How De Soi Built a Brand in a Category No One Believed In

0:00Our subscriber rate has jumped 15 % to over 40%, and our churn has actually gone down.

0:11Just a handful of years ago, non-alcoholic beverages were barely on anyone's radar, let alone the menu at your favorite bar or restaurant. Now, the landscape is exploding. At the forefront is De Sois, the sparkling aperitif brand co-founded by global superstar Katy Perry and master distiller Morgan McLaughlin. Their mission? To prove you don't need alcohol to have a toast-worthy, elevated experience. When we're doing marketing activations, There's always a liquid to lips or cans and hands component to it. Today, we're joined by Scout Brisson, CEO of Despois, who's guiding the brand through this rapid growth into over 8 ,000 stores at retailers like Whole Foods and Target.

0:45It's truly a flywheel effect when you think about talent involvement. The opportunity to be first on shelf when a major national retailer is creating a non-alc set. As a founder herself, Scout brings a unique perspective to building an industry-defining brand. We're here to chat all about building a standout brand, campaigns that win over customers on and offline, and how Despois has sold over 8 million cans and counting. We try to make it a no-brainer for people to subscribe, and then you can give them all the education, get them into deals. I'm Serena Smith, host here at Shopify Masters, your companion for starting and scaling a business.

1:18Scout. Hi, so excited to be here. Thank you so much for being here, and congratulations on your very recent nuptials. Thank you. Big transitions abounding for you left and right. It's true. So talk to me about the flavor that we have in front of us and let's crack into it. This is probably not supposed to say this, but I'm like, maybe it's the season. It's my favorite. It's St. Moritz Mule, which is our wintry twist on a Moscow Mule. So it's got pomegranate, cranberry, these like kind of rosemary spice notes. I know it's so satisfying. It's so ASMR. Mm-hmm. But this one tastes like someone said the other day, Christmas in a can.

1:57Totally. Yeah, it's really good. We had this launched as a seasonal last year. And then our customers in July were like, bring back St. Moritz Mule. So now we relaunched it as a permanent flavor. So now you can get it year round. How exciting. Yeah, it's fun. I have to say too, it's such a funny thing trying to describe how something tastes to an audience of people who can't taste it. But something that has always stood out to me about Dessois is that it's a really sophisticated flavor profile in a way that, like, to me, I'm a longtime foodie. I used to be a restaurant critic. You know, I think for so long in the category of NA cocktails, you were kind of getting, like, the too sweet seltzers and NA margaritas and whatever, you know?

2:45And Dessois was truly the first time that I tried something where I thought, oh, this, like, really feels sophisticated. You have Katy Perry as one of your co-founders, which we're going to talk about, but you also have Morgan McLaughlin, who's a celebrity in her own right, master distiller. What were the biggest hurdles in terms of crafting something that was going to satisfy a pickier palate? Well, we, gosh, there's a lot, but we talk about falling off a flavor cliff. And it's this line that you're talking about, does something taste like juice? Because really when you deconstruct a soie, it's a mix of fruit juices, there's tea extracts, there's these botanical extracts.

3:25But I think of it as like a toolkit that Morgan uses where she's thinking about, okay, I want to make sure there's like an aroma. What's the nose look like? What's the mid-palate experience? What does the finish taste like? And each of those different ingredients plays a little bit of a role in it. So I remember the first time I went to a production run, we were making our non-alcoholic rosé, Trey Rosé. and there's chamomile in there. And Morgan was so insistent upon the chamomile. And I was like, I don't really get it, Morgan. Like what is the deal with the chamomile? And she had me taste one side by side with and without it.

3:57And it was a completely different drink. And I think that's when I realized, and this is my first rodeo and beverage, that the nuance and the complexity is really these like small little levers that you learn over time because people, to your point, Nobody was making these types of drinks before because the demand hadn't been there previously. There's so many hurdles that you have to overcome when you are developing in a category that isn't deeply established, right? If you're talking about something like wine, people are really accustomed to getting like a very long preamble about the flavor profile of the wine.

