The Powerhouse CEO Quietly Building Katy Perry’s Drinks Empire: "Know the End Game Before You Start”

0:00Hey, business besties. Welcome back to Female Founder World. It's Jasmine. I'm the host of the show and today I'm chatting with Scout Brisson. She's the CEO of Dissoir. Welcome. Thank you for having me. I'm so excited to be here. For people that don't know Dissoir, what are you building? We make non-alcoholic sparkling aperitifs, which is, let me say, just a fancy word for a cocktail. I have one of my favorite flavors here, but we have bestsellers like Spritz Italiano, which is non-alcoholic Aperol Spritz, non-alcoholic rosé, spicy margarita, the whole lineup. And you joined in 2022? I joined in October of 2021.

0:36So it was right before we launched in Jan 2022. Amazing. And can you share, so the business is like pretty much just four years old now. Can you share some milestones that you've hit along the way? Yes. So 2022 was a big first year for us. So we launched in starting with D2C really primarily, but started building our retail business in 2022. We raised our seed funding round from Willow Growth, who's a consumer fund, which I feel like funding rounds always get like a big press moment is a big deal in institutionalizing or leveling up your business. And then in 2023, we really started to expand into retail.

1:19That was when we launched nationally with Target as a part of their first ever non-alc set. And I always love, this is where like my LA woo woo comes in, but in 2021, so right when I first joined, I made this deck and it was like, what's the future of non-alc going to look like. You know, 2022, you've got more niche, specifically non-alcoholic spirit retailers. You've got menu placements at some accounts. 2023, I had like the big Target logo and this mock-up of an end cap of Dessois. And lo and behold, by December 2023, we had launched in Target. So I always say I manifested that one. And then, I mean, at this point today, kind of fast forwarding, we're in over 7 ,500 doors.

2:03We have six flavors. Our team is 11 people. So it's been steady, like steady growth, I feel, and in a really hot category. Let's talk about the early days and how you got into this kind of work. So you were at McKinsey before you kind of got into entrepreneurship. Is that right? I started my career there. Yeah. How did you, what was your foray into business? Yes. Well, I, so I went to MIT for my undergrad. I first went there thinking I want to be an academic. Essentially. I was like, I'm getting my PhD in neuroscience. And then I was there and I was doing all this research and it was so boring.

2:42I was like, I want to be, I like, I don't want to be doing independent lab research. I want to be working with people. It's like, okay, what else does a neuroscience degree, you know, take you towards? And I was like, I'm going to become a doctor. So then I was pre-med because I decided kind of late in, in my undergrad, I was going to have to take a gap year. And when I was really thinking about what I wanted to during that year off, I had, I was talking to a friend of mine who was the same major and she had gone into management consulting and she, her pitch was scout you, it'll look on your resume and you can make some money.

3:14And I was like, right. Sold. No problem. And I just really loved it. Like I loved this idea of, I was always an athlete. So I'm like being in the trenches with the team, getting to like interface with our clients. Really, I think for me, my superpower was always managing those like key stakeholder relationships, thinking about the storytelling, the communication. And I loved, I did a whole bunch of different types of projects, but I really loved the consumer, the entertainment, the growth focused work. And so I started to have this idea where I was like, okay med school thing on pause I really want to explore this and like keep running with it and try something even earlier stage but I went there to venture then I started my own business and then I came to DeSuo.

4:03There's actually like some pipeline between med school dropouts and entrepreneurship like a lot of people I talk to were planning on being doctors. Really? Yes I don't know why this is I think it must be like you're smart and you're like driven or ambitious in some way and then once you realize oh actually like I've got something a little bit different about how my brain works no I'm not going to go into med school but I speak with a lot of people who are planning on being doctors I know I always associate I mean the stereotype right is like you have to get amazing grades you're in school for forever so I always associate the very perfectionist achievement oriented side of myself with that like I need a path and I need to be on this path to something and entrepreneurship.

4:43And I like swear by being naive is your biggest superpower because it's like the more you know, the more you think, oh, I would do that differently or I wouldn't have made that decision. But I feel like you have to kind of jump into things more blindly, which doesn't, I don't associate with that perfectionist side of myself. Some of the things I want to talk to you about today. So we're going to go through kind of like like your journey and how the business has been built and hitting all of these milestones, what you guys are actually doing behind the scenes. I'm really curious about the Katy Perry of it all and how she's involved.

