sustainability of energy fuels being used we had those electric cigarettes that looked like cigarettes before then we had vapes etc of where we are now and so what and we have bex blue launch which is an alcohol-free beer and so i i would call those kind of the incumbents so they are the bigger slower heavier been around for ages maybe not the best quality and then you fast forward and suddenly you've got what i would call the insurgents so you've got someone like athletic brewing biggest new non-alcoholic beer brand in the world they've raised 250 million dollars and yeah i absolutely killed it they launched after seedlet um you've got tesla uh you've got oatly's and you've got all these kind of amazing fast growing modern relevant meaningful brands and i think that's really interesting when you are thinking about an idea for a product or you're thinking about a category that might be maybe a bit under leveraged maybe dusty maybe in need of a bit of a refresh i just because i love history and i also think when you're standing up and telling the story of why your product makes sense being able to give some of the lineage of what's happened before that might help predict some of the future I think it's pretty interesting and I guess just the fact that nothing's actually new you know that we have I don't believe in originality I do believe that everything is a combination of everything else yeah and so I do believe that the way you get great ideas is by exposing yourself to lots of different interesting things yeah and how do you think about that or what was that like because if you're first do you feel stupid because you're having to raise awareness spend most of your time educating the buyers and the public on why there's a need for this product versus now if you enter the market there's the prop the education has probably already been been done what's that like is do you think there's a good time to time it is it best to be first is it best to enter late um and how would you have kind of conviction that there is a need for this and it's the right time for it and I'm on the right track or is there a degree of luck as well maybe there's definitely a degree of luck I think to make it to give you a really good example early days of seed lip I could spend an hour with a buyer or a bartender and most of that hour and these could be like you know the best buyers the best bartenders most of that hour would actually be focused not on seed lip most of that hour would be educating about the need educating about the fact that people are moderating their alcohol intake etc and then it would get to talking about seed lip now i walk into a meeting with silver with our new brand and i don't need to do any of that education and so when you are first unfortunately or fortunately you are having to do every single job of the category so you're having to establish the pricing of the category and why that price makes sense you're having to establish the language of the category and how that makes sense to customers or consumers you're having to do all of these jobs whereas now when you've got a category that's got loads of non-alcoholic beer wine spirits you've got loads and non-alcoholic cocktails in bars and hotels you can focus more on your positioning your brand your liquid how that might be relevant and so i think if you are thinking about disrupting a category or creating a new category two things are really important number one there must be familiarity so for example seed lips in a glass bottle you make a seed lip and tonic in the same way you'd make a gin and tonic so the behavior is the same it's called a non-alcoholic spirit there's there's a sense of newness but a sense of familiarity there that's really important don't throw everything out don't create something that's too weird the freedom bit meant we didn't have to try and taste like gin we didn't add juniper for example as a botanical we didn't have to do things in the way that alcohol did them so one of Seedlip's best performing types of customers in the first 18 months was garden centers not an obvious choice but we're a nature company we were focused on people who love nature we were focused on I guess amplifying the truth about our product which was these gorgeous botanicals and so we thought actually the garden centers where people are driving always we thought we'd get a great audience there and we did and we did lots of sampling in garden centers we then went on to design two gold medal winning gardens for Chelsea Flower Show which were by far and away the two best activations we ever did at Seedlip in terms of return on investment so yeah I kind of I think you've got to balance this freedom and for me you must balance this aspect of freedom and familiarity if you are creating something new don't throw it all out and do something totally radical you've got to find these safety points I would call them these hooks of reference where someone goes ah I kind of I sort of know what to do with that I sort of know when I might use that rather than I've got absolutely no idea you're totally throwing everything out I don't know what I'm doing and therefore I'm not buying I'm not I'm not engaging so yeah it's a really delicate balance we're doing the same with silver and aged non-alcoholic spirits we're not trying to tastes like a whiskey but we are in that occasion you do sip it neat it has grain and wood and you've got that those codes but we're also doing something completely new with completely different flavor profiles and disrupting maturation processes and everything else so yeah getting that balance of freedom and familiarity when you are disrupting a category i think is really important yeah and i think probably one of the big advantages in being acquired by diageo and probably one of the things that attracted them is that you were first and you did smash it you created an amazing product you had this crazy growth um should we go to the woods yeah your woods yeah oak tree and talk about this a little let's go let's go how do you go from just you to more people and think about hiring like there was one there was one requirement wasn't there for the team yeah i i'm a massive fan of a man called david hyatt uh he was founder of howie's jeans and then set up hyatt denim and he basically said his company was an ideas company that made jeans and i loved that shift of it not just being about the product and being about something a bit bigger or a bit more yeah and so rather grandiosely we always called seed lip a nature company that made drinks yeah and you know silver is a tree company that makes drinks we kind of it elevated what we were doing and so naturally when it came to attracting talent and finding and building a team we were looking for people who regardless i didn't care whether they drank alcohol or not In fact, most of our team did drink alcohol.