4:33How are you communicating the sophistication of the offering without, you know, the can becoming like overwhelmingly full? How are you engaging that education? Well, it's this interesting balance because where our brand started was with these more abstract cocktail concepts. We had three flavors we launched with Golden Hour, Champignon Dreams, and Purple Loon. And I always joke, I'm like, three names that don't really tell you anything about what they taste like. And when we launched our rosé, we realized that there's just so much power in telling people this is what the taste experience is going to be.

5:08So now we have Mule in the name or we have Margarita in the name or Spritz in the name. But then at the same time, when you oversimplify something, then you don't want to lose the craft part of it. So similar to wine, we talk about we have tasty notes on our cans. If you're on our website, we have this whole botanical glossary. We really think about, from a marketing standpoint, Morgan's story and the tastemaker behind it. If you're trying to pitch a restaurant beverage director to carry the product, how does Morgan play a role in that story? to be able to speak to the liquids, but it's very much about each of those different touch points.

5:42That first product line, did you find with these sort of more vague abstract terms that it was still driving purchasing or did it end up feeling a little too niche? It was too niche. We had a funny learning because Champignon Dreams, which is discontinued now, it had the cutest packaging. Like by far, it's still some of our favorite color palettes of the flavors and favorite shape. But it was this kind of like burnt orange and like lilac pink and then in this like mushroom flower shape. And it really sold. Like people were picking off the shelf because the packaging was really cute, but it was our most polarizing liquid by far.

6:23Like Morgan described it as an Aperol spritz on acid because it was just so out there. And it was an interesting consumer psychology study of like, okay, people are interpreting packaging a certain way, whether they're, I think people were reading it too as champagne dreams. And then you had this cute packaging colors. And we talked about these like juicy strawberry notes and then they were getting it. And it was this really kind of bitter, like savory flavor. And so I would say now that we have had both of these products on shelf at the same time, meaning our first line and sort of our newer flavors, it's really clear that like our newer flavors outsell those two to one because they're just easier to pick up and know what you're buying into.

7:11Champignon means mushroom in French. So like I remember when I first picked it up, I thought, oh, this is going to be sort of like a more mushroom oriented drink. Were there functional mushrooms in it? Yes, there were. There are in all of our drinks, but that one I think the name really came from, yeah, the kind of more like savory profile that it had, if you remember. Totally. Yes. I do remember it. We've come a long way. An Aperol Spritz on Acid is very apt, actually. Morgan sounds like my kind of girl. On the other side of things, you have Katy Perry, of course, massive celebrity. You know, it seems like the days of having something fronted by a celebrity and then it being a slam dunk as a result are over.

8:02The CBG world has become too saturated by celebrity-fronted brands. So how have you been strategically utilizing Katie to leverage the brand? And how do you also ensure that her massive superstardom doesn't overshadow the long-term offerings? It's truly a flywheel effect when you think about talent involvement in a business. And I, again, first rodeo in this, but I've seen everything from what literal doors get opened. So the opportunity to be first on shelf when a major national retailer is creating a non-alc set and maybe they're looking at a dozen or two brands and they're thinking about who do I pick from this.

8:45We launched the business at the exact moment in time. We were able to get feature coverage and Vogue and People Magazine that other brands might not have been able to get at that stage and moment in time. We had investors, and I think capital goes a really long way in the early stages of consumer brand building. So it's really all of these different moments that I think you see this is the unfair advantage that having this platform and this reach beyond just what I think is very obvious, which of course is Katie's social media and obviously the megaphone that she has there. Because I came into the business after they were 18 months into development.

9:22It was basically fully baked when I joined. They had created a real brand. And when you pick up the can, it doesn't have Katy Perry's face on it. It doesn't have her name on it. It's something that has its own identity that's telling its own emotional story. And I think often you hear operators in this space talk about how important that is. Because at the end of the day, if some strategic wants to come in and buy this business, they're buying the people who are loyal to the brand and they're buying into obviously Katie or whoever it is ability to help continue to grow that brand. But it's really about loyalty to something bigger than.

