Tarquins Gin Founder: The Unconventional Brand Building Playbook DIAGEO Wish They Knew About

0:01Hello, hello. I hope you are wonderful. This episode with Tarquin is amazing. I absolutely love Tarquin's gin, the brand he has built. if you ever go down to Cornwall it is fucking everywhere and his approach to brand building is so unique they constrain it by geography they didn't focus on going into London they really really grafted there's tons in this episode we go into like why they constrained it to Cornwall how you can build a brand outside of London and how that actually gives you an advantage we talk about how they create packvertising how they create the packaging to be really unique and stand out on shelf why they've opened stores actual physical stores so brand depth over brand awareness distribution density over distribution depth and they've basically built this furnace down in cornwall which is absolutely amazing uh tarquin is super fucking bright their stuff he talks about how we reinvent pimps uh with margot robbie and how they'd get that going in the us and the states uh we talk all about how they got the brand going in the early days which is just like sell sell sell sell sell i think you can get so bogged down in sort of the packaging and the product but it's like move just actually go out and sell put it in your back of your car and get selling um tons of leadership how they built a massive d2c business um loads in this loads and loads and loads in this but the conversation's super chilled and long just how i like it ebbing and flowing and grooving um but if you want to get right into the apex of the brand building uh stuff i'd go to about 40 minutes uh that's when it starts um we get really into the brand building bits but otherwise just sit back chill relax like talking stories amazing the brand he's built is amazing um and i think you're gonna absolutely love this one please do share the pod if you enjoy it really really helps leave a five star review por favoro and yeah have oh yeah also if you want to come to the christmas party or crimbo do um i'm going to put a link in the show notes we've got about 10 tickets left it's going to be fucking banging um yeah thank you so much enjoy this episode i think what's interesting about us or our company or our brands is more the journey I wouldn't say that there's necessarily some marketing or you know business mastermind behind our success or you know I don't necessarily analyzed in a really intelligent way as to what exactly we've done you know I have a sort of you know mix of you know a bit of timing a bit of luck and doing some things quite well you know but I think what is probably interesting is the kind of the story or the journey or you know how I guess when I was 23 you know like a 24 year old setting up this company to actually be you know we're not huge but all the you know about 10 million in sales roughly that's fucking still massive yeah so big for a small company you know i think that's the best way to describe it you know it's an aspiration you know i'd never even had 10 million on my business plan yeah yeah never had 10 million on my business plan for the first five years um and you know i i it feels like we're big but equally you know compared to the biggest where we're still you know this is that joke an old joke that we make less gin than diageo spills in a year and that probably you know it could be true and it's kind of yeah yeah but yeah there's loads there's loads in that because it's like what what are you measuring yourself against because so many people i i speak to so libby who did piper investments don't know you know piper she's basically saying most brands get stuck at five to six million yeah and you've sword straight past that like you have kind of a million pound mark the five so all but you know if you're if you're measuring yourself against the diageo then obviously it's it's good it seems like you're marked off you measure yourself against the you know it's interesting because you're basically comparing yourself to a premier league team when in all in all um in reality every challenger brand is probably a league three team yeah every challenger brand like i'm talking you know even like the big ones like yourself so you're probably winning that league but if you put yourself in the champions league i against diageo then yeah you're a minnow yeah exactly but there's a whole point on that so i mean i'm good i'm good to jump in mate so we can't just just roll straight in yes um so where i want to start is i was driving down to the gunner Gurner's Head yeah awesome um and there's for listeners I recommend kind of googling it but yesterday in Cornwall there was kind of torrential uh biblical rain slashing down I was driving down one of those long kind of winding country roads cows to the left sheep to the right yeah yeah yeah um and then you've got this kind of yellow honey colored pub in the middle of this kind of verdant vista yes it's the best way to describe it and uh then you've got the the kind of just the ominous yet kind of beautifully alluring atlantic ocean that's just spewing at you it really pulls you and as i was driving along i was thinking you know thinking about our podcast today and i was thinking god there's actually a lot of parallels between kind of the cornish coastline and the founder's journey which we will interweave into our conversation today um but the gurner's head was your first stockist yes take me to the feeling uh in your kind of in your in your tummy or your stomach as you as you're driving along those winding country roads with uh tarquins your first bottles in the back of the car and you're driving towards the Atlantic Ocean, which is both kind of terrifying yet incredibly exciting.

6:03Talk to me about that feeling and what was the first thing you said to the people at the Gurners Head? It's a good, yeah. So it's almost 11 years ago now. That was the 30th of July, 2013. It's sort of the culmination of a 12-month startup period where I effectively taught myself how to make gin on my cooker at home. and during this planning phase of setting up what we were the first distillery or gin distillery in Cornwall for over 100 years well the southwest of England I sort of started my business plan so you know I did GCSE business studies back in the day and you know the first thing to do you've got to write a business plan if you're you're going to start a business and this involved reaching out to potential customers potential suppliers I dropped an email to the lovely brothers of who are the owners behind the gun at head charles and edmund inken and they were super enthusiastic you know i said i was going to make a gin gin and a new gin in cornwall would they be interested in buying some and they said they would they'd be delighted to stock it um and they were actually very persistent so they kept on asking me during the startup journey is it ready yet you know is it ready yet so it got to the point point of about um well as i was trying to develop it make sure the recipe was absolutely perfect you know i had them breathing down my neck and I had this sort of sense of urgency that I needed to deliver this year in time for the summer season you know July the 30th we were almost into August those peak eight ten weeks were almost over so I scaled up eventually from my cooker to a 500 square foot best described as a converted cow shed to sort of slightly more industrial premises on a farm estate just 10 minutes outside padstow scaled up to a it's about 250 liters in size 250 liters still produced 220 bottles in that first batch in fact six first batches were write-offs this was my developing or scale up process from changing that tiny little recipe which i made in a 0.7 liter still on my cooker to a commercial recipe and on the 7th we were in business so you know i tasted it tasted fantastic tasted delicious you know everything i've been dreaming of for the past 12 months on my startup journey um with help my older sister and uh business partner we're a we're a family family distillery first generation family distillery we corked the bottles labeled the bottles um waxed them load them up into the back of my voxel astra estate which was um my very sensible compromise of um not getting a van yet i remember i was dreaming during the startup phase of driving around in a van but they only had two seats so i was like okay i'm gonna get the halfway house um a used estate car i can fit you know quite a decent amount of gin in the back of it i've got five seats yada yada yada so um loaded it up um they'd been hassling me so i drove down there it's about it's actually almost quite a big county so you can drive from east to west or even you know central north where we are to the Gurnett's Head is a good 45 minutes possibly an hour on a on a on a busy summer's day which it was and as you said it's this beautiful part even more wild than the wild coast of Cornwall so it is a beautiful drive and it is you know cows come up into the garden of the they actually walk up along the road to the front of the pub and I remember when I started the distillery or started the brand I knew I wasn't necessarily going to be the world's best salesperson that definitely wasn't my forte and and I knew that I wanted to be able to when I decided that I would love to make spirits and in particular gin I'd love to be able to create something that I would feel really proud about and passionate about and then hopefully the sales would would click into place and come naturally it'd be a lot easier to sell something that you know i was so um so passionate about and could talk for hours and end on um you know hopefully that bit would be easy and i wouldn't say it's easy but it but it definitely felt natural um so you know driving up definitely a mixture of nervousness and a mixture of excitement and i got there and they were well prepared and there was the whole the whole staff not only of the garnet's head but i believe the old coast guard hotel as well which was their second um second venue and they were waiting for their tasting you know sat around a large table waiting to be poor you know waiting for something that they'd probably done dozens of times with much more professional outfits than us you know you know we're ready for their tasting ready for their signature service they call it in the trade a little bit of history background um and maybe you know the kind of kind of standard for sorry signature serve what do you mean by that like a cocktail you know how do you sell sell serve your gin and tonic what guys would you sell it all if you had a cocktail in mind what would that be that would pop onto the menu you know what is the best way to to drink a tarquins yeah um so these are all things that i've learned over the last decade of how the tasting should have gone but really what i explained was my journey into how i made it what went into it in terms of ingredients um and what i was doing there today and you know we we tasted it neat, you tried it with a splash of tonic.

11:09How to be garnished, we love a slice of pink grapefruit and a sprig of fresh thyme. And that was it, it's a little bit of a blur. I was quite shocked that there were so many people that I was going to talk to. I thought it was almost going to be transactional and I was getting there, sell a couple of cases of gin, thanks very much, and I'm off to the next. But no, it was more of a substantial event and it was that you know it was part of the learning process for me of of how you start to sell a brand and how you hopefully try and build it and build those advocates and ultimately try and you know win those lifelong customers of Tarquin's and that and you know knowledge is power I had worked prior to setting up the distillery between an office job in London and the distillery in Cornwall I worked in a pub called the Ballmer Castle in Notting Hill and I was Is that the one that's behind the, as you come out Notting Hill gate on the left?

12:10Not that one, so that's the Windsor Castle with the hanging gardens this is on Ledbury Road, it's kind of just off Portobello it's I can rewind, the reason I was working there is before I had the spark in my eye to make gin i'd actually left a um my desk job in london to set up a quick service thai restaurant chain so um i've rewinded back a little bit in the story um yeah we jump around yeah jump around okay so so um even rewinding further back than that i mean before university i did a cordon bleu cooking course um so always being very interested in food just for listeners cordon bleu that's like a it's like a French based sort of the cookery school effectively the classic one is in Paris but they got locations all over the world and the one I went to was in London it wasn't like Le Grand Diplom where you do a two year effective like a degree where you're doing an apprenticeship in fine French cuisine it was a month's course you know very much the essentials of the classics but it was very much following and enthusiasm I had for food hadn't yet blossomed into drink yet because I was still only 18 and you know I can't say I was sophisticated yet in that department but I then used it as very much almost like a qualification to go and be a chalet host which is where you go and cook in a chalet in France for loads of people typically for a British company where they go skiing so you might cook breakfast afternoon tea and dinner for say eight people maybe a three-course meal and you kind of hone and perfect your skills of cookery so i was really interested in food um after university where i studied much more conventionally um economics and politics um went to bristol and left to move to london like lots of my friends um did and um i took a job which was very much an extension of my degree which i was still also very interested in economics and politics where i wrote uh i was an it's called an emerging marcus analyst i used to write economic political financial market research on Latin American economies or countries.