5:16I've heard from multiple people that your team is just amazing. So I want to talk about hiring and lessons there. And then funding, fundraising, you've had a different journey than I think like a lot of consumer brands and a lot of folks who are listening to this will have a different story. And I want to kind of get your thoughts on this landscape in this space. Sure. But let's kind of go back to the beginning, 2021. How did you get involved. You mentioned Katie. So our two co-founders, Katie and Morgan. Morgan is an award-winning distiller. They met back in 2020. So Morgan, under this spirits brand platform, was really playing around with this idea of first non-alcoholic spirits, then non-alcoholic ready-to-drink options, and knew that it would make sense to bring in somebody with a platform because there's so much education that you need to do when you're building a new category.

6:03So they met in 2020. Actually, they're both pregnant for the first time. So not drinking alcohol, hit it off immediately and started to get to work. So a year and a half later, I meet them. At this point, there are liquids, there's a brand, there's packaging, there's a website, there's most of a supply chain set up, and they need somebody to come in and quarterback it and get it to launch. I got introduced to them through somebody I'd worked with at McKinsey that was part of that spirits platform. So they helped kind of broker, if you will, helping them find their person. And I started as general manager before I moved into the CEO role.

6:40But I definitely, even though I missed a lot of that development time, I'd gone through that with my own business before and have a lot of thoughts and lessons learned that we can talk about of what I think that I would do differently or if I could have gone back in time, we would have done differently. 100 that's exactly what I want to talk about yeah so you're actually you're at Doe before yes and then you left and joined as well yes yes okay so talk me through those early days like you I've got in my notes here like you're pretty focused on building the DTC engine what went right what went wrong what was kind of fueling the growth in the beginning we did a lot we spent a lot of money that we didn't need to spend in the early days so like a couple examples and we actually spent a lot more for being a DTC business and at that point trying to make that channel work.

7:25We spent a lot on brand marketing. And I think brand marketing is really important for building a beverage business, but doing that when you have more distribution to actually make that money worthwhile. So for example, we spent$10 ,000 on these like branded beautiful boxes for at our, at the time for our bottles, which we don't sell right now. And you've got the cans. We've got the cans. Yeah. So we had these bottles and we were like, every you know retail store is gonna have a case stack of these beautiful branded boxes never use them like that that product really didn't didn't make it into retail because there was such a fit for cans in retail and then for I there was another thing I was thinking about the other day because we don't spend a lot of our marketing dollars on actually sponsoring events so like all the activations events that we get to be a part of are really because of our network our connection just a foot in the door.

8:18But back then, I remember we spent$20 ,000, which was so much money when you're in that early stage, to be able to be part of this other celebrity brands launch event and activate there. And it was just not the right time or the right place to be investing in that kind of top of funnel awareness. I think we should have been building way more deep and intentionally. So like if we were starting with, let's say like we had some cool independent shops that opened up in LA in the beginning and through fair. And it was like, okay, if we're doing this, then let's focus on activating, like do a little pop up on Abbott Kinney like we do now where you can get eyeballs.

9:02Or if we're focused on D2C, like what did work well for us was we drove a lot of subscription from the early days. And I think my opinion is businesses to be successful in DTC, that's got to be their core business. Subscription. Yeah. Interesting. To make the CAC LTV equation work. Because otherwise, with just the cost of advertising now, and particularly with us, the cost of shipping, right? So what your margins even look like, that equation really has to add up. Okay. So let's talk about, you mentioned these kind of like indie stockists and how you would have activated with them. Sure. by 2023 you were launching into retail in a pretty big way you mentioned before about you're in seven seven thousand five hundred I've got in my notes retail doors which is amazing how did how do you launch into retail that quickly how does that happen we okay so in the first year we started with some more regional partners so we had accounts like air one and at the time Foxtrot.

10:06So think you're like natural premium accounts where you have really our earliest adopters are shopping. I mean, accounts like that, it was, it was submitting to their online portals, right? Like it was going through very traditional submission processes to get their attention. I think another thing we did really well, because look, it's a hot category. These types of accounts were starting to think about brands. They were already carrying some brands that were thinking about adding more. We had Katy Perry right from the very beginning. We had a big PR push when we launched. And so that helped us, I guess going back to this conversation of brand awareness, but that helped us create awareness with both the trade as well as with consumers very early on.

10:51But then as you start to get into some of these bigger accounts, we had inbound interest. Like I haven't told this story in a while, but I remember like one of our best accounts, Total Wine and More reached out to us. And it was this sales at Drink to Soil email inbox that like I set up before we launched the business and I totally forgot about, like full panic. It's like, how did they find that random, you know what I mean? Oh, I know. That random email address. Well, come on, you know, you reach out to people and you're like ops app, customer service app, marketing app, right? You're like, somebody's gonna answer this.