9:59Totally. Yeah. It took me a little while of consuming buying DeSois before I even realized that Katie was associated with it. And I thought, oh, how interesting that they're not broadcasting this at every touch point. Right. That's by design. Yeah. And you have people like you who come into it because you are a target demo and maybe you discover it, you go to a friend's dinner party and they're serving it and then you see it at Sprouts and then you're scrolling on Instagram and some influencer, you follow posts about it and you have these different moments. And then we have the people who were reading People Magazine that came in and saw it because of Katie.

10:34And so you get people coming in through both channels, but obviously from a marketing lens, like we're hitting both. What are your core customer buckets in this moment? It's really, I'd say, two sides of millennial women. I think of myself as part of the cohort, which is living in urban areas, you know, spending money on wellness. They're thinking about particularly in LA and New York, they want to go to cool brand activations that are popping up on Abbott Kinney or in West Hollywood or in the West Village. And then we also get a lot of young moms and new parents that are buying into it. We did an activation with St.

11:12Moritz Mule at Apricot Lane Farms earlier in the fall. And it was like 300 people where it was all parents and kids and maybe some grandparents. And even the kids were drinking St. Moritz Mule. Like you get more of those family-friendly activities. So we get to, in that vein, think about when we're doing marketing activations, there's always a liquid to lips or cans and hands component to it. But then as we think about the slightly younger millennial audience, we're thinking about more of that like UGC shareability content from it. Because Apricot Lane Farms, I don't think we saw a single piece of content on Instagram, but it was clearly our demo that was trying it and then going into a Whole Foods and purchasing it.

11:53We're talking about the value of demoing and getting liquid to lips, as you say. How then are you converting that person into a subscriber and then keeping them coming back time and again? Very practically, we always have physical materials, right? So if we're doing a demo, there's always a card you can grab. It's got a QR code you can scan. Step one is getting someone into your email list. And then you can give them all the education, give them all the opportunities, get them into deals. But we try to make it a no-brainer for people to subscribe. Like we have the best discount, the best price per can you can get is being a subscriber, especially a first-time subscriber.

12:28We run like an awesome 25 % off deal if you're buying 16 cans. We do a lot of, okay, if you get to three, three orders, then you get a free four pack. So just continuing to incentivize people. Our biggest cohort that we really go after are people who have purchased a Swam more than once but aren't subscribers. And so we, I mean, again, we give them a sick deal because we're like, you're our customer. You belong on this subscription. will make it easy for you to skip, cancel, change your order. We just want you in the program. It's been cool to see because our subscriber rate on first purchase has jumped, I mean, gosh, from like 15 % to over 40 % in the last six months.

13:11And our churn has actually gone down. We're getting really good customers in, whether it's through demoing, through online, and then we're keeping them. And I think that's through all of the stuff that we're talking about, but like also some of the really practical things that you're offering them along the way. Relatedly, are you doing anything to really help encourage loyalty and a sense of community building? This was a really fun one. We did a corporate giveaway. And so we said we'd pick 10 companies to gift Dessoa for their holiday office parties. And I shared it on LinkedIn. I sent an email out to our full customer list.

13:45And we asked people, we're like, tell us a little bit about your company and why you want to have Dessoa at the holiday party. And the responses, I was like, I didn't expect to get so emotional reading some of these responses. But I think creating a little bit of that, like, we know you already spend money on this one. We want to give back to it. And then, like, I don't know, having a two-way conversation with people who are drinking it. Pull up my heartstrings. Tell me one of those stories. Oh, well, there was a nurse who wrote in and was talking about just, like, being a part of a group of first responders and how hard they work.

14:18and how for her personally, like she's been trying to cut back on drinking because of the impact on, you know, during the work week and just feeling like it was something she wanted to be able to share with her coworkers and that community. Beautiful. No brainer. I know. She won. Yeah. She won. Okay. Let's go back in time. You joined in 2021 and not yet as CEO, as general manager. We'll talk about that transition a little bit. You'd been a founder prior. The brand launched in 2022. What did you envision in terms of how you could change the trajectory and the positioning of non-alcoholic spirits?