14:22So Venezuela and Colombia were my specialties. But I knew, even though I was enthusiastic about the content of what I was doing, I knew that this wasn't the job for me for the next 50 years. This wasn't where I saw myself necessarily really developing. And what I was really passionate about working in this effectively eight or five desk job was that one hour break that i got in in for lunch effectively where i used to potter around of you know london work near quite near fleet street um quite near some pools and i used to pop out to the best up and coming kind of quick service uh lunchtime spots so places like leon when they were up and running um you know uh pod was was going there the whole landscapes change today but what i was really passionate at that time was thai food so my idea you know i couldn't get and prices have changed over the last decade you couldn't get a five pound pad thai which was quick service you could sit down for a meal get a 10 pound pad thai but there wasn't that opportunity to get something grab and go and thai was so popular you know it's one of those cultures and cuisines and everything about that country has sort of been exported pretty you know the growth has grown pretty significantly and was really popular and i thought that would be an amazing idea you know i would eat it i'm sure thousands of others of people that would eat it so i actually left that job after a year to make sure um it was it was the right decision left that job and took the job in the pub in the warmer castle which was one of those fusion pubs which serve british food and thai foods there was there was method in this madness of this move and the idea was to learn the ropes of hospitality um learn a bit more about the thai food so it was a whole team in the kitchen that i'd sit and have that family style meal with in between shifts um and write the business plan so we know about my love for a business plan and i would literally spend time outside like competitors in theory like wasabi even some pre-demangers doing foot full counts i'd have those one of those clickers and click click people in and out between the hours of 12 till 2 and i spent six months doing this and working there um and got to the end of my business plan and realized that setting up a restaurant in london you know i read a book about setting up a restaurant they told you that you know they give you three financial metrics that if any of these are over a certain percentage of your turnover such as rent um or wages then it's a red flag and i think pretty much everyone in my model was a red flag it's very difficult to set up a restaurant in london you need to be extraordinarily busy to really be make a success of it and even then you're on a knife edge so i didn't have big deep pockets either the tie the tie in a pub thing i think it's one of life's brilliant delicious quirks there's a pub by where a family home in um uh in okshot in surrey i called the vic which used to be an old school boozer like like low ceilings you have the landlord yes like a corpulent bugger just drinking guinness all day but they had thai food so it's like an old school pub but the thai food in there was just amazing well just yeah like sort of face melting delicious yeah and and i think i was interviewed the firm oshan rogers who's the founder of the devonshire i don't know if you in london which is this new part yeah yeah yeah i haven't been yet but yeah it's difficult to get a res yeah yeah yeah difficult to get reservation but he's i mean his the podcast goes live next week he's genius he talks about storytelling and everything but um yeah i think you don't really see it as often anymore the tie the tie in the in the pub what did you what did the tie team in the pub teach you about life and food because i i think you literally learn from you can learn from everyone and anyone like when i used to i used to have a cheese um around london for harvey and brockless yeah and actually some of the interactions i'd have with different staff members and stuff were of some of the biggest lessons what did that teach you it was it was i suppose it was like any um restaurant a bit of front and back of house the front of house um i did have a thai colleague and she was lovely and um working front of house i thought it was such a change from working in quite a buttoned up office job you could be yourself and you're relaxed and have normal conversations you know if you were feeling hung over you could tell them and you wouldn't you wouldn't not get promoted the next year and it felt like a huge weight and relief off my shoulders and you know really actually love working there it seems silly i hadn't worked in a pub before and it was fantastic and then as i said we had these family style meals um so all the chefs were thai and so you'd sit around between a like a split shift or a double shift um and uh they'd cook you know that they would take um they'd obviously make it economical but like they would chop the heads off the fish that they serve and you know they'd quite take quite a deep cut so you get more of the fillet but they'd make these amazing non-menu dishes um really traditional thai ones you know like lab salads and lots of um regional dishes that they were depending on where they were from and it was amazing and they're really relaxed you know very relaxed beautifully friendly um people and it is very much family you call them uncle or auntie or you know similar names and it it was it was just a fantastic place to work and a really lovely community and um you know they got wind that i was sitting at this restaurant some of them were you know and be like, I tell you what, man, I could be your head chef.

19:41And so, you know, I thought, you know, it was really, it was a bit of luck that I ended up working there. But if I, you know, if I'd followed through just doing the restaurant, which is probably a wise idea that I did it, you know, I would have, I had an instant foundation of a network to rely on and try and make sure the thing would have been a bit of a success. But it was, you know, it was a super cool experience and it really helped, you know, me learn so many different aspects of what I brought into my next role as an entrepreneur it was a company founder you know that customer service attention to detail just making sure you know you're a bit of a problem solver as well dealing with the general public dealing with customers and at the same time that's when I received really helped the spark towards setting up a distillery or a drinks brand so we had this wine training kind of run-of-the-mill wine training that you get from your supplier.

20:37So this whilst I was there, yeah. So we had this wine training. It was, you know, naturally, if you're, you know, naturally quite inquisitive about what I'm working with. So I hadn't worked behind a bar before. I'd always been interested in food, but, you know, started drinking beer. You know, I liked beer. I wasn't hugely into it, but started to learn the differences between what it, you know, started, I tried Guinness properly and actually liked it because I'd never really wanted to order one before. You know, you clean the pipes, you try everything, which was fantastic. you do the same with the wine and you get to try them all so you can have that power of knowledge and this is where i learned that you know as a as a as a bar person i'm not going to recommend a wine that i know nothing about and this is exactly the same case with spirits and wine so by sitting through that wine training and learning about the nuances between each wine or not even nuances just the difference you know the clear differences between some of the regions or countries or grapes varieties suddenly you feel empowered to really you know talk about it with your customers so if they ask you i would love a white wine you can say with confidence with a smile on your face why you should order the white rioca and why it's so delicious because it's your favorite and you know nine times out of ten they're going to go with your recommendation so it's very much helpful in that respect but also um you know i love uh a physical product being something you're able to touch and taste so when I got to the end of this business plan for the for the Thai restaurant and realized the numbers didn't stack up it would have been you know pretty difficult to get off the ground I needed a sort of inspiration to do something else and I'd always been you know interested in food and it was felt very natural to make that pivot over into drink as well I'm from the west country originally so we have all sorts of craft ciders I say craft we've you know, they used to sell before they clamped down, you know, cider and milk cartons on the, on the side of the road, you know, through an honesty box you can do when you drive through Devon and Somerset.

22:36I've had the real ale boom or, you know, ultimately probably craft ale. Since the 1980s, we've been making small batch ales and really high quality and something that we've been proud of. But when it came to spirits, so I'd had wine training, you know, I'd been working with the beers and the ciders. The spirits was very much a different domain. um you know it was very much a i love learning it was a discovery process for me to learn that the majority of the back bar or the products that we sold were owned by about three companies that over the last 40 years have been huge consolidation with brands getting snapped up by the big boys um and even sort of a local brand to us plymouth gin down in the southwest i'm originally from the west country um you know that was owned by pono ricard the french multinational i just had no idea you know um so i thought it was fascinating and i began to read about very much at the time it was the craft whiskey boom in the states so they probably maybe america is about a decade ahead of us and and lots of these things um and they are maybe you know gin isn't big in america whiskey is big that's probably one of their largest spirits outside vodka and they began to make that hundreds of distilleries began to pop up on a micro scale and make whiskey and in england that had transferred over to gin um we're very much a gin country and uh why isn't america a big gin country i don't get that that's because i just find that the power the similarities and difference between us and the states just yeah crazy well yeah why do you think that is it's a good it is a good question i think now they're showing signs that they're getting into it the market for gin is growing but it is it's probably one of the smallest categories of the big ones in the states um it's a it's a it was a maturing market so it's it's ultimately i suppose lots of spirits are cyclical and gin maybe was big in the states 30 40 years ago it's got a great naval heritage um big on the big on new england what do you mean i think it's a classic navy they used to drink gin with the navy yeah and also it's got that kind of you know plymouth gin is all about the founding fathers and it going over to new england and it's kind of it's got that coastal sorry to interrupt because i've always so plymouth gin is not plymouth uk gin it is plymouth uk yeah but the founding father set off from plymouth i believe is that why it's big exactly because i thought i thought no i don't mean this this sounds like an absolute dickhead but like plymouth's not the most uh gorgeous of places in the world there's not more romanticism to to plymouth well i didn't think so because i because i just but i didn't then i realized how big plymouth is it's big yeah i mean as a brand but i didn't realize as the brand yeah it's the brand it's one of the classic ones so it's a it's a unique start it's been made for hundreds of years in Plymouth the distilleries still exist um in the Barbican in the old town effectively um but the fact the pilgrims or founding fathers of America set off from Plymouth so it's got that heritage in the that's why the state it's kind of I suppose so it has that legacy and lots of these legacy brands perform quite well in the states but it was very much maturing drinker you know they've been drinking gin for a long time and it's really what we're seeing in the last few years as new drinkers getting into the category with the cocktail culture with the sort of emergence of some of the celebrity brands and really bringing it into sort of uh popular culture but but yeah gin gin in the uk was definitely is definitely a little bit more as a proportion of the share of market more popular than the states um but the way that that craft spirits boom had translated from across the atlantic was very much into gin so I was inspired by the guys like um Sacred Gin up in Highgate and Sipsmith as well down in Chiswick um and they started around 2008-2009 similar time to each other and they had started to make gin on a small scale and what they did is pave the way to um for people to realize that that was physically and legally possible so we knew that the market had sort of condensed into just a few players and I genuinely think that the people didn't know that you could make gin or spirits on a small scale legally um and feasibly and what they did I just thought it was the coolest thing I'd ever heard it's like you could make small batch spirits um which sounded absolutely incredible you know you can do it in your house you know the guys Ian at heart at sacred was making gin at his house and I was like wow you know how incredible and he had a commercially viable product that he was selling in some of the best bars and hotels in the world he was exporting you know he was in fortnum and masons and i was like oh my god you know i would i had a dream of having you know making my own product um i thought this is it you know this is what i would love to spend the next five ten twenty years doing um and that's literally what i did you know i love researching so um i didn't have big budget effectively i had some inheritance which i ring fence i had fifty thousand pounds to set up my business it was very clear that fifty thousand pounds doesn't set you up a quick service thai restaurant chain in london but it could if i you know played my cards right and was quite frugal with how i set up this distillery i could bring a brand to market to make gin and that's and that's pretty much what i spent how did you spend the 50k because a lot of people want to set up i mean i mean there's a gazillion different paths here right but like you can either go and set up your own factory distillery which is one path or you can kind of just use a third party but yeah people who may want to be setting it up may think they need a gazillion k how did how did you spend the 50k yeah that's a good question so my motivation for setting up the the the are the gin so i i love the idea of creating something unique um was obsessed with you know be yeah i don't know how much everyone knows about gin but as long as you add juniper you can add anything you want to make your own completely unique recipe why juniper juniper um is uh it's this technically a pine cone but it's that it's the it is the flavor of gin um and uh it's it's piney it's resinous it's really oily it's got that fantastic scent on you you know, both on the nose and on the palate.

