Ola Sol

0:00Miles Beckett:Welcome to the Emerging Brands Podcast with Kelly Bennett. This is the podcast to discover stories behind your new favorite CPG brands. Each episode brings you behind the scenes of the brand and founder story, learn what sets them apart in the marketplace, and their strategy going to market. We talk about plans for growth, practical advice for an emerging brand founder, and where to shop products that are making waves in food, beverage, wellness, beauty, and beyond. You'll also hear from industry experts, brand builders, investors, and operators you should absolutely have on your radar if you're building a CPG brand today.

0:44Miles Beckett:I'm your host, Kelly Bennett, a Brooklyn-based brand strategist with a front row seat of what makes an emerging CPG brand stand out. Whether you're building a brand of your own or love supporting what's next, you're in the right place. This podcast is brought to you by Hummingbirds. Hummingbirds is the go-to platform built for creator-powered retail activations. They're connecting everyday creators with CPG brands to generate shelf-level awareness, drive in-store momentum, and generate authentic content in markets that matter the most. Go to hummingbirds.com for all the details and let them know I sent you.

1:29Miles Beckett:Now, let's dive into the new episode. Hi, everyone. Welcome back to a new episode of Emerging Brands Podcast with Kelly Bennett. Today, I'm speaking to Alexis B. Chen. She is the co-founder and CEO of Ola Soul, And we are going to talk about a really cool space that I'm personally interested. It's a bit of a lower alcohol level in cocktails, but also being mindful of waste. It's a space that I'm just personally love experimenting and trying new products. So Alexis, I'm so happy to have you on the podcast.

2:09Alexis Beechen:Pleasure to be here. I'm so excited to have this conversation.

2:12Miles Beckett:Awesome. So to kick things off, I would love to first talk about what is your product? Because when I first heard about it, I had never heard of agave wine in this way. And I would love if you could just like take us through what exactly the product is first.

2:32Alexis Beechen:Sure. So Olasol is an agave wine. And agave wine, we like to say, is sort of like the little sister to Blanco tequila. And what we mean by that is that it's made out of the same plant, Blue Weber Agave. Not all agave wines source their agave from Jalisco, which is where tequila is made, but we do. And we cultivate Blue Weber when it's about five to six years old. So exactly when the best tequilas in the world are harvesting and cooking down their agave. The process to make agave wine is actually very similar to the process of making Blanco tequila. All tequila is actually fermented before it's distilled.

3:12Alexis Beechen:So the cooking process, the pressing, the fermentation, all the same as tequila. And then at that point, there's a fork in the road. Tequila will then go on to be distilled. And instead, what agave wine does is we filter and then fortify with a high proof, neutral agave spirit, which is pretty close to tequila. It's a little bit higher at ABV. and in that process that's where agave wines are a bit different in terms of how well you filter the quality of the filter the quality of the spirit that you're adding to it right and so

3:48Steve Seigel:just like there's different qualities of port and vermouths and other fortified wines right there are other you know versions and other qualities of agave wine historically agave wine has been sort of like an industry secret. You know, it's on the bottom shelf. It's really been competing against price. There hasn't been really any brand that has approached it from a premium perspective.

4:14Alexis Beechen:And so that's what we are trying to do is kind of take agave wine out of the shadows and champion it for all of the benefits that it has. Namely, that it is, you know, when you smell it, it smells like tequila. When you drink it, those first initial notes, you feel like you're sipping a Blanco tequila. The benefits outside of that are there is really no burn. It is a much smoother yeast at the end, at the finish. It beats my interest. Exactly. And then because we're not distilling it, the ABV is actually much lower. So most tequila ABV percentage is about 40%. We are only at 24%. And then from a caloric standpoint, from a sugar calorie standpoint, most tequila is about 60 calories an ounce.

5:02Alexis Beechen:And we come in at 29. So it's this really kind of exciting opportunity to drink something if you love tequila, or agave spirits, but you maybe just don't want to have as strong of a drink. Agave wine is a really great option. But there really hasn't been a premium brand out there that's putting as much

5:22Steve Seigel:thought and effort into the production and the brand and before Ollissel.

5:28Miles Beckett:Very cool. So how did you personally land on Agave Wine? I know that you've worked in the marketing leadership of alcohol brands and you also was a founder of a previous canned wine brand. I would love to hear, I know this could probably be its own episode of the journey to your future. chapter now, but I would love to hear like the overview of how you landed on agave wine.

