How Lucky Saint Became the #1 Alcohol-Free Beer in the UK w/Luke Boase || GTG S06E05

0:00And Lucky Saint, the name, how did you land on Lucky Saint and where does that come from? And was there a name that it was going to be that didn't get through to the final round? They presented four routes for the brand and the first one was called Saint. It immediately sort of, there was immediately something interesting in the word saint for a couple of reasons. One, there's just, we can all feel a little bit saintly if we're not drinking. There was this kind of like quite nice nod to it, but then also there's lots of religious heritage in brewing. Before we get into today's episode, I want to give a shout out to a special sponsor.

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2:00Hello and welcome. Thank you so much for spending your Tuesday evening here with me. Luke and I were just saying it's funny, actually. That light is really bright. I can't really see any of you. So you do have your hand up later for a question because there will be a Q &A a bit later on. You're like, I'll have to be like looking. But yes, thank you so much for spending your Tuesday evening here with me at The Ned. My name is Zoe Fox and I am the host and founder of the Getting to Grow podcast where I sit down with founders behind some of the most exciting food and beverage brands. I've had the amazing, amazing opportunity of speaking to so many founders so please do give it a listen if you get the chance.

2:41I also get to host conversations like this live in person, going beyond the headlines, really getting to know the person behind the brand. and Luke so tonight we have someone here who's defined what it means to launch a beer brand in the modern world. Luke is the founder of Lucky Saint the alcohol-free beer that's not only full of flavor but full of purpose. Before starting the brand Luke worked across so many different varieties of kind of avenues which we're going to get into before as well but it was his frustration with the lack of non-alcoholic options that sent him on a mission. That mission took two years six breweries, three countries and one big leap of faith.

3:21He launched Lucky Saint in 2018 and since then is growing to the UK's number one alcohol-free beer. It's stocked in over 10 ,000 venues, served in some of the best restaurants in the country and of course here tonight at the Nets. And it's the first ever alcohol-free brand to open its own pub in the heart of Marlebone. He's built a B Corp, shaping the narrative around modern and mindful drinking and is proof that you can disrupt an entire category by sticking to your principles and obsessing over the product. So please do give a big round of applause for Luke Bowes.

4:00Thanks, Sari. So that's the only thing I have to read off my iPad, and now you have my full attention. I find there's so much to say about you, so I just can't let that off my heart. But now I'm here. So Luke, what were you doing before you started Lucky Saint? um my my last job was in the sort of most unlikely so I ended up in an oil and gas company working on projects in Kazakhstan which was like which was not not the not the intended route at all um I was working for a Belgian entrepreneur looking at projects for him and he happened to own this oil and gas business in Kazakhstan and one fateful day he said Luke he's like could you do me a favor could you just do this like one thing this look at this one project in Kazakhstan uh and then two years later I was still I was I was I was stuck in the stuck in the trap um but the net kind of the nature of um those projects is they spin up and they're very intense and then they spin down and so when in the in the low points I was spending all of my time figuring out what I really wanted to be uh what I really wanted to be doing in my life and um at one of those moments I met two founders of a technology startup business and um despite I guess having worked kind of in all sorts of things I'd never I'd never been exposed to the world of startups and I remember sitting in a meeting with them and they were explaining how they wanted to change the face of retail and um their enthusiasm and belief and passion for what they were building was infectious and so I walked out of that meeting being like I need to be on that side of the table doing something that I'm I'm that excited about and and and that passionate about and yeah a few ideas came and went but the one I could never shake off was this idea of taking the sort of dustiest most maligned category and trying to turn it into something positive so were you a big drinker before to kind of make you think I want alcohol free I think I probably like a regular drinker in terms of um yeah look I went I went to university in Newcastle which probably says enough um so uh yeah I'd have myself down as a as a regular I guess like yeah regular drinker not a consumer of alcohol-free beer um I guess reasonably like healthy in my lifestyle um um i'd funnily enough i'd sort of without consciously knowing it i'd fallen i'd sort of stopped drinking beer probably in the like late noughties um and i now i can now figure out why that was but at the time i i you know i was just it just didn't sort of float my boat anymore anyway and then craft beer came along in i don't know 2012 2013 and suddenly that was what the problem had been it was like an absence of interesting things um to drink in the beer space and then yeah and then I and then I was thinking one day around like alcohol-free beer on paper great proposition in practice I wasn't even a consumer of it um so that was the that was the kind of that was the little spark that I that sort of went off in my head and I couldn't I couldn't stop thinking about it and you spent two years and worked across six breweries kind of perfecting the recipe in that trial and error period at the beginning how did you kind of end up perfecting the recipe and all the challenges you had how did you kind of work around those those issues um i mean like too too many challenges to name um so the first i i guess before we sort of even got to the the um like development of a product they were kind of had this idea of building an alcohol-free beer brand and trying to turn the category into something positive and I thought that that needed two things one there wasn't a beer that was good enough to bring me in and then secondly there wasn't a brand that would make me feel positive about that choice um the sort of the latter part is a bit of a moot point if you don't have a great product so I sort of just I just launched into reaching out to breweries and trying to figure out any way I had I honestly had like no experience in in any of the things that we now do so beer marketing brand like I had no experience in anything I remember googling I remember sitting at work and googling ingredients in beer which just which tells you it was a low it was a low base to start from um so it was always going to be a case of kind of reaching out and trying to trying to find brewers who could help so i'd i'd just do tons of outreach to any brewer anyone in drinks who'd basically spare any time and uh then try and convince the owner or someone senior within a brewery to say look i've got this idea can you you know help you know would you like to help develop it and you know with the sort of expectation that there'd be a kind of a relationship an ongoing relationship to produce the beard afterwards and in those early days where you're kind of cold calling walking into lots of breweries um trying to get people's opinions was there a well any of the ones that you you worked with in the early days that maybe said no but have ended up becoming quite quite vital partners in in lucky saint's journey um I mean I still know I still know lots of them funnily enough like um it was one brewery where I think when I approached them I think the owner looked at it and thought maybe that's quite a good idea so we'll I'll just play along with it and if it's any good then we'll just do it ourselves um and but it wasn't I remember we did we did two breweries there the first one tasted awful the second one got infected and then and then the owner called me and just said look my my head brewer is really motivated and really interested in brewing like eight percent ipas he's really not motivated or interested in this project and i need i need him happy have you heard from any of them since obviously you've become the brand you are today that he's like he's a he's a he's a friend now and so uh yeah and then uh another brewery i approached and we did a bit of we had an attempt with they own some pubs so we now work with those pubs so yeah it's a small like it's a it's a small industry and if there's what there's one thing i've learned is that like everything comes around again in in some way often in a different form but whether that's a customer that you work with or a supplier like nothing ever happens once you always sort of you always end up talking to someone again on something else so it's important to build good relationships through that process.