28:53And it's bitter and it, you know, blends beautifully well with tonic as we know. But as long as you've got that ingredient, you can add absolutely anything you want in to make your own recipe. So that's what appealed to me about it. And so how, you know, I set up on the journey to make the gin. And so I basically, I didn't have the budget for a consultant. So that would probably be the first thing you do. You get a consultant to learn how to make it. But equally, I didn't go down the third party route to contract it out. what appealed to me to make gin was to actually dive into the product to make it myself that's what I wanted to do I wanted to make this flavor myself I wanted to make it unique I wanted to get that perfect balance between those junipery notes the florals the spice the earthiness the herbaceous and create my own unique recipe that I would feel very proud to sell um and um you know it wasn't I didn't really know much about marketing or brand as such back then maybe it was a little bit naive I don't know if that worked in my you know as a strength from or as a weakness but for me I dove into the product and the process itself so I knew I wanted to make this gin I knew I wanted to make it myself so I needed to learn how to do it and so I was always going to do from start to finish production and bottling myself there wasn't really any other way that I knew or I didn't even you know I didn't explore for someone else to make it because that wasn't what got me excited I wasn't a professional marketer i didn't you know i couldn't tell you you did i didn't know the best practice of making or launching a brand that wasn't my expertise but i knew i had the passion to make something which i hoped could be a little bit better i wasn't shooting for the moon but if i knew if i gave it the right care and attention to detail that lots of these real ale brewers and cider makers had done um provincially or regionally in in cornwall and in devon and Somerset in the west country if I could do the same with gin make it taste better than the household name or in the green bottle that everyone else has I might be onto something you know and I could convert people maybe one at a time that they should you know give my gin a try um and hopefully convert them for a bit of an upsell so that was very much my premise at the beginning so just going back to the 50k how did you how did it break down yeah so I found um um so i left london and moved um back to the west country um and the idea for me was to live by the sea um and i think on paper was to go surfing in the morning and make a few bottles of gin in the afternoon um but the fantastic things about living in cornwall is we've got falmouth university so first off that was one of the best graphic design and art degree uh universities in the country so it's a hotbed of creative agencies so i found some guys who were similar age to me about 25 24 25 when i was starting up and they were happy to do my whole branding website design bottle packaging the whole works like a hundred grand package for a couple for a few grand is that still the branding today uh we have refreshed our branding since um the agency is still going and they're going from strength to strength from kingdom and sparrow and it was very much you know for them probably building out their portfolio a bit for me getting something which was an an extraordinarily fantastic value you know the amount of hours and time and effort they put into this you know i was getting way more bang for my buck um so i had this awesome creative agency really enthusiastic guys um and basically they did that marketing front um including website for that so it's super cheap um my still so i've been eyeing up which is the copper pot still that you use to make the gin i've been eyeing up um the one that sip smith had used but it was you know close to 100 grand that was twice what i had so i had to be more creative and i found these beautiful hand-beaten copper pot stills from portugal they were a couple grand so here we are you know a few grand from my branding a few grand from my still maybe some auxiliary equipment i needed a 200 pound bottle filler and filter i needed some tanks you know another thousand pounds um but ultimately on equipment you know less than i'm sure equipment and branding probably less than 10 grand then i just get the rest is really goes into stock so you know you've got to buy your first pallets of bottles first labels juniper alcohol um and then the rest is working capital so you know from that it sounds bizarre and i think obviously prices have gone up over the last 11 12 years the rest of it is obviously labor capital that's just running running it yeah so you have to sell on credit so even those first customers um i was giving credit to some some lovely ones would pay me the day i delivered it or you know they'd write me a check because they they were they felt sorry for me maybe you know this this young kid selling them some gin and they they had great empathy for me trying to build this business and then they'd write me a check on the spot and you know i'd go and cash it um but really no i was offering credit so you know 30 28 day 30 days credit off the bat um and uh within that i don't know how i made it work so i wasn't necessarily paying myself a salary off the bat um i did by the end of year one um and i didn't pay my sister off the bat as well so that's where we had huge savings in terms of you know that would have been the majority of the cost of the business but i managed to make that i have well we've managed to make that 50 000 pounds last to today and hopefully beyond genuinely so we've never taken any investment um so we're you know we're still i say this first generation family business and we managed to start turning a profit you know fairly quickly and ultimately we're working from a you know our rent was 300 pounds a month right we're in a 500 square foot unit just outside padstow so we hadn't gone the full bells and whistles we were really i was really focused on the production and trying to make the product absolutely delicious but very much working from this low overhead base and you know i knew i had 50 000 pounds and that was my one shot it was either you know use it to put a deposit on a house or try and make the best success of this sort of crazy idea to set up a gin distillery and you know i was working 12 hour days seven days a week very much determined to make this work and i think i think this we've got to rewind back to this is 2013 um and uh probably you know gin was beginning to take off i think i was very incredibly fortunate in terms of timing as as probably the next year or two it kind of just exploded but um you know i think i was extraordinarily lucky you know we'd make about 220 bottles in a batch um i'd load it up into my car i'd i'd sell it to sort of local wine shops um farm shops lovely bars independent hotels and restaurants um learned then that you could use fedex use a courier to start shipping out orders learned that what a pallet was literally and that you can send stock via pallets and it gets taken by a haulier it was very rustic you know i was this was not a sophisticated operation i was using carbon copy um receipts i don't know if you can even remember those you take it to an account they sign their signature it was all written by hand you tear it off give them a copy and we keep one and then you know at the end of the week i'd convert these into invoices and send them out you know you have that disastrous moment where you've lost one of the carbon copy books it's got you know 10 grand's worth of orders where is it finally dig it up under a folder but it was it was really it was honestly very rustic and we'd do events pre-card machines it was all cash you know you know you're counting up money you're going down to the bank cashing it in and popping it in but effectively you know you know very we've grown very much organically over the last 10 11 years and those days you know the margins are pretty much similar to most food and drink modest-ish you know probably 40 gross margin on a duty paid or a finished bottle of gin or 33 sometimes so what you're effectively doing is very very slowly trying to turn two pounds into three and doing that consistently from the financial from the financial perspective of it and then what we did what i did with my sister is very much reinvest reinvest all of our profits into building the business and that's what we've done you know gradually we turn one still into two and two stills into three then we invested in a much bigger custom built still from italy which we named ferrara because it's very much similar to a Ferrari and probably cost the same but it's kind of it's very much been a journey of organic growth for us and you know I think a huge challenge for me in the early days was that capacity so I you know we'd get an order and I'd be like oh my god I don't know how I'm going to fulfill it that was the it was a great amazing problem to have and through always being at the at the limit of capacity we run an extraordinarily efficient business not on intentionally by any means but just you know being probably understaffed and underemployed you know which is way too much to do with very few people myself and my sister it took us a long time to hire the first person and it kind of we just ran an extraordinarily efficient business with with you know just limited resources i speak to a lot of people um and i think i'm trying to think who's james bailey who's the ceo of waitress he said to me the brands need to get really clear on their path to profit yeah one of the things he said what one thing i'm kind of picking up from you tarquin is you do a lot of planning with it with with the thai restaurant the venezuela colombia economic analytics and stuff um that's not i don't i don't really have any kind of plan with this or you know and i think a lot of founders are like that as well they may not have a plan they've got an idea for creating a banging product yes something they love doing they can do six seven days a week but you you've take you to had 50k and you've built this you know you're now 10 million uh 10 million years kind of retail sales uh sales you say how did you what are the one or two kind of big levers you think you pulled to get to profit pretty quickly because i think that could help a lot of people that is a good is a good question i had incredibly low overhead i think that was definitely by being in privy to pad so probably being in you know things are definitely cheaper you know we're quite rural area the rent i think we were paying as i said 300 pounds a month i think if you were based in central london location probably if you're in a you know potentially you could have a theory in a bar or a restaurant or you know some in a more prime location that you could 10x maybe even you know 100 times that that level of overhead um so that was very low and i didn't really have a marketing budget there was i didn't really have a budget for anything um i was making it and what we were really doing it was i was concentrating on trying to sell it so selling it was again me putting up an email list of the independent wine shops around england and then dropping them an email saying hi i've got this gin would you like to stock it and these were the days where they'll be like yeah i'd love to try it or you know yeah i'll order two cases so it was extraordinary i think that timing part of it was just extraordinary so i was with your opening accounts and winning business i wouldn't say very easily um definitely but probably easier than it is today and i think it was that perfect point that we'd made something that people were interested in um not just locally so we had fantastic support from our local county obviously in cornwall and region but also nationally as well and it kind of we had decent sales i think that's obviously really important off the bat i was busy what were you doing your first year sales wise first year over over 300 grand so so like so um we'll get just quickly on but one thing i think is uh sometimes when you're manufacturing you said you didn't have a marketing budget and you didn't have necessarily a sales team i think when you make your product yourself that is your marketing i spoke to louise avery who does la la uh yeah yeah they make it themselves that is that is their marketing story yeah i think the best sometimes the best marketing budget is your product and we're going to get onto the actual packaging like the perry from big fish calls it packvertising yes yeah i think you know for people listening to this sometimes if you if you boil everything away really just reduce it all the way down to what makes a great brand yeah it's the product is is the salesman the product is the marketing the packvertising you know it's i think i think you're a darling example of of doing that well um but yeah we were saying in terms of the um well my brain how do i get from profitably grow or from naught to 10 or what are the three things which helped us get the profitability so one is definitely sales yeah those are those are important where was the so you got 300 grand in the first year so we've talked right beginning this conversation of you driving to the gurnard's head which is one boozer you do your talk from there from that day 30th of july to 30th july the next year yeah 2014 how do you make 300 grand yeah so i think you sold over 15 000 bottles of gin roughly 300 grand in sales this is very roughly speaking of course yeah but similar similar you know maybe your gross margin is 30 a third let's say roughly and so with our overhead you know we're basically able to pay myself and my to um you know a salary and cover the overhead of the of the distillery which was which was minimal so that's how i guess we pretty much um as i eventually paid a salary so that's how we pretty much our path to profit was in year one we basically turned a profit from the first financial year um which is amazing you know i didn't know that that was an extraordinary feat at the time either obviously I knew business you had to make money but I kind of I hadn't it's a tough one I hadn't anticipated to necessarily make a loss so I always knew I had to make money I didn't know how well it was going necessarily it was kind of you know I knew that I had this my stress at that time was not being able to make enough gin so I made all the gin at the at Tarquin's and I did probably the first four potentially even five years of the company's life right so i got moved from one still to two stills to three stills and i would run them potentially at our peak season seven days a week myself while still trying to run the company at that point probably in year three we had you know half a dozen employees as well so i was it was it was it was so as i said we were just extraordinarily efficient but i think at the first is always important to have those sales i think 300 grand in year one is pretty extraordinary and without quite a significant marketing budget and definitely we've been very lucky by being in based in a region which which is phenomenally supportive of local and independent brands launched at a time where people were very much considerate of their food miles cared about what they were eating what they were drinking and very much engaged and perceptive to my story of how and why we made the made made our products i think you know it was potentially easy maybe easier than it is today easy to get that i wouldn't say easy to get the sales but you know we'd get those sales and people say and it is true and in circles back round to the product part of it it's easy to get that first sale you know i can sell a couple of cases of gin to an independent wine shop in yorkshire but to get that second sale is the important one um and that's where i think the second sale i think that's where it boils down to the product and that is it so you know i because i did it myself and i i was very much obsessed with making it taste delicious and you know a little bit better than those ones on the high high street and at the end of the first year something that we you know which gave us the pat on the back that we've been doing something right we did win a gold medal at international wine of spirits competition in london one of only six jins out of hundreds to do so worldwide and it it sort of validated the fact that we had made something which was which was delicious and people enjoyed it so they finished that bottle and they'd be keen to buy another one and i think that was that's what led to growth in the second year and so we built on that 300 and we did 600 the next year literally doubling in size and then the next year we did 1.2 so and then the next year we almost doubled again so for the first five years of business we almost doubled in size every year which is phenomenal and super unheard of and it got to 2019 I think and we were 29th fastest growing company in the UK and that Sunday Times Fast Track 100 where they take your compound down your growth rate for the last five years and and you know it was kind of phenomenal and it feels like a world when well when now you know 11 years on but as I said my greatest stress at that point it was the it was the growing pains of building a business what do you do and demand outstripped supply and describe that viscerally that stress because it sounds i know it's it's an amazing story and it's super inspiring but it sounds uh almost too good to be true it's like the bunny walking down the fucking street you know what i mean but like it that what you said that you kind of said three or four times stress yeah describe the impact of the stress on you and how you how you how did you navigate that because those first few days sorry first few six twelve 18 months uh can can be kind of apparently stressful yeah and how did you navigate that i think that i had it's probably a good type of stress right so even though you might it's slightly overwhelming so there's just a lot of balls in the air which i was juggling overwhelming but equally you know that it's a good overwhelming so the result is is definitely positive that you've got these sales and it's really how do you solve the solution how do you increase capacity how do you make more growing it 100 year on year is um it's difficult you know comes with its with its set of challenges and and ultimately you know a more experienced or a slightly better operator probably could have increased capacity a lot or would have done a lot faster than me and and you know met that demand and grown the company bigger and faster and better than i have done but the way that i was restrained you know it took me a year and a half to hire a our first production people to help with bottling.

