Bethenny Frankel on Skinnygirl: Kardashian, Clooney followed my lead | Forward Progress

0:00Hey, it's Graham. It's Thursday, and that means we're offering you another positive piece of a past interview. Each week, our team digs through the archives to find our strongest feel-good stories to present to you in podcast form. This week, Bethany Frankel.

0:21All right, so a big turning point for you professionally was Skinny Girl. Explain how little interest there was in your idea for the low-calorie mixed drink initially, and then how quickly that changed. There was no interest at all. Because when I got into alcohol, publicists told their clients, put the drink down. Every client. No one was promoting alcohol. No one. And the guy who is responsible for the success of Grey Goose said to me, I said to him, quote, unquote, this is a f*** you idea. He said, there is no such thing as a f*** you idea in the liquor business. because there had been no f*** you ideas in the liquor business.

0:55There were no new categories. There were no new inventions. It was you sold booze. That was it. You sold wine to women, sold scotch and whatever. Before me, no one drank the clear tequila. The men did. The men were drinking the Patron. But I gave license to women to drink clear tequila and to drink this. And I invented the skinny margarita, which is literally, in Russia they're ordering skinny margaritas. I'm not exaggerating. Like all over the world. It's crazy. So I would go to these different companies. I went to Diageo, to their Cuervo section, to their other sub-departments. The people that got me the meetings didn't even show up to the meetings.

1:31It was literally me and the person at Diageo being like, yeah, no, we're good. And then Frangelico gave me, I remember, half a million dollars to do something, to do a skinny, like, Frangelini and like, okay. And then Sousa came to me to give me$200 ,000 to talk about their thing and make drinks with their thing. But I was like, I want to do my own thing. But I would have even done a collaboration and they could have taken half of it with any of these companies. I didn't even know what I wanted. I just knew that I wanted you to be able to order my drink my way. But people had such little interest in it that they wouldn't have even split it.

2:02No, like not a little, like get out of here. Like you're just like, yeah, no, like completely no interest. So there was an agent that represented Kim Kardashian. And there was a man who called for Kim Kardashian. He wanted to pay her$50 ,000 to promote a product. The agent called back, says, Kim Kardashian doesn't drink. But I have this girl who has this idea for this drink. The agent called the guy back. I met the guy. He was the only guy. He was the only guy. His uncle had created Sky Vodka, and he was an interim COO. He had never made any kind of money like that. He was just like a finance guy.

2:40He made normal money. And he was the only guy. And it wasn't even a real lawyer. It was like a veterinarian slash lawyer, like a dentist slash lawyer that did the deal. It was like not complicated at all because, but I always had good instincts about what it, it should be like, how the deal should work. So why did you almost not sell? Because I didn't know anything. I mean, because I, because I, because I didn't, it was the same reasons I did. I was like, why didn't I sell? Because it was so soon. It was 18 months from the idea to the shelves. And we were the fastest growing liquor brand in history.

3:11we created the ready to drink category and I invented the skinny margarita and invented the low calorie category every can you see that says calories is because of this brand every can you see is because of this brand it was a ready to drink product that was like a not they had crappy cheap versions of Bacardi and discount baskets at the drugstore it was not you know years before there had been wine coolers like those sweet sugary it just so you know I was very aware of two things. I created something that was lightning in a bottle, but I was also aware that I didn't have my first pile. I didn't have any money.

3:46I hadn't made a single cent. If there was any sort of legal issue, it would bury me. I also knew I wanted street cred. It would give me the street cred. It would be like, we turned a brand. No one really realized it was the fastest growing liquor brand. The liquor companies did. What's interesting about this is that after my deal, Kim Kardashian learned to drink Midori for a million dollars. When she went as Green Envy for Halloween. So I really was an influencer in every other celebrity, including George Clooney, including Ryan. Well, yeah, now everybody has. You're welcome. Like, that is fully as a result of, because I remember Mark Berg saying to me, Charlie Sheen wants a liquor deal now.