11:15Absolutely. And Lucky Saint, the name, how did you land on Lucky Saint and where does that come from? And was there a name that it was going to be that didn't get through to the final round? It was, well, it was for a time called Not Another Beer Co., which is still our, there's a bit of legacy, so it's still officially our kind of company name. but Lucky Saint itself was, so we started doing some work with an amazing agency called Otherway, to, yeah, I guess like brand creation beginning to end, and they presented four routes for the brand, and the first one was called Saint, and it immediately sort of, there was immediately something interesting in the word Saint, for a couple of reasons, one there's just this uh there's this little kind of this is we can all feel a little bit saintly if we're not drinking there was this kind of like quite nice nod to it but then also there's lots of religious heritage in brewing so it feels like a kind of brand name that's been around for longer than it has if because of that i think because of those sort of that religious heritage it's there um but we couldn't get the trademark on it so it was all a bit of a moot point and then we spent spent two months trying to find another name and and so much naming has such a big influence on the brand and the brand story and a ton of tone of voice um and we did it like literally we went through it all i got became an expert on like horology and watchmaking because i thought maybe alcohol free beer was all about time and the time it'll give you back so we like dived into that and sort of didn't find any nice names there and like hourglass was already gone and um then got quite into romany names so romany names they have some really interesting meanings to them so uh got really interested in django because it means i awake um but equally felt like django wasn't going to be a great name for a beer brand um and then out of nowhere we were playing around fun enough with adjectives with some of these names and then out of nowhere Jono who runs um other way I was on I remember exactly where I was standing on a hot day in May outside Westfield shopping center um and we were talking through it and I was sort of in I was in despair basically because uh this was the we actually couldn't do anything everything had ground to a halt until we had a name all the sort of design stuff the direction was all done and out of nowhere he just said what about lucky saint and it was like done it was just just just knew it and the lucky part of the name it one of the reasons sort of immediately made sense to me was because there's a podcast series that you will know called how i built this and the last question on in those so how I built this is interviews with founders of some of the most amazing brands and businesses and the last question that the interviewer Guy Rouse always asked is how much of your success do you put down to skill and judgment and how much do you put down to luck and the the answer is I always the answer is always sort of very similar it's lots of serendipitous meetings and lucky breaks and you know fortuitous moments and so the kind of the lucky part for for me is a it's an ode to the luck that i think you need to make these things work definitely i mean the founders i've i've spoken to on the podcast a lot of them say it's sometimes like right time right place i was very lucky in that situation um but yeah i mean you can't knock obviously all the immense hard work that goes into goes into what you've done um you launched like you say into market in october 2018 and the on trade rollout was swift so was your approach to sell more into bars and restaurants first than it was to maybe go get a four pack in retail uh yes so um i'd read somewhere drinks brands are built in the on trade so like that became the gospel um and we launched on the first of october and i remember so we had 33 venues stocking our beer on kind of launch day and the only thing it was me uh and jordan who was a grad who had just hired in like the september and the only thing we did like was prospecting just like all day every day and I remember this feeling just it's it's sort of amazing those in those early days because if you go from like one venue to two venues you've just doubled the size of your business and you go two venues to four venues doubled again and and it's it's so it's so instantaneous and so rewarding and literally like the more emails you send today will mean more replies tomorrow and more listings the day after that rather than waiting for a day so it's this um it's very like incredibly rewarding kind of cycle and we won uh 80 new venues in our first month we won 19 new venues in our second month we won 100 in our third month and it was just it was like go go go go go and with the kind of production scale from doubling the size of your business from going two to four how was how was that process and where were you at this point you know brewing it brewing it yeah i mean it's it's still it still took like three months to sell through half a truck of beer um and yeah i was i was remembering so that the first order was like half a truck and then you just make a sort of rough it's because it takes six weeks to brew our beer and so you probably need to account like allow for like eight weeks in order to sort of so you'd then make a bit of a calculation i wonder you know maybe maybe we're ready to like order or another we can maybe we could do a whole truck now um and um yeah like so it was three months until we sort of ordered a bit more beer and then it would be because that was a whole truck then that would be another three months before you go again um and now i can't i mean i actually can't tell you what but i remember a year ago we we looked i think it was november and we were doing a truck a day wow so yeah these things uh these things have moved on but also in the early days it's really hard to forecast because you've obviously got a shelf life on your product and you need to make sure that when you're ordering your stock that you're not gonna that you sell within a shelf life but also then give the end customer enough time to then for them to sell it through so there's so many things in the initial early stages that you're also learning and figuring out yeah i mean i think i think that's sort of everything is figuring it out and not you know everything is everything just sort of needs to be kind of from an operational perspective just needs to be good enough at that stage i think you're just you're just trying to find out like what's the level of excitement in on trade a customer's like are they really are they excited to take the product what's the level of engagement that you're getting back and so these are all the sort of actually i think i think in reality our execution was terrible with the only thing we used to basically i used to measure yeses which was like if you know someone in a buying meeting we'd say yeah yeah we'd love to take the product just put a tick next to it and move on to the next thing and and and i suspect that um you know we didn't we didn't pick up all of the listings that we thought we had because we were just i was just moving on too quickly onto the next thing we've got much better than that now a bit more process in there um and then and we didn't so coming back to your your earlier question we didn't think about uh the off trade um well i wasn't going to think about the off trade at all for like 18 months or two years and then i met uh chilen who's now our chairman and he was running i think called distil ventures um at the time and we uh we talked about off trade and he said actually the thing you really need to think about is off trade like now because non-alc drinks brand and brands are being built as much in the off-trade, so in supermarkets, as they are in the on-trade, because it's easier to convince someone to drink an alcohol-free beer at home on a Monday than it is in a bar on a Friday.