15:03Well, at that time, there weren't really any retailers that were carrying products like Dessois. Crazy how rapidly things have changed. It's the really fun part about doing this because you hear it in so many different avenues over the past four years of really important people saying, I don't believe in this product. I don't believe in this category. I don't know why people will drink this. I don't know how this is going to scale. Or it's a flash in the pan. Right. It's not going to last. And then they change their mind. And so now our whole mantra is it's not if, it's when. And I think that's something that I maybe at first was a little like fake it till you make it because who knows?

15:43None of us have a crystal ball. You have these major consumer tailwinds that are driving the growth of this category and that is not going away anytime soon. But now I'm like, we literally have the proof this has happened enough that everybody comes around on this category and it's just a matter of time. But back then, no major retailers were carrying products like this. If they were, it didn't exist in the same part of the store. They were maybe lumped in with your functional sodas, like an Erewhon that obviously tends to be more forward-looking. And I remember telling friends, oh, I'm joining DeSois to run this non-alc brand.

16:21And, huh? Soda? What do you mean? Even saying non-alc didn't really mean something to people. So it was really a lot about how do we take this from being an unknown corner of the beverage world to really the fastest growing space and be a leader in that space. And that was the mindset from day one was like this brand has the potential to be a leading brand in the category. And I think that's because of all these components you and I were talking about that we had in place to set us up to do that. You could see the writing on the wall from Jump that it was going to explode. Yeah. Yeah. We focused on D2C initially because retail wasn't there.

17:03And it was in customer responses. Like every stage has a different feeling of what product market fit looks like. But it was really there. You had people who were like, I stopped drinking or I'm trying to stop drinking. And this has been absolutely game changing for me. and just the amount of people that even today still subscribe to this product online breaks all standards of what you would expect within a category like ours. How and when did you start making inroads with retail? It wasn't actually too long after we launched. And I have this funny slash embarrassing story. When I joined in fall of 2021, I set up this sales at drink2swallow.com email address and promptly forgot about it.

17:47And it was in like February or March after we had launched. I had this oh shit moment. And I go and log into this email address and there were hundreds of emails in there. And we had retailers who's still a great partner of ours. For instance, like Total Wine, they were one of the earliest retailers to get behind the category because they saw with non-alcoholic beer and non-alcoholic spirits, which was what they carried at the time, that people were cross shopping that with alcohol. And so they saw, oh, well, instead of putting non-alc beer near beer and non-alc spirits buried within the spirit set, we should bring these together because people are wanting to buy both of them at the same time.

18:25And so like they had reached out to us. I remember Erewhon had reached out to us. So there were some of those early movers. So by the end of 2022, we were still only though in less than 500 doors. So it was starting to pick up, but I think it was really 2023 that we saw major, say, trendsetters in the category get on board, namely Target and Sprouts. Okay, let's talk about the target of it all. Why was that transformative? Because you have this big box retailer saying, and there was a lot of PR around it, saying this category is real and this category is real. So we're going to take a dozen brands and we're going to put it in what started in 700 doors.

19:12And then within three months, I believe, they expanded it to nearly full chain. So you have somebody who's massive. And again, think about all these early conversations I'm having, whether it's investors or retail buyers or distributors that are saying, I don't even know who's drinking this. But you have somebody who's like, I have 2 ,000 stores and all of these customers are coming in every day that are drinking this. I'm thinking about the chicken and egg of it all, right? The company launches in 2022. At the time, NA Spirits as a category is still pretty small. It feels niche. It's like maybe known about on the coasts and less so anywhere else.

19:52There's been such tremendous growth in just like a few short years. To what do you credit that shift in consumer behavior? Is it like the products are coming to market. And so that is driving consumer change. Is it like the research that's come out about alcohol and more people pulling back on their alcohol consumption? Like from your purview, what's A to B? I'd say there's three things and you hit on a couple of them, but one, the growth of non-alcoholic beer. I mean, I remember going to one of our manufacturing partners in North Dakota. And this was in 2023. They didn't know what Aperol spritzes were, but they all drank non-alc beer, right?