47:45I had a bit of help from my family. I was maybe a bit too slow at the beginning to really try and scale things up. And, you know, but equally, I don't know if it worked in my favor, always having this slight bottleneck of not being able to fulfill some of these orders, creating a little bit of buzz about our brand. Maybe, you know, these retailers saying can't get Tarquin's in stock. It's unavailable. we're on the waiting list it's coming in next week and then they tell their you know that word of mouth buzz because we were kind of this cult maybe not cult we were this independent brand very much one discovered by those pioneers the people willing to seek out these independent gin brands and and within that small community and that which had grown through facebook and facebook and eventually instagram maybe we you know inadvertently but you know we'd created this buzzes around the brand which helped fulfill you know which helped facilitate more sales growth the future so had i met that supply you know maybe maybe we would we would have flopped early doors i'm not sure maybe we'd be 10 times the size but the um i went to a pizza place called vincento's yeah in uh in a bit like crisp i've been to crisp in fulham have you heard of uh the crisp pizza no if you're in fulham it's well fulham hammersmith it's unbelievable pizza same vincennes is up in watford but they've got a thing and i went there they're like come have some pizza you know um you're doing the podcast and um they purposely only have 200 pizzas a day yes so i'm in this restaurant and i'm thinking that is a brave strategy yeah and the guy people are coming out i've traveled from crystal palace i've traveled from i can't remember somewhere else i've traveled somewhere and the guy is literally tom's name is it's like yeah sorry we're out today we sold out in two minutes and i was sat there having my pizza i was like this is genius like it's the whole scarcity thing you know people as soon as you think it's robert chardini's like weapons of influence like number one is number three is scarcity or whatever um but that is such great strategy because you want people create a hype around it when people finally do get their mitts on the pizza they're talking about it yeah and it's almost this little beautiful kind of alchemy of of hype if that's the right way of saying it yeah so i i had wondered if i'd created that by mistake and possibly it could have been the case and and um so as i said it was it was a probably a positive stress not be to put not i just remember i'd taken one of my first possibly my first holiday um that i'd take it maybe in year two of the business because i was very much doing it non-stop as i said seven days a week up to 12 hours a day and it was just you know i threw everything into this company i didn't really have any other responsibilities no wife no kids no mortgage it was just like this is what i'm doing um but i went on holiday with some friends and i remember and i maybe only reflected on this when they he told me my friend richard he was like an order came in i was checking my emails and i was like oh no and he was like what what's happened at work you know something terrible has happened he's like something you know stills fallen down something's broken down and i was like oh my i've got an order and he was like well what you know i had an export order for like a you know full pallet of 600 bottles say and i couldn't fulfill it because i knew it would tip us out of stock and um we're gonna go out of stock by the while i was abroad and you know all i was gonna do is have a backlog and be really really busy and he was you know he couldn't believe it he was like your biggest problem is that you can't you know that you've got an order he was like this is completely crazy it's like and i think that's when he told me he knew that I had a real business and was just like I think you're onto something here you know I think I told you at the time I don't think England needs another gin mate but you know when he saw that he was like you know I think you're doing something right so you know carry on you know I think you could be onto something and that's the kind you know that's the strip that's I don't know whether it sounds odd looking back at it but you know being slightly concerned when an order comes in is a sort of strange ironic kind of kind of feeling you know wish I had that feeling now is as we're bigger and suddenly you've got overheads and you need probably to hit a certain level of sales for that break even on a monthly basis so there's more um more strain or not strain there's more requirements within a business but then you know i had such low overhead it was it was a very different dynamic you know i think the the requirements and and um stresses of a business change as you as you mature but um but that you know i think we were extraordinarily lucky you know this was um we managed to do a lot of things quite right and out of the 300k yeah in that first year what where was that was that coming what was the split of that was it coming from bars restaurants retail um probably a good mix of um they call it on and off trade so on trade is typically um uh where you drink in the bar so bars restaurants hotels then off premise would be retailers um so that would have been a good mix of both so lots of independent wine shops those would have been our and farm shops those would have been our biggest retailers and then um we were very much weighted initially to the southwest so naturally you're going to sell on your doorstep um so lots of bars independent bars restaurants hotels and cornwall would supply wholesalers so you sell to a drinks wholesaler by the case and they break it down by the bottle they sell to bars by the bottle um and then we would sell direct via courier um to lots of these wine shops so we have these padded boxes if you're a challenger brand that's absolutely killing it in d2c but you're struggling to crack retail then you've got to listen to this maybe you've got a cardo listing maybe you've got a whole foods listing maybe you're absolutely killing it in selfridges maybe absolutely killing it in your farm shop and your indies but my friends making the leap.

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54:18Northstar are not like another data company that force Fiji data like Fuagua that act like a NASA space mission. It's super, super simple to use. Their team are amazing and they actually get the challenger mindset. Northstar are your shortcut to smarter decisions, stronger pitches and investor confidence all built specifically for challenger brands like yours you don't need a massive sales team you need north star link in the show notes click that link and you'll be able to book a free demo with north star highly highly recommend that and thank me later they can you know you can ship them across the country quite easily and so probably a 50 50 split um in the beginning and it probably stayed that way um all the way until covid really for the how many years is that COVID 2020 for seven years we're probably half on trade half off trade what I found super kind of intriguing is how this distribution you again whether whether you meant to or not but the constraining by distribute uh by geography was kind of interesting because obviously for people who come to cornwall tarquin's is literally ubiquitous you go you go to the boozes it's the tarquin's umbrellas you see it you know you've got seven shops uh physical retail stores you see like the blue in my eyes this is before you know kind of very early days the podcast way before we'd even met was i i was like fucking hell tarquin's is kind of synonymous with cornwall and i think there's a genius in terms of this constraint thing again of like i think chris d was the found worked at he was ceo of harrods and um old ceo of booths yeah think and he was saying brands early stage brands want to go and class the whole country which is which can work if you can go gangbusters have the money to do it but also there's there's the constraining by geography with here obviously cornwall and in doing so you build this distribution density which is almost this this kind of hot furnace and i think as we were saying beforehand it's like the whole seth golden thing of if i give you some purple dark uh dye or tie dye dye it's much easier everyone wants to go and try and put that purple dye in an ocean and make it go purple whereas actually if you try and just do do a swimming pool bang you can get this explosive kind of awareness in one burning hot place yeah and then from there can can spread it across the country um and i think you guys have done that super well so so you what was the hardest day in that in that um in fact maybe not that that first bit because it seems i always believe when people i speak to people there's there's there's a period of momentum and it either comes right off the bat like yourself yeah it comes three years in but it can sometimes come seven, eight years in there's a period of momentum that just and when you've got momentum things are a piece of not a piece of piss, nothing's a piece of piss but like it's not as solves a lot of problems it solves a lot of problems what have been the periods when it's kind of gone not necessarily, what's been the hardest day in this ten years where you've gone fuck me, why am I doing this um that is a good question i think we've had a few road blip you know road bumps you seem very you know a few road bumps over here i'm thinking bloody hell i just remember i remember the planning process of starting up a distillery and what i learned you know i learned i didn't know much obviously i didn't know anything about business because i was starting my first one but i learned that you get a you know it's an endless you're dealing with a lot of problems a lot of unexpected problems that you can plan as much as you want but you're going to get issues along the way and it's i think within the operations department of a business that's really what you're doing you're problem solving and really most of those problems come with um financial cost really you know this doesn't work it's going to cost you an extra five grand you're like okay so you kind of you have to develop almost a sense of humor and you know face these problems as positively as you can and um you know be happy with the solutions and you kind of have to be quite

58:38have a bit of initiative perhaps or you know be willing to evolve and adapt so i remember the first big issue we came across was when our bottle we used to um have a stock bottle for our gin went out of stock so this was a stock bottle stock so it's in a catalog it's a bottle which is sold to you know dozens of suppliers around the world um it's just a bottle as opposed to a custom bottle where you get it made specifically for you it's your own mold it might say tarquin's on it this was just a generic bottle yeah um which it was technically it was a cognac bottle from france i bought it from a big french company came from cognac was manufactured in france you would have seen it on the market probably in in cognac brands and i wanted something disruptive that no one else used so i got this this bottle um and i go to my supplier one day and say hi can i order three pallets of bottles maybe say that's three thousand bottles and he said unfortunately we don't have any available for you and you know i didn't even realize this this could have been a problem it was like what do you mean you don't have any of these bottles it's like okay the factory has run out of stock and they're not producing any for three more months it's like well that doesn't really work for me if i don't have any bottles my business shuts down like what am i gonna do and he's like that's not my problem mate you know i would take a forecast from you but you're too small you're buffer stock and i was like what do you mean he's like your levels of volume is so small you're just like buffer you'll buffer around the forecast effectively and at that moment i was like oh my god you know so i think that was a huge that was a moment where I thought it could end.

1:00:16It was like, if I got no bottles, it's kind of game over. Three months with no sales. It's three loss-making months of all your overhead. Potentially, can you rebuild your brand from going out of stock? I didn't really know what would happen. It was the summer, which was our peak season. What year is this? This is really early, maybe 2015, potentially. Possibly 2016. So how did you go about solving that? Because the one thing we're going to get onto to is i i think the way you crack d to c during lockdown was some fucking prison break shit mate thank you so one thing that in my kind of uh research talk with of you mate is this ability your your ability to solve problems and look at things is is very unique um and the the way you kind of crack the d to c from the brand when your brat was up against wall we're gonna we're gonna to get onto that but specifically with this this um standard bottle that's in the catalog you just run out of stock yeah can you kind of just understand like kind of the texture and the tapestry of the way your brain kind of looks at these problems i think this is probably a very more of an easy one to solve i mean ultimately you've got to probably put your gin in a different bottle does it need to look the same is it going to be the same color so you know i had to exhaust every avenue i got my one of my best friends who's half french fluent in french calling up all these other wholesalers in france do they have any in stock and no one seemed to and eventually i moved to something with a screw top which was slightly off white off clear it was slightly had an opaque sort of greeny tint and it was slightly unpleasant and the court wasn't you know the cap wasn't great and it was a terrible halfway house but it meant that we were still on the shelves people were still ordering it and we were able to swap them out um as soon as we got the real bottles in stock so it was disaster averted but I just remember you know being told that these bottles without you know felt like the end of the world to me at the time and but as I said you you kind of you know that you will be able to get over lots of these road bumps and it is just um having the patience and really trying to work through it if you could as you say there's a gazillion bumps in the road or blips and I think the framing of that is actually really shrewd um quite simple but sometimes the best things are simple as is is i i'm the worst at this i can sometimes think oh fucking hell the house panic the thoughts go a gazillion miles per hour everything's going pete tong what's the fucking point in doing it and it's actually just like they're just blips yeah if you could sum up and this can kind of be the uh the launch pad for the next part is is sum up in one sentence what your of all the problems you've had what is your your one problem solving sentence so that when i say someone listens to this it's it's all going pete tong out there kombucha or chocolate or uh crisps brand what would you say that is yeah um i i'm trying to think if what do i do if i have a terrible problem i think you know things get better with time i think time you know is a time is a bit of a healer ultimately and um I think if you feel, you know, it's good to remove yourself from the position and try and, you know, de-stress a little bit, do something relaxing or calming.

1:03:39I think in this day and age, it's probably spending time with my two boys, my toddlers, sort of reflecting on, you know, the bigger picture that it's, you know, ultimately we're just making, you know, we're making booze. This is a fun industry. This is, you know, I'm doing, I've got the world's best job. I make gin. You know, I'm able to have a, you know, a job in Cornwall. the most beautiful part of England, if not the world. And it's kind of, you know, if you can remove yourself from the initial problem and look at the bigger picture, I think you can tackle it a little bit more easily and break it down into what it is and try and just think of the clear solution.

1:04:16So, you know, obviously it's get a new bottle or, you know, I think we'll probably move on to COVID. That's another, probably the next big roadblock in our journey. So let's, so you, I think I read a post you said, my days of running Facebook ads from the sofa are over, sadly. Tell me about, as I say, it's like some mad prison break, kind of, just super, yeah, tell me about that. Tell me about being on the sofa running Facebook ads. Add some colour to that. So this is sort of COVID time. It's March 2020. What size the business is at this point? Probably around 5 million in sales, roughly speaking.

1:05:07And those are the majority of those wholesale and direct-to-retail sales split between wholesalers supplying the entree, the bars and restaurants, and then independent wine shops supplying the independent wine shops, which is the off-trade. About a 50-50 split. but lockdown was lockdown you know alcohol was you know bars and restaurants closed most retailers closed as well and I think obviously we were we were facing challenges the same as for most other businesses in the world but I think within the spirits industry it was a big question mark of what does one do now and it felt a little bit like that bottle scenario was like my business is shut I've got you know all these employees I probably had i don't know 20 maybe 30 employees 20 30 at that time um obviously we got the we got the furlough scheme that came out which was obviously fantastic i think we prior to that scheme we'd all voted to take half pay to sort of allow everyone to maintain their jobs in a leadership meeting but we didn't have to go down that route we managed to um a few people take furlough um and then a few people sort of keep the cogs and lights on and supply the channels when i say channels sales channels effectively that we're allowed to within the constraints of the government lockdown and that was very much direct to consumer so which we again we hadn't done it yet it just was it was on my list to-do list but we just we'd been so busy trying to fulfill these trade orders that we you know it sounds silly never really got around to to setting up our e-commerce store shipping direct to consumer i think we we'd focused on amazon um for two years prior and um we used to drive traffic to amazon and that's just what we did is is the halfway because the compromise but compromise because we hadn't set up our own website to sell sell direct to consumers it's just easier it was easier yeah it was easier and um it sort of had a bit of a benefit for us and you know unexpected benefit in covid as well so you know lockdown was announced and we knew we had to set up the site Shopify is amazing.