19:50And so we ended up, yeah, all the intentions to just do on-trade, and actually we sort of spoke to Sainsbury's the next day. Wow. And actually I've just been there this afternoon, literally in the same room where I had that the first meeting on like the 20th of December 2018 and so yeah they became our first retail partner in early 2019. My question my next question was was there a partner that sort of like put you on the map in those early days I'm assuming it was Sainsbury's for you back then? Yeah like the big so the big ones were definitely so Sainsbury's yeah we did we were part of the what's called future brands program which is a thing because retail like really intimidating um when you're a a small brand and b have never done it and all of you know all of those things um so future brands i always thought of it as a bit of a sort of it softens the blow and kind of gives you a bit of protection against the the um or a bit of a bit of comfort and support so yeah a bit of cushion to kind of work in that environment while you warm up to it um so that was great so yeah they they supported us and still like a great customer of ours and we work really closely with them the other one was probably our first listing which was honest burgers and is still you know is um again like that was a very serendipitous meeting because I was in pre-launch was trying to hire a salesperson and met an amazing recruiter who actually we met in Soho House in Dean Street and she said oh you know great tell me about this role you know where's it going to be in and I said well it would be you know number one place I'd love to be would be in Soho House were sitting in one and then um and then the next thing I said was or if there was a burger joint it would be Honest Burgers because of that what they stand for in terms of quality you know they still hand cut their chips and all this amazing stuff she says well you're not going to believe it but Tom the founder was best man at my wedding and I'm having dinner with him tonight would you like an intro um yes double yes um and I met Tom the next week we sat outside the original Honest burgers um restaurant in brixton market uh 10 o 'clock in the morning it's a tuesday i still remember it um and sat there drinking like hand labeled bottles of lucky saint that still they were in we were just in they were just samples so they were just in standard bottle shapes and he loved the beer um and said yeah great i'll put it in all my restaurants 28 restaurants and next menu changes the 1st of October so that's that became our launch date oh wow good it really is all about like who you know and making sure you're you're chatting to someone you never know who you're sat next to have the conversation yeah well I think yeah you just and it's um these are like it's it's it's fortuitous stuff but yeah like just always always been curious about about things I think is it helps and was there a moment when you maybe it was going into an honest burger or maybe it was walking into sainsbury's and um you know seeing your product on shelf or going for an honest burger and watching someone order and drink it and you're there kind of like looking we were saying just before we went came on the pod that one of you guys picked it up and luke was having a little look to see your reaction to it is what's that kind of like as seeing your product in the wild as such um yeah it's sort of strange i think the the most impactful thing so we uh we launched on draft in january 2020 and i think seeing like you know because you know bit we all like that's always that's the that's the hero thing about beer and like um and so we're walking into a pub and seeing your kind of your branded font in there and someone ordering a pint that was that was very cool um and then i gotta say i still get a buzz when i like occasionally you see someone around who's wearing a pair of lucky saint socks and i'm always like yes merch everyone loves me much um and in those like you know those early days and when you got the same resisting did you kind of come home and sit on the sofa and go like this is resonating like people are really understanding like the purpose of alcohol free and why i brought this product market

24:26it i did well it's all so you you just immediately go like you get a so you get a i remember the call from from tom at sainsbury's and he was like yeah look we taste the product we love it we want to put it in i was like okay great great um and then you have to wait three months because that's how long it takes to sort of get these these things on shelf but it's always like that's only the first that's only the first thing you then got to find out if it's going to sell and that you know so there's all there's all the all these all these steps and I'm not very good at like sort of not very good at sort of sitting back and going oh isn't isn't that brilliant I'm sort of always wondering like what what's the what's the next thing and like you know what what what comes next and yeah it's hard I think to like take the success in I think you know when something happens you need to kind of say to your team come on go in for a beer like yeah we do and we've got my we have we've got we've got much better at celebrating successes um for sure because it's like yeah it's important we now we've got uh an amazing team and um yeah celebrating and and like recognizing the things that are happening um is is really important emma who's our md um introduced this uh which i just think the most amazing saying which is like these are the good old days um which is just a good reminder that these are the times we'll look back on this and and and you'll be like god that god do you remember when that happened because otherwise we do we sit like we'll sit in a monday morning meeting and it'll be like it's sort of incredible deluge of like new wins and listings and amazing activations and it'll be the middle of dry january and there'll be posters everywhere and you've got to remind like these are the good old days.