6:03Alexis Beechen:Yeah, I can't take credit for it, truthfully. So as you mentioned, you know, my career started in advertising, I got a once in a lifetime opportunity to be a part of the Dos Equis Most Interesting man campaign, that really opened my eyes to what is going on behind the scenes in alcohol. And then I got inspired to start my own canned wine brand that was sold in 2021. And I frankly just needed to take a break. This is a hard industry. CPG is hard and alcohol is very competitive. So I just couldn't do it all by myself. And so I was exploring a few other things and started a family. And I got a cold email from my freshman year roommate saying a good friend of mine from high school has this crazy idea and wants to talk to someone who has launched alcohol brands.

6:56Alexis Beechen:And those guys ended up being my two co-founders, Steve and Miles. They are incredibly successful tech entrepreneurs in their own right. And Steve was really the one who stumbled upon agave wine when he was looking for a low ABV alternative to tequila. um you know he has two kids we're both we're all circling 40 and we just wanted to find something that we felt excited about drinking but knowing like hey you're not you're not putting as much alcohol um in each drink and you'll be you'll feel better the next day and then there's also the opportunity of like hey I didn't have two drinks tonight instead of one and and know that

7:33Miles Beckett:I'm kind of netting out of the same place okay there's so much that you just touched on that I need to go back to what how was it exiting your first company I mean I'm sure that you needed a break which again could be its own episode but I would love to hear what that experience was like that you were like still open to doing it another round uh could you give us a little bit more of an inside look of that aspect?

8:04Alexis Beechen:Sure. Yeah. So I started the drop in 20, I guess, right out of business school, 2015. And before I knew it, we had signed on with Southern Glazers in 26 states. We were in Whole Foods, Total Wine, Fenway Park. I mean, it's just from a top line perspective, it was like, this couldn't be going better. And the reality was I was doing it all by myself. I was a CFO, the CMO, chief fundraiser. And unfortunately, things were slipping through the cracks. We had some product issues, you know, and at the same time, in an industry, you know, the alcohol industry has been flat pre-pandemic. And so all of the big guys were looking for areas of growth.

8:48Alexis Beechen:And then they initially I was getting lapped out of the offices when I was like, no, I want to do a canned wine and I want to do dry rosé. And then, you know, before you know it, everyone realized that was the future of this industry. So I got a cold LinkedIn DM asking if I'd be open to, you know, selling the brand. And it was the right thing for me to do. And so it was sold to an online retailer who unfortunately I think was a victim of the pandemic and shut down. But it was an ending. It wasn't necessarily the ending that I wanted. But the nice thing is I'm getting another go at it and bringing a lot of hard-learned lessons with me and doing things.

9:34Alexis Beechen:Some things the same and some things differently this time.

9:36Miles Beckett:That's what I was going to ask next of, I could resonate with that in the sense of I was a partner of a restaurant and we built it from the ground up and bootstrapped and we had multiple locations and learned a ton and got in great press. But then I realized I need to change this. I need to find a different path. And that's how I got into CPG from restaurant into CPG. And I feel like you have that story at one point of this is my path and this is what I'm going to do and I'm going to keep exploring it. So when you have that shift, it is hard. You do need time to recover and to like get your bearings and saying, okay, what's my new chapter?

10:22Miles Beckett:So I would love to hear what were some of the things that you took from that previous brand into Ola Soul today? in terms of what we're doing the same or what we're doing or maybe just even your own perspective of strategy mindset just of things like okay these were really good tried and trues and I'm

10:46Steve Seigel:gonna bring this into the next chapter yeah um so I think one thing that I we did well and you know there's not it's so interesting some things like I couldn't do again if I wanted to so for example you know when we launched the brand and this was 2015 like instagram was still a great way of scaling and so we launched our an instagram channel that was just about like the lifestyle that we wanted to be a part of the you know our brand vision our brand world and we launched that

11:14Alexis Beechen:a year ahead of time as we were going through the process of creating the product and then we had an audience to launch to when we were like surprise you can actually now buy this brand you can buy this world. And you can't do that today, at least not on Instagram. You know, it's just, it's too hard to get the natural scale. So that's sadly something I can't repeat.

11:32Steve Seigel:But I think one thing that I did for the drop, which we absolutely did this time was finding, so, you know, in CPG,

11:41Alexis Beechen:you have two customers, you have the stores, the restaurants that you're selling into, and then you have the end user. And that's a little bit different than D2C, right?

11:48Steve Seigel:And so you have to constantly be thinking about both of those groups at the same time. And so, you know, early in on, you know, both brands, it was really important to me to get out there and find champions.