40:54This was far more about do you love nature? Yeah. And if nature's important to you, and yeah, our interview questions for people would, I didn't care about tell me when you did X, Y, and Z at your previous job or your CV. I cared what tree you liked, and I cared what your favourite animal was. that was a opportunity to learn way more about somebody based on the psychology around what animal they chose and why or what plant they would be versus kind of that sort of corporate rudimentary set of tell me about an experience or a time when you did in your job yeah that's really really powerful isn't it you always make me think of Patagonia there as well like yeah kind of like those brands where the identity and i think it just transcends everything they do as well they're what they're interested in and their beliefs and um so did you have success did was that successful or was that were there disasters along the way because i love nature but i'm totally incompetent do you know what for the most part by being a nature company and attracting people that love nature meant for example a we had a head of nature and our head of nature used run Chelsea Flower Show.

42:12Wow. He had no idea about the drinks industry. Our marketing executive Liam had been doing a PhD on cacao. Wow. And so we just opened the field in terms of getting really rich talent of basically having lots of naive people who weren't coming with lots of drinks industry baggage who could take risks and try things and learn and not be blinkered. And so if anybody's listening or watching and thinking about hiring and how you build a great high performing team I do think being able to be really clear on what kind of company are we what kind of talent do we want to attract because guess what people in the world do not spend their time walking around thinking about drinks they don't people don't go out to drink drinks brands they go out to have a good time yeah and so tapping into people's values and identity beyond the product that's more about purpose that's more about yeah values and identity definitely served us really well definitely meant we could get really really good talent really great team and then you flow that through and so we flowed being a nature company all the way through to whether it be doing litter picks as a team something a little bit pithy to closing the business every august for a week closing down and paying people to go on holiday wow and the only the only requirement was that that time was spent in nature that's incredible i did it though not because i thought it was some genius kind of company culture thing i did it because I needed a break.

44:04And I needed a break when everybody took a break. So you know you get that Christmas period where everyone's off and it kind of feels like everybody can switch off. Well I wanted that feeling, but then the second feeling of when everybody comes back together. Because October, November, December is the busiest time in drinks. And so by everybody going away for a week at the same time in August, meant everybody came back absolutely fired up for the autumn and the winter. It worked really well. That's incredible. How did you incentivize your team? So I gave 20 % of the company to the team. So everybody had options in the business.

44:50And you had options whether you joined right at the beginning or just before we exited. and one thing was really really important to me it didn't matter how senior you were the people that got the most were the people that joined the earliest and that I've not seen people do it that way before because typically you want to attract some big talent or a senior person you want to give them the biggest options actually no I kind of totally disagree with that it was based on time because the earlier you join the bigger risk you're taking mmm you're joining nearer the end and you're a big senior person well lots has been established lots been set up you're coming in at a different stage of the business those early employees and I'm doing a similar principle now with my new team where the people in at the beginning are the people who get the most well they're the people who are gonna do it the longest they're the people who are taking the biggest risk they're the people that needs need to be rewarded the most incredible and i presume you get a much better output from people and the commitment when they've got a piece of the pie i think so i think it's it's creating a shared alignment and the other thing was this was very transparent everybody knew that there were options for everybody not to the level of everybody knows what everybody might get but definitely it was part of my kind of i guess narrative back to the business of we're all on the same pathway here we're all aligned we all want this to be a success because we all get to benefit if it is cool what have we got here our three berkshire gilts so three sisters.

46:36Yeah. Yeah, one of the most endangered species in the UK. They're an English breed. Yeah. Don't touch the fence. It's electric. It is electric. But yeah, these three will have piggies next summer. Wow. What do you call this place? An estate? A farm? I don't really know. I kind of, maybe an estate, it's sort of part, I mean it originally was an estate which which sounds very grand and formal. It's only, it's 25 acres. It's, I mean, we've got livestock here. We've got the forest, we've got a river. Yeah, it's, I don't know. I don't really know how I talk about it. I guess it's sort of homework, larder.