11:27Yeah, so it's like, I think with anything sales, you're taking a mixed approach of whether it's like DMing cool boutique-y accounts, or you're submitting through online portals, or you're trying to like piece together an email address from what you find on the internet, or LinkedIn. I mean, LinkedIn is amazing for reaching buyers. Okay. So you think that that brand building that you did in the beginning had like the direct correlation to the retail, being able to get those retail brands and clients on board? Yeah, definitely. Awesome. Once you're actually in those doors, what do you do to get your product off the shelf it's one thing i think yeah get stocked in target but you actually have to sell through so one of the things that i hear from brands in the community a lot is like being in target or being in one of these big retailers can completely destroy your business if you don't have enough funding or you don't have the awareness of the community support to be able to sell through the product talk me through your experience with that yeah because i mean the worst case scenario you never want to be in is you get discontinued because it's really hard to come back from that But I would say it's really unsexy building blocks, right?

12:34It's to start with in-store execution. So making sure, and harder than it seems, but making sure that your product is on shelf, that it looks like how it's supposed to look. Making sure that your packaging tells an amazing story and really shows up on shelf. That is something we are probably on our fourth. Like we probably revise and refresh our packaging once every 12. Oh, interesting. What are you changing? For people who don't want to have to change it four times or, you know, what are you doing? Right. So people can learn from me. I would say visually making sure like one big thing we did is making sure that the can is really popping off of the packaging so that like the elements that you're leaning into.

13:15So if you, if you're for your messaging hierarchy, if one of the most important things you need to be communicating is your brand name and what the product is, making sure that that text is the first things that their eyes are going to. So like we had our first derivation of packaging. The name of the flavor was in this font you couldn't read. There was no can on the front. It was this like really minimalist. Super aesthetic, not very. Not designed for DC, not for shelf. Yeah. Yeah, so I would say like messaging hierarchy and make sure it shows up on shelf how you want. Okay, good to know. You mentioned a few times you're in a really hot category.

13:52And I feel like this non-AWC space in the last five years has just blown up. How has that impacted the business, good ways and bad ways? And how has it like influenced you as the CEO as well? Well, there are a lot of opportunities that we've gotten. So I'll come back to the target example, right which is first ever non-Auc set so you're not fighting to take shelf space away from another brand that's already there you're asking to be part of something new that they're creating so for us we were pretty early to the non-Auc movement we weren't the first brand but we were one of the first brands and we had a big platform we had funding right like we had a lot of the infrastructure to quickly become a leader in the category which meant we were able to be one of those brands I I think the flip side and the challenge is you're one of the first, right?

14:42So you're thinking about, okay, I've had other accounts and I won't name names, but I've had other accounts where our products get buried into some mixer set that like nobody knows where to find in store. And you're working really hard to try to move that product off shelf, but yet your customers don't know where to find you. Or you're spending time thinking about, oh my God, like our price point. Like our price point has changed so much because there was no reference point when we launched. A four pack of De Sois used to cost$25 in retail and now you can get it for$15 or$16. What was the learning there?

15:19Was it kind of like you thought people were going to be spending what they would spend on an alcoholic drink as a replacement and then you realized it was different? Yeah well it was because we thought we were going to be a bottle first brand. Right. So we were pricing it like$25 for a bottle of wine. And then we thought our bottles were going to be our core business. And the cans were initially more of an afterthought. Yeah. And so when, when we were pricing the cans, we're like, well, we don't want these to undercut our hero product. Yes. Interesting. Okay. I want to stick in like kind of early days for a little bit.

15:49I'm curious for the folks who are listening, who are building specifically in your category. So I want to go deep for a minute. Guys, if you are not interested in how to build a specific beverage brand, you can skip the next like two minutes but I want to understand how you scale up from like creating a recipe scaling up that recipe going to a co-packer like how does that all work and how do you how do you like find the people to help you do that the in my opinion the best way to create beverage formulas is to work with a flavor house so they are going to be your supplier for natural flavors and they have a lot of most of them have r &d teams that you can have access to and it's much more cost efficient than paying a formulator outside of that effectively.

16:32I also think depending on the complexity of your beverage, I mean, Morgan for us is like, we call her our witch because she's like so good at what she does in formulating. But if you don't have the palate yourself, like you can help incorporate some of that. So once you, once you have your formula, you're obviously thinking about how do I scale this up and finding a co-packer. And the co-packer industry is not easy for anyone. And I got the advice before I did my first ever production run that like you think three things will go wrong, 10 things will go wrong. And so just preparing yourself for that.