20:36Just as a reference point. Target conversations started because the beer buyer was seeing so much success with non-alc beer and thinking about, well, who's my customer? It's really women. What are they shopping for and interested in? And how do I meet that need? Then you've got major press. I mean, the conversation around drinking less has been nonstop since I've been involved. And as recent as this summer, there was a lot of press around drinking being at an all-time low. In January this year, they talked about how there was a surgeon general advisory warning linking alcohol to potential breast cancer.

21:13So I think there will be this continued conversation around health and alcohol and then consumer behavior and drinking less, particularly as Gen Z is coming into its own because that's the generation that's the most dramatically different. Then the third thing is what you hit on, which is availability. So if our earliest customers were saying, I'm going to pony up, we were selling four packs at the time for 25 bucks, I'm going to pony up for$75 to buy three flavors that I've never tried before, now they can walk into pretty much any store local to them and try a can, whether it's DeSua or another brand.

21:52And I think that availability in accounts is a really underrated thing for consumer brands in just creating trial and discovery and awareness. Like it is marketing to be sold at a store because now people can see you. You can't rely on that marketing to move the product off the shelf, but it does add credibility to the whole equation. How are you moving product off the shelf. If you are a tequila drinker, you fundamentally know what the flavor profile of tequila is. It's not that hard to say, okay, I'll try this other brand, right? But in the non-alek spirit universe, it's like there is such an insanely broad spectrum of flavor profiles.

22:32You have no way to know when you're, you know, picking up a can of DeSsois or whatever else, like really what you're getting yourself in for. You have this thriving D2C side of the business, even in retail, unless there's like a demo going on or something, there's no way. So how are you getting people to take the leap? You said it in the beginning of this conversation, right? Which is that our liquids are truly distinctive. The whole space has come a really long way, but I believe it's still a huge moat for us moving forward. And that means trying to get people to taste it as much as possible.

23:05So one of our biggest marketing spend buckets is sampling, like having the product, whether it's demoed in Whole Foods or the activation that I was mentioning where we're showing up at events, happy hours, dinner parties. parties. We partner with our on-premise, like our restaurant and bar accounts by, you know, free can on Friday if you come in and, you know, order during happy hours. So it's really trying to get people to experience it themselves and then doing that in a way that can unlock a sale immediately after. You joined in 2021 as general manager. You were founder of a company of your own prior.

23:46You transitioned into the CEO role in 2022. You've been a founder. You had not been a CEO. Did you feel naturally equipped for that transition? No, no. When the first conversation happened where they, you know, we were like, okay, maybe you should become the CEO. I was 26 years old too. Young obviously is one thing, but I think about like leadership and management and people management. I had no experience really in any of that. I remember feeling really excited, obviously, and scared. And I was like, okay, if I have one thing that I'd say is a superpower of mine, it's my growth mindedness. And I remember thinking like living in a place of discomfort is actually the place that I want to live in professionally.

24:33So this discomfort that I'm feeling is a good thing. But I simultaneously thought, oh, I need to read every book to tell me about how to be a CEO on the internet. I did. I mean, I read some, I would say the, the ones that stood out were The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz. I still love for anybody really, but I still love alter ego effect, which is all about stepping into a persona. So really thinking about that, like stereotypical, like Beyonce, Sasha Fierce, who do you want to be in that moment? And then more recently I read a book called Scaling People, which was like a textbook about leadership.

25:08Is your CEO persona different than Scout the Human? No, no, definitely not. I think there are moments as a CEO that you have to step into a different role or place. And so I think about that. So early on in my fundraising, I remember thinking about, okay, I want to be delusional and optimistic founder. And that's kind of the mentality. I need to bring vision. I need to bring passion. I do podcast recordings. I have podcast scout who's like, tries to be more eloquent, but also bubbly and outgoing. And so it's like picking pieces of yourself, I think, to lean into and really embrace. But it's helpful when you're doing something for the first time, I think, to have a bit of a reference point of whether it's formed by yourself or other people that you've seen, but say, oh, I want to step into their shoes for this meeting or conversation.