12:02Alexis Beechen:You know, the product doesn't have to be perfect. You don't need final packaging, but just starting to get feedback on, you know, what do you think about this?

12:09Steve Seigel:What do you think the pricing should be? What do you think about this packaging? You know, if you're, if you're stuck between two do variations of a product, getting feedback. And obviously, that's super important because, you know, you are one person with one opinion, you want to be doing kind of informal focus group testing. But at the same time, you know, you want to be bringing people along on your journey. And you want to have advocates. And so that when you have that first palette of product, you know where you're going with it, right? It's not the first time people have heard about you.

12:41Steve Seigel:So that was something that I did early on in the drop. And that's very much something that as we were, you know, putting the pieces together of all the soul, I thought it was really important to, you know, just a need to always be getting out there and talking to your customers, but then also, you know, creating advocates getting buy in, so that you know, that launch isn't as like from zero to one, you're building up.

13:04Miles Beckett:I'm so glad that you said that because now we're talking and it's so funny the restaurant I was a partner of launched in 2015 as well oh wow yeah so I probably went there yeah and so I um I really resonate with your story and I just turned 40 this year too so like a lot of parallels we're on the

13:25Alexis Beechen:same page yeah I'm gonna be 40 in April so I'm right there with you yeah and it's that time where

13:31Miles Beckett:you're like, okay, I can't have the same cocktails I used to have. But something that you touched upon that I find really important that I would say from when we started our first business, our brands in 2015 to even today is warming up that audience and doing that pre-launch work. That's what I've now niched into with CPG food and beverage brands is that pre-launch strategy. so you're not speaking into the void of the internet once you have your first production run and you're like, what the hell am I going to do with this now? So I'm really glad that you touched upon that because I still think that's a tried and true way of building a brand, even over the last decade of really getting those early advocates, as you said, and people to test it and give you feedback.

14:20Miles Beckett:what has been some of the ways that you've been doing that this time around that maybe is a slightly different than how it went a decade ago but also just how you started doing that and cultivating that because I know a lot of emerging brand founders listen to this podcast and they're probably brainstorming okay I'm gonna be creating this product soon how do I get people you know hyped about it or want to try it, I would love to hear your insight of just how you went about it.

14:56Steve Seigel:Yeah. So, you know, our initial insight into trading all the soul was, you know, we want a low ABV tequila, even if tequila is an option. You know, this is something that people could order in its place. And, you know, there's a lot of articles coming out about how Gen Z is drinking differently. And so we were very bullish that we could got, we, you know, we have an amazing product. It tastes excellent. We can go into like any cocktail bar and there's going to be a place for it. And unfortunately, again, going back to like, you have two customers, right? There, you have to first sell it into the category manager, the bartender, whoever it is.

15:35And the reality is

15:37Steve Seigel:in the low ABV space, you know, people, they're not quite there yet. You know, whereas there weren't a premium, you know, non-alcoholic cocktails, maybe 10 years ago, like that's where the low ABV movement is right now. And we found that out pretty quickly. You know, there are certainly, we have a couple amazing accounts that are putting a low ABV skinny marg on the menu. It's doing great, but that's not, you know, the majority of our business. What currently is going really well for us is because we are considered a fortified wine, not a spirit in California where I'm based. And there's a couple of other states.

16:19Steve Seigel:There are places that can't sell spirits, but they can sell wine. And so we realized that that's actually kind of our initial entry into the market is talking to those folks and getting them making cocktails where they maybe hadn't been able to make a cocktail before, or maybe they were using soju or sake in their margarita. And so being able to come with our product and say, listen, this is basically tequila has been really exciting. And it totally changes the dynamic when you are like one of one product that they can consider versus one of many. So in terms of, I think. That's so interesting.

16:57Steve Seigel:Yeah.

16:57Miles Beckett:How soon along after launching did you find the opportunity?

17:03Alexis Beechen:A few months, a couple months. What was kind of becoming like a peripheral like niche. Oh, that's interesting that they're interested in it.

17:10Steve Seigel:You know, again, I think this is a big piece of information or a big piece of advice I would give other founders is you need to be looking at your early data. You need to kind of go to where the sales are going. What is working? You know, don't don't try to make something happen, even if that was your initial thought or your initial vision. You know, figure out who your most ardent, excited customers are and then go out and find more of them. And that was what was happening for us. You know, when we were looking at our reorders, when we were looking at how, you know, what accounts were we closing quickly?