47:22How do you feel about it? I presume this came after the sale? Yeah, so we exited Seedlip, well the majority of seedlet was sold for summer of 2019 and three three really important things to say on it nothing to do with actually selling it number one so leading up to the sale one of my shareholders died oh my god and they were a family friend they were a business partner in my father's for 40 years and that when you it is a dreadful yeah um and b creates actually quite a few legal complications yeah so that that wasn't great second thing that happened was we don't know how but a sample of seed lip or a sample of seed lips liquid somewhere had been tested for alcohol content oh wow and they'd found it was like 10 % ABV wow we don't believe it was sealant sleep anyway but when you you're talking when you're in an acquisition process yeah it's not great that's the kind of thing that can send your arm bells running yeah anyway that was that was all all fine the third thing was uh my wife was eight and a half months pregnant um and so we did the deal with Diageo on the 7th of August 2019 nine days later my daughter River was born uh yeah it was um oh it was a big it was a big moment for so many different reasons Yeah, incredible.

49:09But pretty stressful. Yeah, a crazy period. How do you come to that decision to sell? Like, what's the... So in our case, we'd take an investment through Diageo's accelerator called Distill Ventures. So in the drinks industry, a few of these sort of accelerator incubator type outfits were setting up. And basically how it worked was Diageo funded the accelerator that funded the startups. and there were pre-agreed volume triggers or value triggers and exits we seed lip was twice as fast as the industry norm and twice as big well so that was amazing but we already we had a goal we had a target for exit which my team all knew which made us very aligned uh very focused which was great and so we hit our trigger and that triggered the acquisition process with Diageo right so it's very open um so that's that's because they've taken a small stake and then as part of that stake it's agreed that when you hit these volumes we'll talk about acquiring you Exactly.

50:29I guess the key difference was most companies get acquired if they're lucky in seven to ten years, maybe even longer. Yeah. Yours was like three years. Yeah, we were three and a half. And so what's that process like deciding to sell your company? So my thinking, and I did think about it a lot. Did you have a choice, by the way? Or it's like actually because of that pre-agreement, we've got to sell this. I did have a choice, but I also had thought about it so much that I didn't have a choice. My thinking was this. I want to change the way the world drinks. I'm really good at the beginning. I'm really good at starting stuff.

51:14I'm not good at scaling stuff. Therefore, I need a partner. And I need somebody who knows about making things big, about global scale. Diageo, perfect partner. world's biggest premium spirits company business in 170 countries you know like footsie four proper brand builders guinness johnny walker like iconic stuff yeah and so i i guess the deal i did with myself was i've got to do my bit and then diadjo are going to do their bit and so So the lesson really from all of that is, A, know what you're good at. B, forget any of this selling out stuff that you kind of might hear or that kind of narrative.

52:09And ultimately be really, really clear on who the right strategic partner could be in the future that's going to deliver, ironically, the outcome that you want. beyond just selling a business and so changing the way the world drinks I was really clear I couldn't do on my own and thought the best fit would be an alcohol company who knew about cocktails knew about bars had all the distribution and so for the first three and a half years in that relationship with Diageo they provided the capital and let us get on with it and that was amazing because we got to go and make the mistakes and learn and prove and build the business and ultimately we kept coming back with really great results so they kept saying keep going.

53:02Yeah and the question on everyone's lips is how much did you sell for? Cannot tell you but I'm assuming it was a lot of money, millions of pounds. It was a life changing amount of money. And it was an amount of money that meant obviously giving 20 % to my team. Someone bought an engagement ring. Someone put a deposit down for a house, like really meaningful stuff. And lots of those people have gone on to start their own business, which is what I wanted. lots of those people have gone on to join other startups and fast-growing businesses in what I would call modern or alternative industries yeah and ultimately I'm in a position where wow it's really windy I'm in a position where I've been able to build a distillery go back to the beginning and yeah set up new brands This is an oak tree, an English oak tree, and it's probably been here for five to six hundred years.

54:13You can see here this char, it was hit by lightning. Oak trees of this size will be home to over 2 ,300 different species. Wow. And an oak tree of this size can probably produce enough oxygen for a hundred people for a year. Wow. It's pretty cool. The badgers were making their burrows underneath it. We've got woodpeckers who've kind of born into it and made nests. Yeah, brilliant, wonderful, iconic symbol of, I don't know, Englishness and, yeah, forest and trees.