17:07But there are a lot of resources in CPG communities to find co-packers. So whether it's startup, CPG has a directory. There's now a platform called Keychain, which is building a co-packer directory. obviously references. I mean, we were just talking about this earlier, but Paige on your team reached out to me asking for diligence on our first co-packer for Dessois. Because she also has a beverage company called Benny. Yes, exactly. Shout out. So I think doing diligence is really important and finding that first early partner who's going to help you take a recipe from benchtop to scale because it's not an easy process.

17:46And then in 2023, Dessois had this kind of like breakthrough in the way that you're positioning the brand. Tell me what that was all about. We started with more abstract aperitif concepts. So we had Golden Hour, Champignon Dreams, and Purple Loon were the first three flavors we launched. And I always say, I'm like, I told you those three and you probably have no idea what that means. They're all amazing liquids, but we were getting stuck. So it was like the consumer wasn't really sure what occasion to drink it in. They really didn't know what it was going to taste like. And what we learned was people were really looking for, I'm a margarita drinker.

18:23I want a non-alcoholic margarita. Yes. Or, oh my gosh, I'm trying to drink glass wine during the week. I really want a non-alcoholic Sauvignon Blanc. I was terrified to make that direct connection because I, as a consumer, had tried so many non-alcoholic products that were promising to be something that were letting me down. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. I am very pregnant. I know. Yeah. Oh, and they're not cheap either. So we first developed. So our first one for one proxy was Trey Rosé and non-alcoholic Rosé. And in that development process, we did a lot of very scrappy consumer testing. And there were two kind of core questions that we ask in all of our consumer surveying.

19:06So one is just fundamentally like on a scale of one to four, how much do you hate or love this liquid? And we set a threshold for ourselves that people needed to be, it was like 80 or 90 % needed to like it or love it. And then the other question that we ask is like, if we told you this was a non-alcoholic rosé, would you be satisfied? And looking at making sure that that number was also above 80%. I think the simpler you can make your product proposition to the consumer and really, really nail what those value props are earlier on, and it comes back to the packaging story, the easier it's going to be to scale the business.

19:46So we've since then, what I mentioned in the beginning, we now have St. Moritz Mule, which is a pomegranate cranberry Moscow Mule. We have Spritz Italiano, which is an Aperol Spritz. We have a spicy margarita. So we've now really shifted our portfolio into things that are easy to understand and easy to pick up and grab and replace in those occasions. That makes so much sense. When I think about even the way that I would shop for something like this, I would literally just be looking for a replacement of something that I've drunk before that's alcoholic. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. Okay, let's move ahead to last year.

20:16You were launching in Amazon last year, is that right? We launched at Amazon originally in 2022. Okay. But a lot went wrong. That happened last year. So, okay, we launched in 2022 before we built any distribution. In 2023, we start to build retail distribution and we start to see these pesky resellers popping up on our listings. So I always am like, advice for anybody shopping on Amazon is make sure the brand says, you know, sold by Diswatch. But anyway, so we were losing out on the buy box, which meant like any advertising dollars we were spending, somebody else was getting that purchase. So we had to do a few different things, which we figured out last year.

20:56One, we had to offer a totally different format on Amazon that resellers couldn't buy from our distributors. So in retail, we sell a lot of our four packs. Online, we sell a lot of 12 packs, but we don't sell any 12 packs in retail. So we started pushing that on Amazon. And then we also hired, you know, lawyers to help us like send a bunch of cease and desist letters and kick those resellers off. Did that do anything? Yes, it worked. We tried doing it ourself at first and that didn't work. I think you really do need somebody who has. Just a letterhead. The authority. Yeah. And they do enough of it that they start to recognize.

21:32The firm we work with is called Thorncrest. They start to recognize like, I know who that reseller is. And I think the reseller is probably familiar. Not dodgy. People just spending all their time doing this. Yeah. I mean, they see an opportunity, right? And that's a crazy thing about Amazon. I believe in it for beverage 100%. I think that's what we will develop. And we've been seeing a ton of scale in the last, basically since June, we started spending ad dollars again. And it's been almost doubling month over month. But I think that you have to get it set up correctly because customer reviews, people look at Amazon reviews, whether they're standing in a grocery store shopping your product or they're shopping it on Amazon.

