CLIP: We Had £10k, Needed £20k and Put It All on an Amex. Here's What Happened...

0:00I think that's the difference between kind of building an alcohol brand where if you disappear, people aren't going to care and creating a brand that really aligns to people's morals and lifestyles and values where they're like, you make me feel something. You're creating a lifestyle that I aspire to have. I want to be part of this community. Yeah. And that's why festivals have been phenomenal for us. They make up 25 % of our sales mix. We do it in a profitable way.

0:23Olly Fawcett:25 %? Yeah. Jeez. And it's a rinse and repeat model. We've done it every year for the last five years. our community grows our CRM database grows the data capture is more cost effective than any out of home marketing campaign that you're going to be doing where people are just looking we can find them capture them we know they're enjoying Clemente and then send them straight to our trade partners and our retail partners and then the growth happens from there and that's the ecosystem yeah that's incredible it must cost a few quid to do that though right and especially when you were starting because you didn't know it was going to work we have i i will tell you another one of our horror stories if you'd like and it is about the festival space um so we went live for Mente in March 2021, quit our corporate jobs like a couple months after that and then a festival in the Cotswolds dropped us a line saying look if you want to have a 10 by 10 meter activation space run a bar this is what it's going to cost 20 grand.

1:19At the time we had 10k in our account I know this is the blind optimism kicking in again we had 10k in our account we put the remaining 10k on an amex i'd crunched the numbers based off of kind of footfall some benchmark figures i was able to get and i was like if we do this right we can generate 65 grand in top line revenue so ideally i think at the time it was like 30 grand in profit by the time you staffed it and exactly cost of goods all of that kind of stuff all of our advisors were like do not do it me and alice are like oh no this 60 grand sounds pretty good um were the numbers right if you look back at them now the numbers were right yeah the numbers were right and it's because we were doing it in such a scrappy way as well it's not like the build and break team that we've got now and the staff we ran the bars we camped for six nights our friends from university were staffing the bars and the most hilarious part about the whole thing was we had one product on the bar, a spicy margarita.

2:15That was it. And an orange juice and lemonade for the children that we were charging at eight pounds for the non-brother in it. Just, you know, I know, but cots old consumer.

2:22Olly Fawcett:Wow. So we could, I know daylight robbery. Um, and, uh, we did the festival. That was the first festival we'd ever done. And we hit the 60 grand in top line revenue. And the best and biggest learning from that was one, we can execute festivals in a profitable way. The following summer we went on to do another 10 to 15 festivals, Taste London, that was the first time we did it And that was where Distal Ventures prospected us Because they said there are no brands in the alcohol space that are activating like Pimenti We think that you guys are onto something with this kind of experience-led brand world that you're creating We later found out we outsold Patron at Taste London because of creating this immersive In revenue?

3:04Yep And they had spent 250 grand on their activation, which was nuts

3:08Olly Fawcett:Oh my god. And that's why Distil were so interested in Pimenti. They were like, you've been able to kind of create something that these brands who are throwing 300 ,000 pounds at an activation can't. And that's when we realised that big budgets don't equal success. It's knowing your consumer, knowing your proposition and creating an experience that is so sticky that people can't think of being anywhere else apart from there. Where's the horror story in that? Oh. I was thinking that sounds great. That sounds like a great time. You made 60 bags. So the horror story, it felt like a horror story because we had quit our jobs at that time.

3:40We had two months to figure out how we were going to run a bar when we had never run a bar before. And it was, that I think was the make or break moment because we had no money after that. We had put everything into the pitch fee and leveraged that debt with Amex. And yeah, it was like either, it paid off, but at the time cortisol levels were so high and I just always like, just felt like there was something to prove to everyone that was a bit like okay like how are they gonna do it and we did it but that two month period when we were planning and figuring out how the hell you run a bar with like payment portals i was like i've got no business doing this like what's going on here how am i running a 10 like 10 meter by 10 meter bar at huge festivals makes no sense but it's a lot of fun though uh honestly doing it with our uni friends serving everybody we had the dj there it was just the best thing yeah like watching our brand come to life in that way i think me and alice realized we're sat on a really good thing here like if we can do that with just a spicy margarita what can we do and we've got an entire range and this is developed and we've got a build team it was just like a little like a little future look into the crystal ball of like what things could

4:47Olly Fawcett:look like for us i guess it's kind of the proof that the mvp works right yeah so you kind of did it pretty quickly and understood pretty rapidly that it would work and there's legs to it and you mentioned distilled ventures for those that don't know could you explain what that is Yes. So Distal Ventures is essentially a pre-accelerator program and they are the investment arm of Diageo. And they essentially look at very young, early stage brands, some pre-revenue, some kind of just ideation phase, some post-revenue. And essentially they look at brands, well, they look to bring brands into their program who they believe have, you know, the criteria to potentially globally scale.