54:57Firstly, we share up to 50 % of our DNA with trees. Yeah. Trees do so many things that humans do that we don't even realize. They communicate, they heal, they breathe, they reproduce. They are pretty magical kind of things. And there's 73 ,000 tree species on the planet. Wow. To put that in context, that's nearly twice as many as the number of edible plants there are. Hmm. And I know and I'm learning that they're full of flavor and nobody has explored that. Yeah, because that's your new products. They lean heavily into trees and what trees produce. Yeah, it's all about taking the amazing flavour from trees to make liquids that you can sip.

55:42Yeah, so let's go back to your new labs to have a look at those products because they're super innovative and I think they're going to blow people's minds. Yep. But maybe should we stop by the river on the way and just talk about your experience with ADHD and autism? three years ago so 2022 uh when i went for an autism assessment yeah i had no idea what that meant i'd never heard the word neurodiversity before i'd always i guess thought my brain's a bit different yeah and but i didn't know why and i didn't know really what that meant and i had such limited beliefs and understanding about ADHD, autism, dyslexia, Tourette's.

56:30I didn't know it was 20 % of the world. I didn't know it was 1.8 billion people. Crazy. As of today's statistics and I guess I also didn't know that 94 % of autistic kids are bullied at school. Wow. And that 85 % of children diagnosed dyslexic are are really ashamed of it. Wow. Or the suicide rates, the divorce rates, the prison rates, the unemployment rates. I had no idea that actually there were such dreadful statistics. But I also had no idea that so many of my heroes were neurodivergent. Yeah, who was neurodivergent? I mean, well, we can't say for sure. people like Isaac Newton and Einstein, but Agatha Christie, Hans Christian Andersen, Steven Spielberg, Muhammad Ali, Marilyn Monroe, Steve Jobs.

57:32I mean, literally, we wouldn't have the airplane, the light bulb, electricity, whether you like it or not, the screens that we use, films like Jaws you know The Ugly Duckling as a book we wouldn't have Mickey Mouse I mean we wouldn't have any of this without people who thought differently and so I wanted to kind of close the gap and tell the truth I guess to catch society up in its understanding that there are loads of people with different brains in fact every single person on the planet has a different brain no two brains are the same some just diverge a bit more away from what we call quote unquote the norm so i started the charity the hidden 20 january 2024 and again i looked back to history to find the model so i looked at all of the amazing social change campaigns black lives matter the poppy uh all stuff that's been done on the paralympics jamie's school dinners uh climate change me too pride i looked at all of those and tried to decode how they've basically been able to work and make change and it's actually really really simple if you find a cause or something to believe in that has a large population of people number one brilliant i.e you've got reach in terms of you've got a big audience great if there can be a real message and meaning from that amazing if you use media then you can make it travel and if you have brilliant spokespeople which means a mixture of celebrities and experts then you can give voice to that message for that audience and make change and so that was the theory we set up uh so we wanted to create a neurodiversity charity that was media led so started a podcast and started inviting some guests on had no idea whether people were going to listen had no idea what we were doing i'd never created a digital product before and i know i said to you before when we've spoken my god it's it's so liberating when you've got something that's not physical yeah it can go anywhere yeah and it can go anywhere instantly fast forward hidden 20 percent listened to in 120 countries uh community of 175 000 people winner of best interview at the podcast awards last year reaching two three million people a week with our content and you've got these incredible people like heston bloomingford on there talking about what it's his experience has been yeah the the mixture of guests of having uh you know famous people kit harrington and carrie grant and heston blumenthal talking about their brains some of the world's leading experts in autism or adhd or dyslexia and then just people with fascinating stories the guy kenton cool who's client you know he's the world's leading climber of Mount Everest 20 times or whatever.

1:00:58So pulling out some of these amazing stories of people's lived experience, as well as busting the myths, breaking down the stereotypes, and telling the truth that it's not all bad. It's not all good either, but there are amazing skills and assets and contributions that can come from creating environments in which people with different brains can thrive. yeah let's talk about that for you then because you're you were diagnosed um autistic and adhd correct what does that make you really good at and how has that helped you on this journey so i'm uh the things that i guess i'm good at are my senses are very very acute right so i've got Yes, so interesting.

1:01:50So I've got really good hearing. Yeah. I've got really good taste and smell. Handy. Which is really handy as I've learnt. I also, and I haven't kind of gone for a proper assessment for this, but there's a high proportion of autistics that are synesthetes. So synesthesia is where your senses get a bit confused. So for example, I see taste and flavor as color. Yeah. My dad sees every single day of the week and year as a different color. So it's where some of these, Jo Malone, for example, is a synesthete, which has obviously really helped her with creating amazing perfumes. So that's, and that's, you know, recent kind of understanding, but that's good.