1:07:11You know, I know lots of brands use it and it's just the super user-friendly direct-to-consumer e-commerce platform. So we created a nice Shopify site, popped the page into our WordPress site and we're kind of off to the races. So we do all the picking and packing or we were doing all the picking and packing for our trade orders in-house. We didn't have any trade orders. Tell me what I want to get into is how you figured out how much you were make how much you could potentially make as this lucrative channel channel yeah i think that's that really adds some some yeah texture to your ability to solve problems so you went on and so i yeah it's a thing but you're ordering off your competitors so yeah so um so we set up our direct consumer channel um and we started selling and it was kind of how do you drive traffic to your website um so the first thing is really you know the whole world was on their phone eight hours a day or their computer at that time huge web traffic you know numbers you have never seen before because no one's no one's doing anything else um so learn about facebook ads this is when i talk about being on my sofa doing facebook ads you know i love marketing or i develop my love or sort of knowledge for marketing as i grew the brand and not you know really just passionate about it um so i set these you know i use the facebook ads app or ads manager app did all these all on your phone all on my phone yeah what were you what were some of the first three four ads um we just have we have this incredible photography so one of our strengths again is our is our product photography this beautiful lifestyle photography really capturing that coastal you know we're we i describe ourselves as an aspirational coastal lifestyle brand we have this generally you know if anyone hasn't seen please do you know on our instagram it sort of captures the spirit but this beautiful photography it translates really well in this digital rich media setting and so really all i had to do is post these lovely photos with a bit of comment you know it's like bring a slice of cornish sunshine you know lockdown deal you know throw it you buy a bottle and get a free bottle of tonic free delivery so gin tonic i'm good to go So I'm ready for this lockdown special.

1:09:24I spend a bit of money on these ads. And suddenly, you know, you get huge returns. So I quickly realized what I worked out how to do was watching videos online, reading blogs on best practice. And sort of taught myself in a week or so. And we started spending about£1 ,000 up to maybe some days,£1 ,500 a day on ads. And they would get multiple returns on investment. So, you know, five, six, seven, seven times return on ad spend at its peak. um but how did i know that this was a decent channel honestly i saw another brand on linkedin with their d2c um orders you know done for the day they post a happy pic with you know three large um what are they three large not pallets they're almost like they're shopping trolleys of boxes they're sending out to their consumers i'm like oh my god you know they're doing really well it's like you know we should be doing that well or can we do better and it kind of is that i wouldn't say I'm super competitive but I do like to see what my competitors are up to so it's those you've got this fight five simple steps to see how much your competitors are selling online or any company one order the cheapest item off their website two wait one week one month one quarter or longer three order the cheapest item from their website again subtract your first confirmation order number from your second number do this as often as you want as many companies like pop it in a chart um and And then you add in an assumption of order value, say, 45 gross per order.

1:10:54And then that gives you a good average on what they're selling. Yeah, definitely. So it was kind of, it just kind of clicked, really. So I was keen to see how we were doing. So we got up to about 2 million run rate of sales, direct-to-consumer, pretty much in the first few months for annual sales. So you built it to 2 million in a couple of months. Run rate for the year, yeah. so we do in the first two yeah so within the first we did get to two million in the end so yeah for year one of direct to consumer sales was about two million in sales year two was about two million as well so that was the leftover was was since the covid lap has that petered out kind of it is it is down on that yeah we still maintain yeah yeah it was a covid boom definitely the covid boom so um but the channels have readjusted as things have opened up those sales are coming from elsewhere effectively sure um but yeah i was really keen to see how we were performing and how other brands were doing you know should i be spending more on ads should i be more aggressive in our in our digital marketing um and always just keen to see where you benchmark you can't really get sales data for independent brands you can get retail you know aggregate sales data from supermarkets but that's that's not really my cohort that's the kind of gordons and and co so what i would do is as you suggested you know there's sequential order numbers on typically on shopify and other e-commerce platforms like woocommerce so it is really it's very simple you can literally order make two orders over a period of time and subtract your order numbers and that's pretty much how many orders they've taken between those two points of time i know roughly or i knew roughly how much a spirits company would make per transaction probably about 45 pounds depending if they've got lots of products on their site um so i could pretty much estimate it the actual value if not i could estimate the items and so what i learned in that first year we were doing about four times as much online sales as um one of our you know the leader in our in our um uh or bigger brands a lot bigger brand than us we've said about four times as much as them and twice as much as another brand that i we were aspiring towards as well um and then maybe they were in supermarkets and that's where they were selling a lot of their gin but i've you know that moment it's not necessarily helpful to be competitive you know it doesn't make you do anything differently it doesn't affect you know your own performance but it definitely gave us a bit of again a bit of validation i felt really proud about what we've we had managed to achieve as a team and knew that we were doing you know pretty well um and that we we didn't need to be more aggressive than where we were we were doing a fantastic job and it's kind of i think you should you know it's one of those definitely appreciate that moment of of having done a fantastic fantastic job and sort of celebrate with the team um and even amazon i'd mentioned that we'd been driving traffic to amazon for the past two years prior that had this extraordinary sort of bonus knock-on effect where um amazon has this algorithm where the more you sell the higher you're ranked the higher you're ranked the more you sell you know if you're on page one top three top five you know gins you're going to sell you know a hundred or a thousand times more than the the gin on page two page three page four kind of like you know google search results um so we had this enormous organic natural boost on amazon as again their traffic was probably up tenfold the non-COVID periods.

1:14:21People were drinking booze at home. They weren't drinking out. So we also saw that channel go double overnight. So we had suddenly, we were able to recapture our loss of 5 million and recoup that basically from Amazon and direct to consumer. And then as bars and restaurants started opening up as well, we had a growth year and we were up 30, 40 % year on year at the end of the first year of COVID, which is extraordinary. So this scenario where the company could have folded or end you know somehow and it was it was lucky that we made these decisions we managed to end you know emerge from it in a stronger place as a company which was which i mean feels feels quite extraordinary but it could have gone two ways you know we could have hunkered down for that year or two years and be like we're going to ride this out we're going to be really lean we're not spending anything on marketing and wait till the on trade reopens so in hindsight it's very easy to say you know our strategy was to diversify and channel and we knew that we needed to sort of focus our energies on direct to consumer and we needed to um do this and that but it's kind of it kind of worked out that way but i wouldn't say that i sat down in a strategy meeting with with a with a very clear plan of what we what we needed to do we just kind of did it reactively instinctively and it kind of worked out quite well so it's kind of you know i think in in hindsight it feels like a great play but at the time it was very much survival and we luckily feels like we've made the right moves what were some of those learnings that on the d2c journey in terms of getting to two million so say say i'm trying to start sell hungry merch or something like that or hungry crumpets yes i've always thought about a challenger crumpet brand yes nice because i love i like it yeah yeah yeah yeah bagel brand to take yeah yeah new york bagel nice one day i think i will eventually get the itch to do that but so i'm trying to sell my bagels or crumpets online or cragles yeah yeah don't worry that's not getting picked up okay what are some of the one to three things that you think double down on those to really get this fucker going i think that that at the time of covid everything aligned so sorry this is covid yeah this is post covid now d2c what would i do yeah okay so now i definitely say the landscape is harder than it was back then so so what success we had to to re impossible to recreate those you know the scenario where everyone's online we do we've launched since tarquins we've launched new brands so we launched twin fin and rum in 2020 which was a covid brand so we managed to grow that quite well and then we've launched our vodka called connie glaze vodka um in the summer autumn of 2023 so that is new so we are um we're very keen on d2c i love it personally and we're starting from scratch so i'm i can almost try and use this connie glaze as a case study and my one you know it's not easy i would say that's the first the first thing it's not how it used to be you know the glory day the good old days are i wouldn't say that over but it's definitely more challenging challenging how so to i suppose ultimately to win those sales on your site so um you know where do you find a stranger on the internet to sort of how does someone land on your website to buy your product so there has to be obviously as little friction as possible you know first of all you've got to get them on the website so for us we probably it's probably facebook ads it's probably one of the biggest drivers um facebook ad that still goes on instagram still yeah still goes on instagram yeah so a meta app mad i guess so we're big on meta ads it ties in with our community probably quite well as well demographic as spirits drinkers um so you need really good content and content is king and you can talk about all the different metrics of conversion and you know impressions but really none of them matter apart from the quality of your content and you need something which you know resonates with your target customer and is something that they're interested in which is difficult to get right so you need either you know beautiful imagery or video or very clever you know very clever copy a mixture of the three and if you can get that right you can increase your chances of success pretty significantly What's the best ad with those three things working in like a gorgeous symphony?

1:18:57So we find a lot of, you know, everyone's into short form video. And I think that maybe is probably younger demographic. We probably get the highest conversion success on single image, just beautiful imagery. And as I said, we're an aspirational brand. So it's probably something coastal related, possibly pouring a drink and getting for us because we're an alcohol brand. So it's something aspirational. if you're sitting in a desk on a rainy day in a busy metropolitan city, you want to transport yourself to have a slice of Cornish sunshine and you might jump onto the website. And then if there's free delivery and if the price is right compared to Amazon and competitors, I might convert and buy a bottle.