22:14What other lessons do you have for folks who are trying to build up the Amazon channel? I'd say that the Amazon customer is pretty like value oriented in a way that I haven't seen our D2C customer. So we have, I think you just have a more critical customer on Amazon. So really thinking about like, if you have a premium product, what is that intersection of price point and how do you make sure that that channel doesn't undercut your core business but at the same time it makes sense for that customer to find it there and knowing that like think about yourself like we're all way more willing to buy something off of amazon for the first time than buy something off of a brand's website um and it's because it's easy yes right yeah it's really return yeah it's easy to return you know it's you can like probably get it next day yeah I also and like I try and personally got support the brand because I feel like in my head like their margins are gonna be better and I should support them from their due to see but at the end of the day like I want it tomorrow yeah I gotta get it from Amazon I mean we we say though that like any channel is good like I really think unless you are actively deprioritizing a channel in which case like yeah don't buy it from Amazon but for us they're all and important part of the ecosystem.

23:31I want to learn a little bit more about your hiring process and like what you've learned around building a team. Did you say you have 12 now? 11 full time. 11 okay. Can you talk me through like who the early hires were and some of your lessons there because like I said like folks have mentioned to me how amazing your team is and I want to know how you found those people, how you keep those people and the decisions that you made early on around who should be on the team. I'm super passionate about this because it was my first time with DeSois really managing and building a team. And I think they're, I guess from a philosophy standpoint, I like to hire people based on character attributes more than experience.

24:12Not to say that experience doesn't matter, but I really look for people that are super sharp, super hungry, go out of their way, proactive and like want it. And I always say, I'm like, there's got to be like a little chip on the shoulder, right? Like something they're trying to prove. It's so easy to interview for this. Like, did they try the product before you get on a call? Did they do any research? Like if it's a marketing person, do they, are they aware of the competitive landscape and they've been thinking about marketing campaigns that could be interesting for your brand. If it's sales, like they better have picked up the phone and called, you know, whomever in their Rolodex and said like, oh, is this something you would want to carry and get insights?

24:52So hiring for those attributes, obviously somebody can have great experience and have those attributes, but solving for that in that process, which I also always do case studies, which is probably the ex-consultant. Like I'll get on, I'll get on the phone with someone and ask them a real business situation we went through for just while like our for hiring sales we were deciding what price point to launch a six can variety pack for a retailer and so I asked them how would you think about pricing this what how would you think about promoting this product depending on you know what our margins look like so just asking them to think through something that they would actually have to do on the job.

25:36Interesting. Yeah. And who did you like, who was your first hire? Who were your first couple of hires? And why were they the right people to join in the beginning? I think your first hire should be people that are solving around you and your skill set. So if you're really good at marketing, then find somebody who can be your ops finance guru and counterpart. For us at DeSuo, like one of the first hires I truly made, because a lot of my team I inherited from that platform that Desuad was incubated from, but was our COO, John, who is a cereal beverage exec and entrepreneur. And he was somebody who really knew how to navigate what is a pretty complex distribution world.

26:20But I also really love like finding like your great Jane or Jack of all trades marketer, like somebody who can like be in Canva, writing copy set up a great activation for an event like brainstorm a creative campaign like somebody who just like wants to do it all and touch all of the pieces is is really and there I think that talent is really hard to find the right person but there's a lot of people who want to be doing it yeah okay I want to talk about funding for a little bit you became CEO in 2022 which is just after Diswar raised to seed round right and you've raised I feel like quite a bit of money since then and along the way which has obviously impacted like all of these things that you've done yeah it's pretty hard to scale into 7 ,500 retail stores if you don't have some kind of cash to to pull on but what has the funding journey looked like and what are your thoughts on raising that much money for a consumer brand and whether that's the right thing or the wrong thing I'm curious.

27:23So the fundraising landscape has changed really dramatically since I joined in 2021. In COVID era, there was so much capital and the mindset of VCs was really growth at all cost. In 2022, there was this pivot towards profitability. What's your path to profitability? How soon can you be profitable? So that is just such like two years. Oh my God, it's insane. It's like, guys we can't change course in two years and yeah and and you're really like I think so often and it's it's a balance right but as the operator I'm often thinking about like what's my next milestone yeah right like what milestones do I have to hit to capitalize the business and get to the next one today if you look at the landscape I think some of the challenges is very category by category dependent.

28:15And what I mean by that is like, I think how quickly a beauty brand or supplement brand can reach profitability looks really different than how a beverage brand can reach profitability. It's really important to find investors who know that. Sometimes I'm teaching investors that and they're like, well, how soon can you be profitable? And like, based on, you know, the beverage brands that I'm benchmarking against, this is where I think we can, we can reach that. But yeah, it's for Dissois, it's been, I'd say, really important for us since that 2022 fundraise to be thinking about growing efficiently and growing lean.