26:14I like that. Were there any big mistakes in the early days that you kind of look back on now and go, God, that was a real obstacle that we had to overcome?

26:30I'm not very good at mistakes. I don't know. I just, not like, I don't mean, we've not made any. But I just think they're all part of, they're just learning. for what comes next what was a learning then in those early days that you think we would have done that differently had we known um from the early days i'm trying to think of interesting things i mean like the way we set ourselves up like organization in like the supply chain i built first time around was like total chaos um so you know lots of funny things like that we always obsess about like quality of the beer and quality of the beer is actually it's it's really hard to do and it's a series of it's getting lots of small things really right and you don't you don't realize that initially you just think oh we if you know if it tastes if it tastes great when you brew it then you know that but if you don't package it well then the beer won't be good and so there've been you know there have been there've been times when um you know the beer hasn't been as as good as it should be um but the reality is is that you know before it happened i never realized that was a that was something that could go wrong so then you're like oh there's another thing we need to make sure that doesn't happen again yeah i was speaking to a founder recently who canned a product um and it was fizzy when she said she put it in and then she tested its shelf life and like within like two weeks there was no fizz and she was like i've just spent thousands canning all these products and they don't fizz anymore but she wouldn't have known that unless she'd canned it so something had obviously gone wrong so you're right it's what you don't know at the start you're like that was a learning curve but obviously i wouldn't have known that unless i'd done it to make the mistake the learning curve as such um and after getting into thousands and thousands of venues um covid hit the pandemic the thing that we all kind of have basically forgot about um what kind of internal or strategic shifts did you have to make to kind of pivot to react to this worldwide pandemic that we all thought was going to last three weeks and we had nice weather for so we were 70 we were a business so we were 70 on trade so that's like bars pubs and restaurants um not what you'd call like brilliantly positioned for a pandemic um or a lockdown um we also had i remember i remember shelen who's our chairman i remember him calling me um and actually i don't know why i remember where i was for all these things i was actually literally i was just over the road standing outside bank tube station

29:22and we'd just built this plan so we'd launched draft in January and it we it had been we had what we thought was three months stock and it sold in three weeks and we were we were really like riding the crest of a wave and there'd been a bit of chat about COVID and this thing that was going on somewhere else and then Shalane called and he's like by the way I think you just need to like run the numbers on you know if this is real and the scenario was 12 weeks which turns out was exactly the right one that was the first lockdown um 12 weeks of no revenue and no cash receipts because people people actually by then they'd already stopped paying us and everyone started holding cash back from the end of february so like three weeks before lockdown happened and And we ran that and was like, ooh, we're out of money in three weeks.

30:20So not great timing. But it was what it was. We were fortunate in that we had these 100 Sainsbury's stores, so that was like great. And then also at the back end of 2019, we'd started testing D2C as a channel. so it had this vague idea about trying to build a uh a sort of marketing flywheel where you could use meta and facebook ads to acquire customers while also driving awareness more broadly for the brand and dc is direct to consumer just in case so like via website or so through yeah through the website and through amazon so it had this idea about trying to build that that marketing flywheel and couldn't make it work.

31:11But we were fortunate because all the sort of infrastructure was set up. So we had Amazon, we had a Shopify website and we were all set up on the digital advertising platforms. And then I remember it was the day before the first lockdown was announced, literally out of nowhere, our sales on Amazon grew by 20 fold, just out of nowhere. Everyone was stockpiling, weren't they? So this is exactly it. I was like, well, that'll last for a day. If they've got their Lucky Saint and their loo paper, then they'll be fine. So I thought that was going to be a one-off, and then it was the next day, and then the next day, and then a week later, our website literally did exactly the same thing.

31:55It grew by 20-fold in a day, and it never stopped. um and so we ended up being bigger two weeks off two weeks by so april um 2020 we were actually bigger as a business than we had been in january 2020 having didn't run our money having lost 70 of our business and then it came back yeah we had our problem quickly became running out of stock because we'd stopped ordering because we were like well this is you know the world's shutting down for the next three months so then we were going and we was like begging and borrowing and stealing trying to get like beer back off customers so we'd go around and we'd like pick up half a pallet of beer and like we have that back so we can sell it really what your customers that had stock sitting in warehouses so we'd have wholesalers who who would just got stock sitting there and you know doing nothing and and they weren't paying us so we're like well we'll come pick that up we'll have that back and then we're going to sell it to someone else um so yes it was a very sort of strange year because and and in total funnily enough we ended up sort of doing the plan that we thought we'd do in 2020 just not in the way that we thought we would so we ended up with a uh an amazing dc channel and then we we won a bunch of uh more supermarkets um and then yeah and then and then the on trade came back and yeah it feels like it feels like quite a long time ago It was, it was, like five years now.