1:19:42But it's definitely to get that consumer into the funnel and down to the conversion. It's more expensive than it used to be in terms of advertising or meta. so it probably shouldn't be the sole source of traffic how you convert what are the things you can do to come as they get to help convert as they just things like free i suppose it's like free delivery so no one wants to pay for the delivery in this day absorb that yeah you have to absorb that um you don't really want to compete with your customers either so you don't want to sell at a price lower than your your retail customers um because they might be a little bit angry that you're out selling them you've got to give them a chance so you're not necessarily going to be the cheapest on your own side as well so you've got to you've got to tackle that as you add a load of freebies because i interviewed a guy from from brand called space goods yeah and again i literally i don't i know nothing about d2c i just find it interesting as because he basically said the more products you have some more skews um the the more you can bring up your is it the average order spend which brings down the cac or something yeah yeah yeah it's all yeah i think yeah freebies gifts with purchases are a great way to do that it's less competitive on pure price um but yeah i think one i suppose it has to be as creative as possible to drive that traffic and that's i'm not the expert in in tiktok and viral videos but that's probably you know partnerships collaborations with other brands but really the big thing is now email is probably our bigger driver of revenue these days i think for brands which you know brands which have lived through covid such as our jit tarquins have a fantastic email database you know over 100 000 customers really engaged customers ones who are you know they've they've used our website they love using our website they hopefully they feel loyal to the brand and we can really drive sales through there but equally for a new brand you've got to build that mailing list again so you're the yeah there's that's there's sorry to interrupt there's two things on that because i think uh so i've i've got someone now on board who helps with my tiktok for the podcast but it doesn't convert like notoriously tiktok is great for your ego but doesn't actually convert to downloads and i've heard from again from up brands is it's you could get a post sorry a tiktok video that gets you know half a million views yeah but it doesn't convert so it's just kind of vanatory metrics yes and the more i'm thinking about it is again this is coming up from uh oshan rogers from the devonshire i said uh we're talking about oscar wilde tangential here but he's got a quote which is everything popular is wrong yeah and i was like well what do you think everything popular is wrong is and he was basically saying that there's trends are kind of bottomless and futile because they they they pass and i'm thinking with tiktok and your your story talk when of how you're driving sales it's okay well that they do work in some respects you had the trend of the you know covid yeah if you boil it down what is timeless so so washing awesome thinks how do we build a timeless pub and i want to talk about how we build a timeless brand yeah you think well one thing that hasn't ever gone away is email marketing yes because the the depth of connection with someone it's permission marketing is what seth godin says it's you know i'm giving you permission to my email box my most kind of clandestine thing you can get access on and yeah i think that can be really beneficial for for people listening to this is in a world that is jumping so much with the whole attention piece yeah one that kind of will never move change that much is your email inbox yeah i think i think yeah you probably hit the nail on the on the head and um we yeah we're we're very big into email and i think that the only difficulty with a new brand is acquiring those you know you're still acquiring that audience acquiring those customers one by one and you can do that online again probably by partnerships with other brands similar community um with more meta ads you could acquire email addresses that way does that work uh we don't do it that much it probably might someone might get it to work well it's probably expensive and you know i uh yeah you know people might look into lifetime acquisition you know lifetime value to a you know customer but it's expensive and i think i'm always keen on lots of trial and error and you know does it work does it not no we'll try it again is it our copy is it our timing what's going wrong and we'll try and refigure out but sometimes in the body of the copy in the body of the copy of the computer in the body of the email what is some of the copy that's really converted to sales and that's kind of part one and then part two how do you build that human connection with people um i think people have for us ultimately we're a i say craft or small batch distillery we do make gin in small batches um so what we're known for are limited editions and those convert phenomenally well where we do drops you know we'll drop a thousand bottles or 500 bottles of some fantastic seasonal hand forage um gin and that converts phenomenally well because it's almost like early access it's this community of of of subscribers get to get get these products before anyone else so those are phenomenally successful um but uh you know i think lots of brands get get particularly in the cost of living crisis they're very much leaning into deals you know pure whether it's gifts or or pure cash you know promotional offers very popular um but in terms of you know i think what is important to me is really be consistent with our brand messaging and make sure that it feels personal and really get across um that are you know our personality as well to the to the customer and make sure that it's content that they want so you know no one's gonna it's kind of some things that i do chat to our marketing team about and this isn't necessarily about email but it can apply and it's about posting on social media as well it's kind of you know no one's gonna remember no one remembers when you don't post so it's kind of it's talking about frequency of posting more or less you know don't post bad content for the sake of posting don't feel like you need to post once a week or twice a week or any moment of time that you know they're not going to remember whether you have posted but they will remember if they see a post they don't like and they see something they don't like they're going to unsubscribe and you'll lose them forever so it's kind of just making sure the quality of content is fantastic and that you you would be proud of it and it's kind of i have various internal benchmarks and you know if i'm sense checking something a brand that i think does a fantastic job and you mentioned that you you see you recognize our blue as a brand color and it's something that we've almost borrowed from verve clico their yellow or their orange and aperol does it with orange and you know um lots of other brands to an extent but verve clico and their yellow and they're probably best in class premium luxury brand lifestyle brand they're associated to events if i ask myself would verbally co write this or do this or you know six myth is even a good example they're a leader and they've got best practice in marketing would they do it and it's like if they if i think no they wouldn't i probably shouldn't be doing it either so i think you know having some um boundaries of what you post being consistent and staying true to brand guidelines is important um but then quickly just bouncing back in terms of acquiring email i think what is difficult it's not easy to build new brands but what we're doing is looking to acquire that acquire that offline as well so we've got these seven shops you know we have over a hundred thousand people passing through our shops every year um through our tours as well it's and it's about engaging with them to not only convert them to being fans of our products tarquin swinfin and connie glaze but also capture their email address and and chat to them online as well so i think again um part of our success if you like is is that we're very densely distributed in in cornwall um but a lot of you know i think several hundred thousand people live in cornwall but we also swell at peak season or school holidays um where we get i think over five million overnight visitors a year come on holiday to the county so if you're selling 200 bottles to the dog and duck pub down the road you know there's a good chance that if the majority of that is in the summer that you're not selling it to just Cornish people you're selling it to people from from London Manchester Birmingham Liverpool Newcastle so you can market and this is what we've we've sort of coined this phrase in-house as you can market to a national audience on a local level so and i think that is what has enabled us with tarquins to grow from you know me selling that first batch out of the boot of my car to the gunner's head to 2021 2022 we were the large i think 2022 um largest super premium gin brand which 35 pound prop 30 pound plus price point in the uk where we did something like half a million bottles so it's kind of it's kind of you know we've been able to market cost effectively to a national audience by advertising locally that kind of has a bit of a ring to it and then we we use digital marketing to follow people back along the m4 m5 m6 motorway corridors around the rest of the uk and what we coined this as a marketing phenomenon we call it the doom bar effect so there's a there's a car scale brand called doom bar which grew from a micro breweries in the 90s or 80s when it started up in rock which is a village just the other side of the camel river to us it grew to become 150 million pound retail sales brand or sales brand by retail value in the uk the largest car scale brand so this tiny cornish brewery became the you know the number one player in the uk and it really did that via consistent marketing and just really solid distribution working from cornwall outwards along those key arteries to the rest of the country really leaning on that that that core foundation of visitors to the region and it sounds um i don't know whether it sounds simple or it's simple effectively um but probably quite complicated in how it works but yeah you know market locally and then follow everyone back to their home i'm just trying to think of for other brands like does that strategy work because of cornwall i i e like i i love the whole you know what i think you've done very well is is build brand depth through the classes through the tours we've seen today yeah but the one of the advent and advantages of being down here is that you have the swell of cornwall during the summers i'm just i'm just trying to think how does a brand who's based in milton keens for example is it possible do you know i think it's harder yeah no i think we've got an amazing tailwind you know i think we've got fantastic advantage of location not only as i said the natural the local community is incredibly supportive of locally made products um so they they've been a you know huge supporters of the brand from the very beginning you know these are the guys who own wine shops you know writing me checks up front being like thank you so much for you know seeing me hand delivering it or my dad would deliver it and yeah but then but then again like there's probably gin brands but the strategy does work for like you know there's probably gin brands based up in uh the lake district yeah yeah you know so certain i do still think you've got done a fucking amazing job and i think the brand i've i did i've got a piece which i wrote in my newsletter between uh brand depth and brand awareness people wank over brand awareness it's the top line figures and i believe brand awareness builds meek fans yes whereas brand depth which is doing things that don't scale which is the tour i saw today there's eight people here yeah eight people are going around there's a depth of connection to you as a brand and that and i think what you guys have done through constraining geography and constraining kind of building this you know putting the purple dye in the swimming pool not the ocean and then what you said there about using the arteries of the m4 m5 m6 whatever to push the brand outwards is is is delicious what what um let's talk about the bottle because again it's beautiful and uh yeah perry talks about this thing from perry from big fish he did loads of brands yeah he actually did sip smith yeah yeah i remember i chatted to them actually for my refresh i think they're out of my budget out of my price range yes but um but yeah they're one of the top love of their work oh yeah i think i've i've read about i think i've watched a a clip on is it pack for tising or pack your tising or something and i think it's it's genius and it's the premise of it is you can spend all your money in the world on atl campaigns but ultimately i think someone said to me said i think giles brooks said this to me 90 of the sales come from the shelf edge in in grocery at least yeah so 80 20 rule put your money and you're bend where it's actually going to move the needle and actually that is the best salesman in the world and i think it looks absolutely gorgeous talk to me about what i don't know if you've got any pictures of what it used to look like um yeah i've got is there any this is this is a limited edition but it used to look like that but change the color that's the wrong but so it's It still had the wax in.

1:33:33The wax was blue. It's the same colour. The one in the second. That's the bottle, but it used to be blue wax and black label. So look, I mean, very rustic. But the wax was still... Yeah, we always had the wax. What's the why behind the wax? So the wax is kind of when I start, you need a tamper-proof seal. so that's legally for any you know container of of drink and use a tamper proof seal so that could be a ribbon you know a ribbon strip a plastic seal um and it could be a wax dip and i was very much inspired by some of these really cool crafty brands in the states and i had a literally a pinterest mood board that i shared with these brand designers um which had a wax dip and um it just naturally over the course of design got exaggerated and because of the peculiar you know because the wine cognac shape of our bottle um it flowed quite nicely with a drip as well so it kind of um it became a key part of what we do in it you know it's almost iconic pops out on a back bar if the lighting's good and you can kind of recognize they've got tarquins listed quite easily um and it has this sense of theater when you open it as well we have these little ribbon strips underneath you can pop the cork and it's just super cool it definitely and as each wax strip is essentially different because yeah yeah i think because i i actually this is i remember being down and there's a farm shop in bristol and i was sampling next to one of your um guys back this is oh nice i'm talking yeah this is before covid yeah so but i i just thought and this is probably my naivety is that it was just a kind of rinse and repeat yeah yeah yeah and i think is actually the fact that each one we've seen it downstairs is hand dipped hand you know yeah Yeah, each one is unique.

1:35:25And I think the packaging is meant to reflect the care and attention that goes into creating each bottle. That was very much the brief when I started. And it's wax dipped. It's sort of ribbon by hand as well. The label features this unique batch character tasting note. So we highlight the lead tasting note of each batch and that gets popped on. So it's kind of, it's meant to look a little bit, you know, it was meant to be a little bit disruptive when we started. I didn't want it to look like any other gin on the shelf. So I did. I wasn't by no means an expert in marketing, but I knew I didn't want it to be in a green, slightly cuboid bottle.

1:36:02So, yeah, and equally, as we refresh the brand in 2018, we could add those additional features as our brand had developed. As I say, I talk about us being a coastal brand. So our bottle is pretty much what we describe it as in sea glass. It's designed to look as if it's almost just washed up on a beach in Cornwall. it's got this puffin which is an icon flying with a sprig of juniper in its mouth it's got waves at the bottom and in Cornish at the bottom it says bottoms up or cheers in Cornish so you turn the bottle upside down it says Jagerstar so it's kind of it's it's it's meant to be disruptive to an extent and it is wacky and I think you know some people love it some people don't love it don't you know they might hate it and i it's kind of you can never please everyone that's what you want um and i think that it has definitely served us well without those big deep pockets for marketing and above the line campaigns never done an above the line campaign never never done a fancy billboard other than you know a billboard on the back of a van and cornwall by roundabout that's that's as above the line as we go but um i think uh it's definitely fared us well and it definitely helps sway that decision for them to pick it off the shelf but we really do you know i think it really is that product quality as well i genuinely think we make the most delicious gin in the world it's sort of beautifully zesty um floral it's beautifully fresh and um it's just you know it does get that second sale that really difficult second repeat business we've managed to build this community and and and that's what you know that packaging helps get that first sale the liquid definitely helps get the second third fourth fifth sale and um i think that has been the driver of our growth over the past decade is is definitely product product product product is key the what I want to talk about is if I can find it yeah what would you do if you brought Pimms off Diageo here's five things I'd do to turn this legacy brand into a cash cash cow one earn an extra 3 million per year, two spend this 3 million on 7 endorsement, three revamp the jug four bring you Wimbledon sponsorship as headline partner five everything everywhere all at once so this is a LinkedIn post you wrote and I thought it was brilliant yeah thanks just just unpack or uh bolster on some some some bits to each of those points so so yeah firstly what made you write that I thought it was brilliant so in the news and apparently it might be incorrect it was reported in the financial news of um a leading newspaper that pims might be looking pims was looking to offload diazio and they'd appointed investment bankers to sell it wait put pims owned pims is owned by diazio they were trying to get rid of diazio no diazio was trying to sell pims allegedly so this was this was the news article the diazio what the one of the world's largest drinks companies you know owns owns gordon's tanqueray johnny walker they're looking to sell Pimm's which is one of their brands um it's obviously a huge brand in the UK not so huge outside of the UK it's very seasonal it's really big summer doesn't really sell much in the winter so I guess these are the strategic reason reasons why they might want to um offload it so they can potentially focus on something else this is what was reported so in response to that um you know naturally I'm just very enthusiastic about the drinks business I have a lot of ideas for our own company but it almost feels easier to be you know it's easier to be to give someone else advice as to what they should do you know it's easier to have the idea than to execute so doing what i suggested is probably hard but for pims is a brand which i love and it's iconic so i just had to think you know who is going to buy it and and subsequently i heard after i wrote this post on linkedin there was it's not and never was for sale apparently so i don't know i don't know why it came out of the news um but it's kind of i like the challenge of what would i do with this legacy british brand which is being you know i wouldn't say you know which is which is no longer as popular as it was a decade ago where aperol is coming in and taking a lot of its drink you know a lot of its shares the same drinking occasion and aperol is taking some of its share i would imagine um probably quite significantly um so it's kind of like what would i do if i own pimps i can't afford pimps i'm sure it's worth hundreds of millions of pounds if they were to sell it um but what would i do if i did and first um just a quirk of alcohol duty so excise duty the tax on alcohol in the uk is phenomenally expensive um it's about eight nine pounds a bottle on the average 37.5 or 42 percent what's it in say other countries um it might be half it might be even less than half it could it could be more so in australia it's actually higher than ours there are one or two countries where it's more but we're one of the highest in europe why is it so why um ultimately that you know the idea is to get people drinking less alcohol so that's that's the thing to raise or to raise to raise tax revenues ultimately as well so you're killing you know you're solving a social issue potentially whilst increasing your tax receipts so it's kind of in the eyes of the chancellor you know it's kind of a win-win put up alcohol duty no no problems um so there was the largest increase in alcohol duty that we've had for decades last summer in august um not only did they increase it by about 10 percent uh not only did they increase it by about 10 percent they made a tiered system so they um alcohol at lower abvs below at 22 percent or below pays a lower rate than alcohol at higher abvs to try and get you to drink more moderate um products so spirits it's a tax at a higher rate than liqueurs or lower ABV products.