4:27And I remember him saying, Justin Timberlake wants, everyone wants a liquor deal because the cover of Forbes and The Hollywood Reporter was just disruptive. And it drove Bravo crazy, too, because they didn't have a piece of that deal. And the company that bought us was like, we're going to do this with Skinny Sousa, which I now realize wouldn't have competed, and none of them have ever competed with Skinny Girl. You can't f*** around with what you're not willing to lose. You know, pigs get fat and hogs get slaughtered. It was a lot of money. It would have been probably five times the amount. If it were now, it would be five times the amount.

4:56If it were Clooney days, it would be. The f***ed up thing is I started it, so we couldn't set the price to what it would end up being for brands like the Clooney or the Pinnacle because I started. So I was too early, but someone had to f*** the Band-Aid off. Looking back now, are you glad you sold when you did? Yes, I had to start it. It was the first horse, and other people have gotten a lot more money because of it, but it doesn't mean if I stayed in, I would have gotten more money because of it. Someone would have, I wasn't willing to take the risk that someone could drown us. Right. In a category I didn't deserve to be crushing when it's the mafia, the liquor business.

5:30The liquor business is the mafia. So getting on those corners was crazy. And you did it in 18 months. I did it in 18 months. An animal. I was an animal. Just more money. I did that on my first book too. When you're young and you're hungry like that or you're thirsty, I did it. I did it pregnant. I was pregnant selling alcohol. It was insane. When I'm an animal, I'm a full animal. But I have to be in beast mode. And I'm telling one of my other partners now, I'll be in beast mode. You have to give me more equity and I'll go into beast mode. But without more equity, I'm not. So she's making very small picture decisions because she's against the clock and she's sitting in purgatory.

6:04So I'm either in beast mode or I don't give a shit mode. and right now she's got me and she's in purgatory and we're going one way or the other and she'd be very smart to like say go and be smote. So you sold Skinny Girl to being global but you retained the rights to be able to use the name in any way that's not connected to alcohol. Right, right. So like what does that entail now? I love the licensing business and I don't love the licensing business. What I love about the licensing business is that the few categories I entered into they're still making me millions of dollars now and they don't want me to do anything which is bizarre like no one's calling me from con agro to say push that popcorn i just do one so i forget i even have these brands and i love them no one's pushing me to push salad dressing because they've got it in the machine it's the distribution machine so what it entails is not a lot it entails not a lot it entails good product good partners is that also what you dislike about it no i don't not like it.

7:04I just, um, a lot of them don't hit. And in the beginning you have to really make the decisions right. And you have to decide you're going to be with the right partners. And everyone promises you a whole big thing. I also don't love it because it comes from external. It's they come to you to want to do the thing. And I'm a person that usually comes, it comes from me to do the thing. So when I'm on Shark Tank, it's bizarre and counterintuitive because they've got this thing that they want to do. And typically, if that idea has been presented to me, it's presented to me because the producers have known it's something that's geared towards a female audience or something that's either health or beauty or something that I touch.

7:46So then now I'm going to take a small percentage of that thing that if I wanted to do it, I could do it because I'm actually a founder and an entrepreneur. Most of the other sharks are investors. They understand businesses and they understand brands, but I haven't seen a product come from Kevin O 'Leary's body or Mark Cuban's body. They are amazing at investing and understand so much more than I do about the other side of it. But it's not usually, if it's not a financial product, it's not usually coming from like a solution that they're seeing in society. So licensing is usually coming from the market.

8:18And often the market doesn't know what the people want. They're late. I've got, I've had partners come to me, a beverage company came to me, a multi-billion dollar beverage company, to try to chase the product that someone else is doing, which means that in a year we're going to be on the shelves next to them. And I knew, I predicted this, I knew that they would be already out, and I wanted to do something else, and battled with my partner. I was like, I don't want to chase the market, I know what I want to do. And the person who ended up doing what I wanted to do sold it for like$60 to$100 million, fast.

8:47So I like the ideas that come from within, for the most part, because I don't like to listen to like data and research about what women are going to want. That's it for now. But if you're hungry for more in-depth interviews, head over to youtube.com slash Graham Bensinger. You can dive into our deep library, which includes more than 2000 clips spanning 12 plus years. Thanks again for listening.