33:18It's kind of mental. That time of lockdown, did it give you a really, like a chance to really focus in on where you maybe had inefficiencies because obviously it was a lot of time at home and there was no going to the pub, there was no social plans, so it really gave you, like, focused time. Did you think anything came out of that that you thought, if I hadn't had that time, I actually wouldn't be the business, or this wouldn't have happened the way it happened? I think there's lots of stuff around around team that we sort of learned and the importance of I think again like we were morning and evening all team calls like you know beginning and end of day every day initially and then everyone worked oh my god I forgot about that yeah it was like it was that like you know sort of and then you go to really once a day and then it was like you know three times a week and then once a week and then everyone and you sort of you get back to normal but I think within that just the importance of like team and culture and you know kind of like supporting one another that definitely came through um and yeah you just work like I mean just work just work really hard and like figured a load of stuff out and yeah as I say we got a we got a DC channel out of it that's it's still growing today and still doing brilliantly um and and we also we spent quite a lot of effort on just supporting customers in a way so like all of our hospitality customers were shut but we um we worked with them in sort of any way that we could and supported them and and so you know try try to sort of try to be try to be good good people along along the way it was an amazing i remember i remember really i can't remember where it came from but I remember reading really early on um and it stuck with me it still stuck with me is that the decisions you make in in COVID or I think it applies to any sort of situation like that decisions you make won't they won't be judged in a week's time or three weeks time they'll be judged with hindsight and 20-20 vision looking back so you should always think about that and sort of therefore like the moral compass that you put against the decisions you make um so yeah i mean i started the podcast in lockdown and here we are at the ned interviewing the founder of lucky saints how many episodes i am episode 67 now i know kind of amazing really i've been very lucky um right time hey um and you describe a phase of shoe leather selling what's one pitch or customer kind of interaction that you had where you thought this is going to shape lucky saints evolution that you came out of it i mean you spoke about sainsbury's but was there another one where you kind of thought and it might have been within the pub world it might have been like a chain or a hotel chain for example that you thought that's a lot of eyes on my product if it goes in there um god there's so many i think the honest burgers thing i definitely I definitely didn't recognise it at the time.

36:29It turns out that, like, it's not that easy all of the time.

36:39So, we, I think it was January, when did we officially launch in Soho House? It was probably, like, January 21, I think. They're a tough cookie to crack, Soho House. They're a very tough cookie to crack. Like amazing, just, you know, one of the most iconic hospitality groups in the world. And one that we'd been, you know, knocking on the door of politely for quite a long time. So, yeah, the beginning of that was like an amazingly rewarding win. So, yeah, those would probably be... um i think the other thing just that that like shoe leather selling and and and it's it's it's a really important phase i think particularly for like a founder because you you you see it's very visceral because you hear and see all of the feedback like live and so you know you you learn you learn a lot in that and more often than not like often you know they'd be like oh yeah cool and they just do a live tasting in front of you and they'd say So they'd pull whatever they've got in the fridge, they'd pull it out and they'd taste it side by side and then you just have to sort of sit there.

37:55It's just terrifying watching someone basically just try your product and you'd just be like, cross your fingers. But yeah, you just learn so much doing that. And British Beer and Pub Association welcomed you as its first alcohol-free member, which I'm assuming to lots of people on the board thought it might something they'd never ever see what was that meeting like and kind of getting that that plaque after so so funny enough i think they had a special meeting to decide whether they should let in an alcohol-free brand which is pretty cool um well cool because they said yes um i we've done a few things in the industry and i often look at if i said i look at craft beers and think about it was almost built in opposition to a category.

38:52So it was quite kind of, the category was built in quite a confrontational way. And that never sat very naturally with me. And I've always just thought it's much better to try and influence an industry in a positive way, but let's do it from within and by working with people rather than, you know, sort of trying to go kind of head to head. So therefore, we've, you know, we've tried to do things like the BBPA and other like trade associations and organisations and, yeah, be part of, try and be part of the solution rather than like sort of rallying against things. And did it cause any like friction?

39:34Did you get any kind of like funny feedback or anything? You were like, I wasn't expecting that. when we became a member there um no not really in the and you know we've been really lucky so the industry have also been very kind of well welcoming to us um and they see uh they see the role of of alcohol free um uh and the you know the positive role it's having on not just on the industry but on you know broader you know health of the nation and um so no it's we're the industry is very much like behind the category um so so that's been good yeah definitely you need the support of them um for sure to kind of make sure that your brand is is seen out there as well and your investors now today include seniors from diageo's distilled ventures innocent founders um warbutons which investors insight did you did surprise you when you heard them say if there was a tall one um and which one have you kind of been that's really been like in on the journey with you um so probably so jonathan warbton is is great and he always his his obsession is all about quality and it's the thing he always wants to talk about and and he's like if you've got product and product quality at the center of everything that you're doing then you're on a good you're on a good foundation so um that's I think just such a it's a good good compass to keep like keep coming back to um and then Richard Reed who's one of the innocent founders gave me I think just the best piece of advice I've ever ever had as a as a founder um which is as a founder you should only do the things that only you can do and it was it was actually it was so liberating because it was basically permission not to struggle with like all of the things that I don't add any value doing and just sort of and it's like permission to be able to say now I'm not going to do that I'm going to do this and that because that's where I can add value.