1:42:11So there's this magic, sorry, it's a bit technical, but there's this magic number at 22 % alcohol by ABV, you're paying something like one or two, I can't remember what I said, one or two pounds less per bottle in tax. PIMS is at 25%. If they change their ABV to 22%, they would save several million pounds a year based on their sales volume of numbers on excise duty payments, basically. So overnight, they could, you know, by just simple recipe change, they could save three million quid a year. That was my first suggestion. And lots of brands have done that in the market. They have genuinely lowered their ABV.

1:42:47And I was very amazed. I was genuinely surprised to see that Pimps hadn't done it because lots of people have made that move. So that would be my number one. My number two would probably be to get a celebrity endorsement. I think it's a great brand. It has a fantastic brand awareness. I think awareness in the UK is something like 80 % of drinkers. People know PIMS. They're just not necessarily drinking it. So it's how do you get it cool again? Margot Robbie, probably the most, you know, in number one female celebrity in the world. She's not British because we want it to resonate with non-British drinkers.

1:43:17She's Australian. She's also obviously a Hollywood star. So you can potentially nail the Australians, the Americans and the Brits all in one. It's probably a lot more than three million pounds for a deal, but who knows? and then i think it's all about that sense of occasion so we again are trying to think of another reason of our success over the over the years with our gin and it was one of something we did quite well was this copper glass we did it um it's like a wine glass i don't know whether everyone drinks gin and tonics in these large wine glasses now it came came from spain but we we invested our market our small marketing budget in 2014 2015 our first few years into glassware that's what we did um i think pimps should do the same so they need to really get some when you say glassware that's what the consumer would drink in a pub yeah sorry so you give this glassware effectively free to bars and restaurants has your brand name on it they then um you know it's the stuff which gets stolen you know like a guinness cup but or a tarquin's gin and tonic glass they drink it out of your your perfect glassware and then hopefully they take a photo of it they pop on instagram um and you get that bit of virality through it as well or you know it happened to me i the first time i saw someone drink a gin and tonic in a copper glass this large wine style glass with loads of ice so a copper glass isn't made of copper no no sorry i'm saying copper i'm saying the wrong word it's like a burgundy glass basically really big oversized wine glass fish bowl not a fish bowl you get a napper but like yeah i know what you mean i call it fish bowl exactly you fucking hold it like that yeah yeah exactly you hold it like that it holds you know it can hold a pint of liquid you fill it to the top with ice get a huge garnish that changed the way it tastes as well definitely and it's got a phenomenal sense of occasion i remember i first saw one before i started up the distillery um and it was a tanker and i saw someone order this clear drink with ice in it in this glass with it and i was just like what is that and they were like it's a gin and tonic i was like a gin and tonic obviously i had to have one you know my friends ordered one it was just like this is the coolest thing i've ever seen you know no wonder people you know people went absolutely crazy for drinking gin and tonic because it revolutionized the experience and it was you suddenly felt comfortable you know i'm very happy to pay 10 pounds for a double gin and tonic this is a drink that i can savor enjoy i feel proud to drink and i think i think that's kind of it's definitely what pims needs you know you've got this jug um you've got Aperol kind of did it as well with their own glassware, kind of.

1:45:47Aperol have definitely done it. And I think Aperol's success. Because Aperol's like a standard wine, isn't it? Yeah, it's in a wine glass. And I think of Pim as in the context of Aperol. So Aperol is a digitally rich kind of... The photos... Aperol's bright orange, okay? It works in the 21st century. You know, it works in this day and age of social media. is a social media first brand it's a bright orange drink it it pops out in every photo you take it looks good photos well on instagram and tiktok etc etc it is ideal to go viral and share okay so that is part of definitely i wouldn't say it's the driver of its success but it is part of it and why people you know very keen to take photos of it pims is brown and it's served in a jug okay we're gonna we're gonna the benefit of pims compared to april is it's served in a jug you're selling four drinks in one go it's like that's an absolute winner um you know you should be able to do huge volumes if you get people wanting to drink it so i would make a custom jug and i'm just you know get jay-z again i'm just throwing stupid ideas out of course yeah jay-z not jay-z get um kanye west to design the jug pay him you know whatever and you've got the coolest jug and it has to be as i said social media first whatever you're making for that kind of a brand you need you know it must be photographed you want to create invoke a reaction from your audience that they have to take a photo and share it and post it on whatever you know platform they are what they're on and and get a bit of virality and i think the issue again it has to compensate with the fact that prims is brown prims isn't bright orange it's not pink like pink gin had the boom again you know match the color of people's clothes their dresses their summery you know summery shirts and stuff you kind of i think it needs to play you know the red and the white with the brand i think you need to lean in that in in on that somehow because that's see that it evokes the british kind of gentleman and yeah definitely and and lady as yeah yeah i think color having a a clear color connection a visual emotive connection to a brand is really important yeah as i said you know berkeley co yellow pit aferol orange tarquin's blue but you know it is really important and that clear brand recognition really sets some brands ahead of others in terms of recall and it is that recall which helps you you know drives that sale at a bar or in a store um but yeah pims needs a cool jug i think you know fruit helps in the in the brown drink i love it yeah i wish the sun was out i would absolutely smash a pims right now um but yeah the three and four were new wimbledon sponsorship and everything everywhere all at once so new wimbledon sponsorship is just you know defensive you know they should own wimbledon you imagine if aperol got wimbledon again it comes down to my benchmark what would this brand do or would another one i do is what would i do if insert biggest competitor's name here they got it instead and i do this sometimes with opportunities sales opportunities if you get offered something and you know you're going to lose money on it for example would i be annoyed if someone else got it and if they would if i would be annoyed i'd probably do it and if i wouldn't you know if someone else did it um and i knew they were going to lose x amount of thousands of pounds you know i might i'd be happy to let them so it's that sense i wouldn't let aperell take take pimp uh wimbledon and then last year everything everywhere all at once it's kind of a it's a sales phrase which comes from someone um in the industry almost like a a bit of a legend within the spirits industry and it was it's his method of launching brands um it's the guy um the guy who started malfi gin um i don't know if you've seen that one it's an italian gin brand and he's got dozens of brands he's like responsible for um working for different companies for launching helping launch kraken help rum helping launch hendrix gin when he worked at that company so he's amazingly sort of a creative marketing genius and his phrase is everything everywhere all at once his name it's called Elwyn Gladstone Elwyn English keys are all I think so, he lives in the States I think he's English English American but yeah that was his we haven't got the deep pockets or budgets big budgets of a Diageo or a Pernod Ricard, we can't persist with a brand for many many many many years waiting for it to work or waiting for that timing to be right, it's kind of try everything in all markets all at once and learn as quickly as you can to see what works where and why and try and fine-tune from there and if it doesn't work it doesn't work you should probably give up and and and do something different so it's kind of it's kind of it's really it's probably more suitable for challenger brands than that and you know it's maybe it's a variation of lots of different things in tech but it's kind of um uh it's basically you know sell pimps to every country you can you know to any retailer to everywhere all at once and see what works and try and try and fine-tune your your marketing or sales approach from there and um and equally if it works fantastic if it doesn't work uh yeah it's a bit of a disaster say i was to say you we've talked a lot about how you've built this with beautifully constrained budgets yeah and i think the pack for tising the distribution density geography shackling the geography building this these diehard fans focusing on the product all these things say i was to give you unlimited dough right and you could get the tarquins uh what say what what event would you say you're going to spend three million on a celeb endorsement what would you do say you're going to revamp something maybe if you were to create your own pub for example yeah or create your own thing what would you do um what would be your headline what would be your headline partner if money was no no object i'd go daniel craig's my celeb probably yes you've been a cool you know you got james bond effectively yes he's done a lot with um uh belvedere vodka for for moat hennessey so lvmh he's probably tied up but he'd probably be my number one for our for our talk when's gin um i would realistically we'd probably just increase our efforts in sales and marketing that's probably where you know we'd look to expand to more countries really give america a bit more of a push than we are currently with bigger budgets deeper pockets and investing in that sales resource so literally a team um and then i say marketing resource we're always where you know i think particularly in this market or cost of living crisis i think we're we're not we're probably emerging from recession but typically brands focus more on the trade marketing stuff which is like point of sale which is things like free glassware advertising at the point of sale working with your your customers whether that's a supermarket or a pub group working with them to invest with them on clever ways to drive that conversion for your brand and that's really where lots of brands like ourselves spend the majority of their money at the moment and those brand awareness pieces those nice to haves um they're the things which are getting funneled towards stuff with clear ROI you know clear return on investment in theory you know if you spend five one hundred pounds a thousand ten thousand pounds what you might get out of it um is measurable so I think you know investing cleverly still working with trade partners and and growing our brand that way is key and then sampling is is really everything how can you build that deep connection as you were talking about with your customer and it's something again that is easy to analyze in hindsight it's probably what we've done well with our tarquin's gin over the last decade it wasn't an overnight success we had fantastic growth rates for the first you know for the first five years you know huge 100 year on year but it's still from a low base compared to much bigger companies and so it has been it still feels like this more of a an organic journey winning over customers and accounts one by one and building that community um over a decade as you know we didn't go from naught to 10 million in one year by any means and there are brands that do you know there are celebrity brands that might go from to 50 million in a year or you know the rocks tequila or you know so i i think um taking that same approach but on a on a grander scale is it would be great and also to invest in our new brands so we have twin friend rum and we've got connie glazed vodka it would be great to turbo charge those a little bit as well with with additional resource but um mkj ignite are a team of experienced recruiters who specialize in the challenger brand space they recruit for over 50 brands ranging from pre-revenue startups right through to some award-winning brands such as real Superfoods and Purdy and Fig.

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1:55:13are you looking at to turbocharge your brand take it to another level save money save energy save stress save time well i've got the perfect thing for you i am delighted to announce that hc brands formerly hc consulting my boy harry clark has just launched a commercial growth accelerator program designed specifically for challenge food and drink brands and you can upskill your commercial team they've got so many modules you can hand pick them we can do the full shebang in a safe hours of research you're going to get the tools to turbocharge your growth get better clarity on your brand's objectives and directions and look harry's worked with some amazing brands holy moly islands savile and rooted drinks he's really helped me with a strategy for hungry yeah if you're looking to turbocharge your brand link in the show notes and you're going to be able to do that easy peasy lemon squeezy understanding how yeah how how you work I my friend funnily enough I don't you know him Dom has got a brand called Allura which is to take on Aperol and I wrote a piece about it being like why Aperol may have shot themselves in the foot and he gave, I got a lot of flack for it basically I had loads of people being like you can't pay that and then loads of people unsubscribed from the newsletter yeah yeah I mean the whole point is it was kind of meant to be divisive but well not even divisive I interviewed Dom on the podcast sorry Dom on the podcast and um he was giving some really good reasons so like allura april so they've got those semiotics so the it's quite an easy switch for the customer yes same occasion but it's an easier pour for the staff so it's less i think with april it's like three parts something yeah yeah everyone lamb asked me for that they're like oh no one cares you know no one cares yeah i think the margins they make more margin allura make more margin per thing sold for the for the pub yeah oh yeah yeah yeah um but but what if yeah and the italian is kind of like this italian uh branding yeah yeah kind of imagine limichello but like a spritz what would some of the things knowing what you know and using that as an example like how would you think they could take on aperol again all all um with limited budgets that is yeah because i think that could paint a picture and tell a story for lots of other brands.

1:57:33I think it sounds like they're taking it from a very commercial customer or customer-focused perspective, which is definitely the right thing to do. So in this economic climate, they're providing a commercial reason for the bar or pub to list it. They're providing increased profit margins. Profitability is very key, particularly in this climate, which is fantastic. And I think it's a bright yellow drink, right? you know the spritzes are very much in so they're bang on trend people always talk about category data and it's very important that you're sort of that relates very much to timing really you know they're at they're at the right time for the spritz um i think taking on aperol is is definitely a tricky one i think um uh by by by offering a fantastic alternative in that drinking occasion which is aperitif spritz um i think they've hit the nail on the head so you know i think I think lemon spritzes are in this summer and um you know it's got a long way to go and I think you know everything is cyclical okay Aperol is in as well and it's it's been building for the last decade and um I'm sure it's got another you know good decade to run as well particularly within the UK um but at some point in time maybe in 20 years it will be the pip you know who is Aperol looking to off is Campari looking to offload Aperol you know you might see a new story and and the next down cycle of that brand when people aren't after an orange spritz they're after a a whiskey so i don't know whatever it is but you know there is there are no it's a 30 year cycle how do you think about that with because gin's in decline in the uk how do you think about building a timeless family brand as you said of a business for your kids to potentially take on like with it with surviving those down downward turns yeah so i know you've got the mpd but like i'm yeah yeah specifically about about the gin yeah so so i think like fashion spirits and i suppose like economies as well we probably have there's probably 30 year cycles in in broader spirits genres or categories right so we know whiskey has had a boom years ago and then it was a massive decline you know they were deep mothballing scotch and iris whiskey distilleries left right and center now it's booming again and every you know every man his dog is reopening these mothball distilleries and they say mothball um they close them down because there's no demand i don't know but yeah you know they'll they'll just stop they'll they'll literally stop producing lock the door for 30 years and then someone comes along and fires up the stills again so whiskey's cyclical gin as well so hendrix launched in what like 99 98 um so you could argue that was the start of the gin boom and we've had 25 years of it and maybe we've still got another really good solid um this is uk i speak of or yeah we still got another five years of solid solid gin sales but really you know a lot of that growth has come from the periphery flavored gin has driven innovation gordon's pink was probably single-handedly responsible for for you know i many percentage points but a significant portion of gin growth in the uk over the last decade and um what we're seeing is a contraction of the industry which is natural you know in cornwall alone we've gone from one distillery us to about 40 and you know i don't think that's sustainable for the long term but um so you'll see a contraction and probably a bit of a um a movement back towards classic dry gins we our flagship or our lead brand has always been our tarquin's dry gin um whereas lots of the flavored gin so we do a beautiful blood orange gin a rhubarb and raspberry gin they're fantastic but um those peripheral drinkers who would drink uh probably a rhubarb and raspberry gin and tonic they might be more susceptible to to trading over to an aperol spritz or to an allura spritz um if the option is there yeah right whereas a classic gin and tonic drinker might only stay with gin and tonic they are a gin and tonic drinker so it's that it's that there's the there's the market who are who are willing to move and try new things and and and and um so it's you know ultimately you know i graduated in 2009 from university i haven't really seen a risk you know that was probably the bottom of the recession from the global financial crisis i got my job in 2011 um or 2010 so it's kind of you know i haven't seen and a lot of my colleagues have never really seen a recession um or a downturn as such just of the economy so there's a lot of news and a lot of firsts for everyone so we've got you know we're seeing premium brands not just gin premium and super premium brands are finding it tougher in this climate so it's it's um it's a mixture of everything that we're facing in terms of as people are people are tightening their belts a bit um but ultimately i think we're focusing on our on our dry gym forever this is our forever brand it's our flagship we sell the most of it it's the one people love the most the highest reviews we probably have three thousand five star reviews on amazon yeah so so it's very much about backing that um and um being consistent with our messaging really and ultimately you know um focusing on you know core markets core customers supporting our customers as well for the long term but you know as as you mentioned as a business and a family distillery it very it has felt natural you know in covid we diversified by channel as we're talking about sales channel so we're no longer just we weren't just selling business to business we've started our direct-to-consumer channel we also started opening shops which you've mentioned as well so we now have seven retail shops um in cornwall and devon as well so we sell a decent amount to direct-to-consumer with the full margin we sell a decent amount to businesses other wholesale businesses as well um we're now in travel retail and airports as well which is a fantastic new area business for us and we do decent export as well to about 30 countries so we're trying to we diversified in channel and now with that cyclical nature of the spirits categories we've started to diversify by product so in 2020 we launched our uh twin fin spiced rum we now have a family of of flavored um and uh caribbean rums as well and then we launched our new vodka brand last year so we have gin rum vodka three of the biggest spirits categories in england and the world and what we're doing to focus for the long term is building those uh secondary brands which all share the same core dna of being from the wild coast of cornwall why didn't you call them a so you've called it connie glaze which i think is an amazing name thank you uh i think there's it's a bit like johnny walker but there's another persona there connie glaze you could do all sorts with yeah um and and as as this twin finn why didn't you put them under the tarquins brand because a lot of people would say and again i like the whole reason i do this podcast because there's lots of nuance and everything but a lot of people say stick under one brand And I suppose, why did you do that first?

2:04:52And then second, why, what's, yeah, the Connie Glaze. I'd love to learn about that. Yeah, so there's definitely, there's two arguments for both. Name everything under the same brand, name them under different brands. I suppose the argument for naming them under the same brand is that you're building the brand equity. You can really leverage that Tarquin's into new categories. And it's a lot easier, it's cheaper, and you can go that route for sure. um but my view was that we're ideally trying to target slightly different drinkers to our gin drinker with rum and our flavored rums in particular we're arguably going after a slightly younger drinker um so slightly different target market and again with the vodka um we want it to be a little bit broader in terms of target market and as well so we've tailored each brand to target a slightly different target market to diversify diversify the breadth of our audience as well so we're not just hyper focused into a ginger increase we've got new generations coming through as we're trying to build this we're trying to be a sustainable long-term brand and i think as a as a 100 % family-owned company with no investors and no pressure for an exit or any other we don't have any other objective other than to build the world's best make the world's best tasting products and build you know be the best place to work as we can be and support the local marine and human environment on the wild coast of cornwall but i think we have been able to um you know also ultimately you you can probably get more i don't know maybe this is a more cynical want you can probably have more listings in the same retailer as well you know that wasn't the reason why we did it but you can pop into a maybe you pop into a local retailer and they stock tarquin's twin fin and connie glaze and they might have three skews of each suddenly you've got nine skews on a retailer's shelf when they were all tarquins they might be like no mate and you've got and you've got and you've got yeah and also in terms of the keeping the cost down you've got one marketing team across three brands really in truth like yeah it actually is it is more There's definitely much higher startup costs.

2:07:09So I think we do things slightly more expensively than we used to. You can't get a brand new agency to do it for a couple grand and boost their portfolio. So startup costs for each brand, content creation. Then you've got how many social media accounts you have and email accounts and websites. And it does add complexity to the business. Do you want, say I'm a man walks into a bar and I see what's in front of me. So you've got the Tarquins, the Twin Fin, the Connie Glaze. Yes. Do you ideally want me as the consumer to think they're three separate brands? Or do you want them to think, oh, they're linked to Tarquin's?

2:07:46Or do you not give a fuck? It is a good question. I think we would probably like... Ultimately, it probably doesn't matter. The essence is we really are ideal consumer. Our ideal drinker for each brand is a little bit different for each one. so that's probably our main purpose i think it would make our life easier for sure if they did know they were from tarquin's um in terms of the when launching a new brand and we do mention you know connie glaze on tarquin's channels occasionally and twin fin but we have you know you don't necessarily get as much crossover as you might think which which only sort of reaffirms the view that they are for different drinkers that your gin drinker doesn't necessarily want to drink a spiced rum and coke and you know your gin drinker doesn't necessarily want to drink a vodka martini they want a gin martini and so so that being in those distinct brands has its benefits um so there really are you know people do tell me you should do them all under the same and um you know i'd try and look at case studies and examples of brands that have done that and there are different pros and cons I asked Ben Branson this who's actually been on the podcast twice, he's actually three times actually, he's interviewed me and I'm doing a sub club with him next week but I asked him with what does nature mean to him in one sentence I'd love to know what the sea means to you in one sentence or the ocean if you're American what does the sea mean to me in one sentence and how it filters into your brand for me

2:09:37I think I think the sea ultimately that you know the sea for us is a to me it's inspiring it's probably the best word to capture all of my feelings towards it because you know on a personal level from swimming surfing you know just being in the sea and then being near the sea and looking at it and you know looking out into the distance and and being around it i think those have the very similar feeling feelings but when it can also translate to other areas of one's life and also obviously naturally into business as well because we say that our brands or as a company we're very much inspired by the sea um we're and um um in terms of our actual company mission if i'm to sort of break it down is to bring a slice of cornish sunshine to the world and we do that using our spit our our family of award-winning spirits as the as the talking point or the drinking vessel um but also in terms of what we do with our mission is to support the the human the natural and the marine environment um that surrounds us on the beautiful coast of North Cornwall.

2:10:49So I think the sea is a tricky one, you know, I never feel happier than when I'm by the sea. And I think many people feel similarly. And what we try to do that is capture it and bottle it and pop it into the DNA of all of our brands. I think that's what I'm looking to do and bring that joy and that slice of Cornish sunshine very much translates you know it captures that as well it's all in the mix but it's a difficult question you know i possibly haven't answered it well no no you have it is inspiring it is yeah the reason i ask is i did a walk unfortunately the weather since i've been here has been torrential rain but the sunday i had the afternoon and uh i took a walk along from padstow along the path before i stuffed my face at rick stein's but um i was thinking that i was like jeez like this the sea can have such a so you're not the only brand that has the sea kind of inextricably and when you say the sea the coast you know the same kind of we're talking about the same thing um but i did what i think you get with on those at the tops of cornwall versus anywhere else in the world is that one feeling of magnetism um and two the feeling of like how small and actually insignificant things are i think it's a beautifully kind of uh this what you're worried about with this podcast or this gin is yeah ultimately kind of nothing in the grand scheme of things and then also i think when i was up there i was like the just you really notice it in cornwall because of the cliffs and the jaggedness of the cliffs the the crashing of the waves really kind of signal signal signal to me is like how much everything is just in constant change i think i listened to a podcast where it's like the no it's in it's in a book from um will store a guy interviewed the other week uh a book called the status game and selfie really interesting guy and he was saying that humans crave stability in a world of change yeah and i think the sea reminds you is that everything's constantly changing the trends are changing and it's like how do you have that kind of timelessness what have been some of the hardest changes um for you personally within all this because I believe the brand is what you're creating for the consumer to enjoy and make a business out of it.

2:13:10Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. But I also believe there is a kind of a deeper self, a learning of self on that journey. Like what are some of the things, how's Tarquin changed from, or we'll wrap this up shortly, from going to the Gurner's head back in 2013? yeah i'm older and wiser i think um i mean ultimately i started the company um i say i think i mentioned at the beginning to the idea on paper when i was in london which sounded like the dream and i'm probably living it well i'm living it was to move to the sea to go surfing in the morning make a few bottles of gin in the afternoon that was kind of the dream on paper i mean i went surfing every day when i was writing the business plan as soon as i made that first possible my surfing you know I barely hadn't been surfing you know a handful of times on the first year eventually I got to do some surf trips abroad when I started going on holiday but you know my surfing went downhill my gin went uphill but also the second reason was to be my own boss I just love the idea of working for myself and it sounds you know it's not necessarily bad working for other people I think I think I'm pretty good I was always you know very studious at school you know very happy to take instruction and work to deadlines but having that ultimate creativity and being in charge of your own destiny and and you know it's not a perfect model of what you put in you get out because it doesn't work like that there's an extraordinary amount of you know luck which goes into a business like you know if i started another business tomorrow it probably wouldn't be successful but it's it's kind of um being able to work for myself in an industry which is amazing you know working in booze the people are fantastic have fantastic friends from working in this industry no one takes themselves too seriously um you're looking to bring joy into people's lives and and to work in that kind of you know a day in the office is literally doing a tasting in a bar or coming up with a cocktail recipe or for me you know coming up with a new recipe of gin or rum or vodka which is you know i've in that sense to me i've got the world's best job to make a living doing it um with a company based in cornwall which is the most beautiful part in the world um where you know it's quite hard hard to find you know it's it's hard similar jobs don't really exist so i've sort of created my own and you know made a living while doing it so it's kind of you know it feels like a bit of a dream i think you know to to execute that plan on paper and exceed it even you know you start off with a five-year plan get to the end of the five-year plan you're like what now you know what next okay i've got to do another five-year plan another five-year plan and then you know it got to year 10 it's like okay what next it's like now you might look at a 10-year plan you know now we're into the second decade of business and it's just you know it's a never-changing journey i think i've you know i'm You know, a father, I have two young boys, two toddlers, and I'm more mature, maybe more risk averse, maybe a little bit different to how I started out.

2:16:19But definitely the same person. I still like taking risks. I love making new brands, which is also driven probably the reason why I didn't call them all talk. The idea of creating a new custom bottle and brand and package and identity, I enjoy. And also just really learned about my own strengths and weaknesses. I know what I'm good at. I know what I'm not so good at. What are the weaknesses you're trying to work on now? I'm probably not the world's most organized person.