41:54And it applies, I think it applies all the way through the journey from day one when, you know, I probably, you know, a founder probably shouldn't be spending all of their time solving like operational and logistical things because there's probably someone who can not only do it but probably undoubtedly do it better. but all the way through to you know today I'm still thinking like where should I spend my time so I could easily spend my time on like a million things but I should try and try and spend it on the things that are going to make it you know the biggest difference I love that piece of advice and another one I heard from speaking to lots of fans on the podcast they always say always hire better than you there's no point hiring someone that can do what you do or a worse job for example so get expertise in that you can't do better and different better and different for sure because you need like the yin to your yang as well yeah exactly couldn't um and the competition now and kind of the industry and the landscape obviously so many brands have entered since since lucky saints arrival into the market but also you know you've got gin non-alcoholic now you've got lots of non and low even as low alcohol now um what do you see as the next generation of disruptors in the industry within within non-alc yeah um this listen there's there's so much going on and and yet i still feel like the category is right at the beginning of its journey so i remember figuring out in 2016 that in this country half a percent of beer sales are alcohol free so that's one in every 200 beers sold is is is alcohol free we're now we're now up to like two percent or two and a half percent so the category is growing by fivefold um which is fantastic but it's still only two and a half percent of total beer and um we have to keep reminding ourselves of that that actually there's there's there's so much kind of there's so much still to go after um and the accept the level of acceptance and change that's happened in the category um i was thinking back again because i've been in sainsbury's today i was remembering like doing we used to do like samplings at the front of store in in 2019 i remember going down to haywood's heath which is a it's a great stomping ground for like saints um but honestly the feedback you'd get at the front of a store is you try to convince someone to try an alcohol-free beer in 2019 so you know the world has changed so much since then and the acceptance of the category has been yeah has has been amazing but we're still you know other countries have 10 % of BSL so I still feel like you know there's still just an enormous job to do and the biggest the biggest unlock I think for for us in this country is about um is draft so we just we as a nation always think like the pint is like one of our biggest institutions or most important institutions um and until you can drink a beer regardless of its abv or you can drink an alcohol free beer in the same in the same format that you'd expect to drink a full strength beer then it doesn't become totally normalized um so that's i think the you know the big thing and there's only you know two percent of venues in this country in pubs in this country have an alcohol free beer on draft so again it's infancy yeah yeah and zebra striping is a trend that like i'm seeing a lot and actually i think i was doing it before it was nicknamed this i'm not a massive drinker um and i'll have maybe like a glass of wine and then like a glass of water or a glass of wine or have like some um soda water and my friends probably think it's a gin but i don't need to tell them that um and that kind of zebra striping trend is also because i think people are they are definitely drinking less um and is that something that you you see as well because you obviously have your amazing pub which you opened in 2023 in marlborough yep yeah um and kind of have you seen that trend in your pub and obviously having a pub there's a lot of questions here sorry i'm realizing as i'm reeling them off um having a pub is such an amazing touch point for you and your customer because you literally can go downstairs and go right only one of you put you for a chat i need to ask some questions like how does yeah the kind of pub work as well so zebra striping which for those not um is alternating between alcoholic and a non-alcoholic drink this came out of uh some research that we did with cam which is a research agency and so we do a no and low report with them every year and this came out last year um but you're absolutely right i i think that what's happened is that people have been alternating you know a soft drink and an alcoholic drink for for years and years and years but haven't been doing it consciously um but when we realized it was happening uh we we sort of like um put a bit of a brand on it and then and then you play it back to a consumer and people go oh yeah that's what i do and now and now it's become part of the like the vernacular that sort of so it helps when you you're almost you're the easiest thing to do is actually define something that people are already doing and then sort of play it back to them tell them then they go oh yeah that's what i'm doing and then it becomes even more it becomes was even more of a thing um so i can't remember why you were asking about zebra striping but that's what i think about that no i was just saying how like that trend that you said is as you kind of brought out but actually you're right people were doing it before it was a thing and then obviously you opened up your non-alcohol kind of lucky saint pub obviously in marlebone um did you design that space as a bit of an r &d hub because i know that your office is above it um and and kind of like talk to me about having like a pub as an alcohol free beer brand um so yeah so the pub was so number one objective um home for our team uh number two amazing opportunity to kind of bring the brand to life outside of just the bottle and the packaging that you see um and then number three like data and insight that we can get out of it and how quickly we can see you know what's happening kind of on the ground um we the idea had been we'd had the idea for a long time we took ages trying to find a site um because we were looking for something could do both jobs so you know an office upstairs for the team um and then a pub and we wanted central london and i thought oh yeah let's do it in soho and then it turns out pubs in soho are really expensive um and uh so we opened in 2023 like important things for us were this is not a non-alcoholic pub um so we it needs to be an inclusive space whether you're drinking or not um so that that was really important and then we also we wanted to use it to i guess show how well a pub could perform with a good range and well executed non-alph um so that was that was always uh something's really important and then I don't know like selfishly opportunity to sort of like open a pub under the auspices of a sort of like so sort of like you know a good like a good brand home is like an opportunity that's too good to resist.

49:32Also it's quite fun to be able to hold like big meetings there so like Sains, Rees, Tesco bring them in so they come to the pub. So it's definitely like so it's like transformational in terms of getting you know people want to come to you suddenly which is amazing particularly as a small brand when you um you know you work really hard to get time with your customers um so yeah having a space where we can bring people and welcome and host them um has been invaluable and then yeah it's been it's been great for our team we had 10 offices in the space of four years i think um so suddenly being in one place for two and a half years is is yeah it's really nice and um in in using kind of the space for hosting and having you know your customers obviously walking through the door is there anything that that having the pub has led you to understand your customer that maybe like data or spreadsheets like couldn't

50:31listen the biggest thing is people just want like non-out to be normal yeah that you just people generally speaking we're human beings we will we just we want to fit in um largely speaking there is you know there will be you know non-drinkers or people who aren't drinking on that occasion will be a a minority within a group and and yeah we'll we'll want to fit in and so um you know alcohol free beer on draft great cocktail range um just a really good like great selection of drinks knowledgeable staff um that for me is the is the biggest takeaway we get i mean we also get quite geeky about like you know how much what percentage of the beer sales is lucky saint and all that sort of stuff but what percentage is it so we'll do like so 15 of the beer sales is lucky saint which is a lot in the context where if the average in pubs is 1 % so it massively overtrades and it helps like our name is above the door it's called the Lucky Saint but equally you get some people but it's not branded inside so you get some people walk in and they don't know the brand and so they'll happily come in and have a pint of Timmy Taylor's and they'll be none the wiser and that's absolutely the way it should be like we don't want it's not a it's not the like m &m's world of like you're saying you definitely know you're in an m &m store um you've said you want to be the alcohol free beer what guinness is to stout what would a guinness level moment look like for you um you know would it be something like sponsoring a big football team or like a stadium thing what what is that moment for you

52:27um so i i grew up in a family full of people who worked in advertising so my my mom was in advertising my dad my sister um and it would not be unusual to sit down on a saturday evening and just watch you know top 100 tv commercials of all time on uk gold um does that still exist that channel yeah i don't know no yeah so um um so so i think like a a defining like a defining moment would be like having creatively producing you know the product so i think basically i grew up because i grew up in the 90s like the levi's ads the guinness ads the stellar artois ads were just like high production value like just like just amazing pieces of art um that that were then supported with like colossal media budgets and i'd like like wouldn't it be cool to bring that back um that there's the dream i don't know why but i and i always remember the toblerone ad or maybe i've seen it loads but you don't have that like that what's the word i'm looking for like resignation with those ads anymore that you used to i remember them as a kid you'd see it and you'd remember and you remember remember i don't maybe well actually we don't watch that much tv or live tv anymore no i think someone um someone who's really smart rationalized to me why that might not ever be the case again which is a bit depressing but anyway i'm still going to dream about it um okay so i've got a couple more questions and then it's over to the audience so have a think about what you might want to ask Luke.

54:13So I've got a couple of good ones which one should I end on? I'll go for a bit of a founder reflection as well. So you you've pivoted roles obviously you've hired the amazing your MD Emma Heal who I see and hear a lot about on LinkedIn she's an amazing character to learn from early on what would your career path had looked like if you hadn't stay if you hadn't thought of like you're saying so i mentioned earlier that i had this kind of meeting with two founders of a technology business and it kind of opened my eyes to the space and my original idea was i'm gonna i should go and get a job in a in a startup and then i started meeting founders of startups and none of them none of them seemed very keen to hire me i think basics I didn't have any I didn't have you hire like very specific like you always have like a really specific need when you're hiring in a startup and I know this and I had I had zero like subject matter expertise on anything so I was sort of I was on I was unhirable so maybe I'd still maybe I'd still be sort of like scratching around trying to convince someone to someone to hire me um but yeah it wouldn't there's there's something there's something amazing about starting your own business which is um it's it's completely all-encompassing um which is sort of which is sort of amazing and overwhelming kind of all at the same time all of the time um but but you know it's great and i feel feel very fortunate that the the wind has been in our sails for for like for most of it and so and definitely on the up as we see so many more brands um and if you could whisper one hard truth to yourself before the 1st of october 2018 what would you have said

56:15it's a big question yeah i can't i feel like i've got to come back to that one okay we can come back to that one um proudest win that you that nobody knows about that was like a really personal win for you but didn't maybe mean anything to kind of like your consumers or the team but was a really like for one for you that really hit home

56:41i'm not going to say who it was but someone who i respect massively from the kind of advertising and brand and marketing world um and i was asking i was asking for advice on you know creative decisions and like what are the things that we we should we should do next and and his response was like and we were looking for copy lines and we were just we just i was sort of thinking like in sort of in search of the next thing and he was just like like it's brilliant just to just do that again and and so that was yeah it was that was like that was that was nice to hear anyway I've taken him up on that and we're quite good at the consistency thing now and um finish finish my sentence the future of alcohol free will be

57:41rosie i like that i like that one um and should we come back to that question

57:54hard trick i think you know what i'd i'd enjoy it yeah i think it's gonna be hard but enjoy it I think, yeah, I think so. Like it is, as I've said, like it's, it's, it's, it's a like all encompassing, you know, it throws everything at you. It's sort of invariably going to sort of dominate life and life at home and life, like it'll all, it all merges into one, but yeah, do enjoy it. like it's you know brilliant brilliant things happen and you learn loads and and it's like incredibly rewarding so yeah don't don't forget to enjoy it i think as well i was speaking on a panel earlier with like with a lot of entrepreneurs i called on like there's a few of them and they were saying how those moments that that you may be like you know back up on you look back and you have sort of laugh about it at the time it felt like the end of the world but you have to learn you know when you're to kind of have a giggle and go okay that wasn't actually that bad like we did get through it really hurt and it was you know an emotional period etc but you've got to have that kind of perspective of things as well yeah there's i'm trying to yeah we quite quick quite quickly figured out you're like oh that's that's a disaster and it's it says everything that i now can't remember what that thing was you know the first time that happened you sort of have to say so So basically you have to say at the time, is this going to be like, are we going to remember this in even two years' time, let alone five years' time?

59:28And the reality is most of the things that go wrong and most of the challenges that you have are just, they're dots on the journey. Yeah, dots on the journey to the amazing alcohol-free world that you work in. Thank you so much, Luke, for sharing your journey here with us this evening. Can I get a round of applause again? Thanks, Zoe.

59:51And make sure you all enjoy your lucky saint this evening. So, some questions from the audience. Who would like to go first? This gentleman right here to my left in the polo. No, shirt. Sorry, I can't see anything in here.

1:00:09I would give you a really nice shirt. Oh, yeah, me too. I don't think you'd like to think so. Firstly, I'm the founder of a branding performance agency in London, so if you do want to thank you, on an ad campaign, you can do that. Just listening to you talk here, I had a situation at the weekend with a friend of mine who has struggled with alcoholism. He was saying that Lucky Saints changed his life in the sense that when he was trying to stop drinking nine months ago. He locked himself away. But now he can go out and have a drink and people can't just go on have a drink and get into that horrible moment and you mentioned being inclusive.

1:01:01Yeah. So observation thank you. Thank you. More importantly I think have you led into any of the communication around that and the positive impact? Because I've seen lots of the positive press that you have and we talk around the way that alcoholism has changed society in that sense, but just specifically around alcoholism and the impact that you've had. Have you thought much about that? So, yeah, we've not leaned into the comms around it. There are, if you read through, there's some amazing stories that come through. some of them come in sort of directly via email some are on trust pilot um um about the positive impact that we can have um there is with alcoholism specifically um alcohol free bid doesn't doesn't doesn't work from for everyone who's who's who's in recovery um so it's a it's a space one we certainly need to be respectful of and for some people it's a it's an amazing solution like the one you described for some people just the taste of it can be triggering um so it's a it's a it's a i'd say it's an area we like take um i guess great pride in you know having had a positive impact um but equally like but at the same time for that reason not not um not going out sort of hard with it from a sort of with a comms perspective and there's probably a more there's lots of there's a there's a lens from a marketing perspective that I think applies not not just to that but lots of you know we there's lots of there are alcohol alcohol free beer sort of need states or occasions that we also don't go after because we don't go after your driving, have a lucky saint.

1:03:09So there are some things you go after and some you don't. Who would like to go next? Yes, that gentleman there. So first of all thank you very much, that was very interesting. So you have gone for a partnership for your production, can you elaborate a little bit on how that was and if sometimes you have regretted not doing it yourself, or not doing it yourself but having a partner? I think for many young food and beverage brands it's a big question, do we use Co-Pack as production parts or do we invest in big production lines?

1:04:07So quick question about like outsourced production versus building your own brewery. Breweries are funny things. They work best when they're at capacity. And when you're trying to double your business every year, by definition you're either under capacity or over capacity so that was one consideration for us the second was the equipment you need to brew alcohol-free beer is incredibly expensive so therefore being able to invest in it you know at that stage it wasn't feasible the most important thing so that that was sort of that drove the decision making the most important part is how do you get really good quality um out of uh a brewery that's not your own and we brew in germany we it was the brewery i approached in 2017 um and it's a 400 and something year old brewery in Bavaria it's family owned independent and they're actually then they're not a contract brewer um and I managed to build a relationship with them and convince them that they should a help with development of the product but then they've gone on and we you know we still brew there today so um yeah so there's some considerations around like how practical is it to kind of um to build your own production particularly in those very early stages and then um just the importance of uh like working with the right partner that's for me like that's you know paramount um in terms of like you know consistently doing a great job with quality uh we have time for two more questions there's a man right at the back i can see with his hand up all the men are asking questions because it's beer I've decided that get a girl involved so two questions one for fun one for serious what's the one thing with the consumer mind would you change about the beer industry the one thing I'd change

1:06:45sorry say it again for me the beer industry goes very old school and very sort of big business organised what's the one thing you would change for the benefit of the consumer oh gosh um

1:07:19I think my frustration as a consumer would be that what you get in a pub is when you walk into a pub and you look at what's on the bar, it's just, you see a lot of the same things everywhere you go. And I don't mean that, you know, one brand is very successful. I'm fully supportive of a brand being very successful. More that the offering that you get seems to be the same. So you just have multiple products that are sort of doing the same thing. And I'd love to see sort of more variety from that perspective. Thanks, good answer. And then the fun question is, what would you say to the people that invented Calibre?

1:08:16I don't think I've ever tried it, and I remember the Billy Connolly adverts. but I don't I don't think I've ever I've never tried it but like all these things you know it's a it's a journey of improvement right we've gone Caliber we've had Bex Blue we've had you know Bex Blue was like utterly transformational when it launched 20 years ago you know it was it totally reset the standard and then I remember in 2017 I think it was was it 2017 Heineken Zero launched and again it just like it moved the game on and I was in we were in development at that point and I distinctly remember like seeing the article come out and just being oh well that was a good idea while it lasted it's all over now um yeah that could be an exit um so that you know and and then we've obviously tried to you know move the game on again and we'll you know continue to work on like how do we make how do we make the product and the category like better and better um we'll see if you're not it's one of those things you've got to be you have to be you have to be moving forward almost just to stand still if you're standing still then you're definitely going backwards and one more question