How 2 Corporate Dropouts Outsold Patrón with £0 Marketing Budget | Co-Founder of Pimentae Drinks

0:00They laughed at us when we said we were going to do it. They were like, ha! They're like, you guys think you're going to be able to kind of compete with that.

0:14It will be the most soul-destroying thing you've ever done, but the most fulfilled I've ever felt. Questioning myself, saying, is this it? Is this what life looks like for me? Consumers buy into moments to connect. They buy into experience. Like, gone are the days where mass distribution alone wins. We later found out we outsold Patron at Taste London. Getting something out that is good enough and having a minimal viable product that you can kind of get feedback on is fine. I don't get goosebumps talking about it now. I was just like, it was the most...

0:44Olly Fawcett:Is that what you needed to prove to other people that it was going to work? Now you say it, you know what? I feel like it's more proving to myself.

0:55Olly Fawcett:Windsor, how are you? I'm good. I'm good. Can't complain. How are you? I'm very well. Well, look, welcome to What It Takes. Very, very excited to talk about your journey that you've been on for the last couple of years with a very exciting brand. But before we do get into that, we'd love to talk a little bit around your beginnings and kind of what early life was like to you before you decided to do what you're doing today. Yeah, absolutely. So I went, well, we'll start university. So I went to the University of Leeds. I studied international business when I was there. Nice. Did a placement year, went to IBM, so classic corporate jungle, where university brainwashed me to believe the only way to be successful was to climb the corporate ladder.

1:34So rolled off of my IB course, went to the commercial graduate program at Sky, so another corp. Did four rotations there in kind of commercial propositions, training and performance, all of that good stuff. And it was probably on the third rotation of my grad scheme. I was questioning myself. saying is this it is this what life looks like for me um and it was actually then that myself and my co-founder Alice and she used to work at ASOS and L 'Oreal we were like we have so much more to give than being in this kind of corporate machine and we were drinking an abundance of picantes on the balcony and where all good business ideas start plugging a pain point we wondered why nobody had made a pre-batched pente because we're millennials we're hyper connected we're lazy we want things at the click of a finger and the biggest argument that we were having at that point in time when we were 24 and 25 was who is going to be making the next spicy margarita in the kitchen so that is what life looked like and two months after that conversation on the balcony pente was enrolled on company's house and that was our humble beginnings what a

2:47Olly Fawcett:day you were saying that obviously you went down a bit more of a traditional route yeah and you were saying maybe that was a little bit more like that's what everyone does was that really the feeling that you had or was there ever an earlier idea or early parts of your childhood where you wanted to do things a little bit different honestly no I think my dad was the person in our family who was always very corporate led in terms of me watching him navigate his career path and it was always kind of very structured. You get a promotion, you go from one corporate to the other and I kind of followed that same journey at university.

3:22You always want to please your parents and I also think shame on university. The only people they bring in to speak to you when you're there are Goldman Sachs, HSBC, NatWest. I was very much pigeonholed into a funnel to join one of the big fours. If you didn't, you were seen as a bit of a failure. so yeah I can't say I had any entrepreneurial inklings when I was at the University of Leeds it was only when I was kind of ejected into that corporate space I was like I'm doing I'm spending more time here than with my family or my friends like it surely can't be this miserable and monotonous with so little independence and I just uh yeah I felt bored when I was 24 which is crazy

4:02Olly Fawcett:yeah yeah it's tough isn't it do you I think a lot of people now like I didn't go to university just because I was always like it's going to be a nightmare for me and I'll hate it and everyone I knew did so it was always a little bit like you know not to make myself sound too cool but like it was always just like a never an option for me but I feel like a lot of people now particularly within social you see a lot of conversation around that being wasted time and particularly wasted time when going into like corporate immediately yeah do you look at it in the same way or do you look at it as a bit more like it's still valuable learnings and it's still ways to develop i would say everything that i learned at university there were very minimal practical applications it was all theories based like maslow's hierarchy of needs and all of that kind of stuff applying yeah applying some of the kind of practical structures into something that is so vastly different different when you're going into practice yeah i mean i learned more in my first six months of pimentate than i did at university um the thing that i would say was amazing and if you are feeling a little bit unsure at university a grad scheme is a great place to be able to rotate around different business areas so all of my transferable skills in terms of commercial business cases understanding what regular cadence looks like with a large team and internally all of that kind of process driven structure to get things done on a larger level super super helpful and very very transferable from having the kind of commercial understanding of what running a business looks like but my god like it if you're the kind of person who has creative problem solving at the heart of what they're doing and you value independence and things like that corporate absolutely not the place for you i just felt like such a cog it was it was miserable yeah no it's tough so you and alice decided to start something and you said i mean it sounds like it happened very quickly yeah why alice so okay this is a really interesting one people I think always go down the rabbit hole of if I'm going to start a business with some like someone it needs to be with someone similar right with me and Alice we had a big mistake as you've you've probably had in your experience me and Alice have such polarizing skill sets right so she looks after the marketing side of the business she was ASOS L 'Oreal did paid marketing SEO for like multi-million pound brands so that was her expertise mine was always very commercial propositions business cases go to market strategy and before we launched pimento started even thinking about it we loved the fact that we had such different skill sets and i went into it not knowing a huge amount about the marketing side she was like i do not have a huge amount of commercial acumen in that sense and we thought okay this is epic and then i also just think from a personality standpoint as well I am a lot more direct and hectic and fiery Alice is so relaxed she's so chill the most grounding person and yeah it's like yin and yang type situation so that really really worked the kind of diversity in terms of what we brought to the table I'd say amazing the first like you were sort of saying that you kind of came up with the idea through consuming the idea which is obviously a great way to start but like for you guys obviously not start the business before did you have people around you who have sort of trodden the path a little bit that you were relying on was it kind of because i feel like a lot of people i mean i've heard the conversation a lot and it's it's kind of funny to be around because i've started a few things and some of them have been successful some of them definitely not um but in the sense of doing that it's the idea of like oh we should start a business doing that thing and it's really exciting and i personally loved the naivety of that time like it's so that's the funnest part I personally think of being a business owner is the very first bit the blind optimism yeah it's great um but for you guys was the you know you wanted to do this thing was there any kind of one steering that direction for you or were you steering each other so really interestingly I think the only example that I could give at the time who was an entrepreneur who was young doing phenomenal things in the space was grace beverly other than that we were 24 and 25 years old we had come from university where like i said it was very much climb the corporate ladder yeah when i spoke to my parents about wanting to quit my corporate job and launch something they honestly looked at me as though i had murdered the dog they just couldn't reconcile it in their brain especially for their generation as well i don't think being entrepreneurial in the way that we were thinking about was the done thing and there weren't there wasn't anyone in our wider friendship group really doing it so it came from this internal fire that we had the tenacity we had the kind of skill set between us to do something more and i think ultimately we just wanted that fulfillment yeah and i think something that we all overlook quite a lot is we are on this planet for how we feel how i wake up feeling every single day rather than living what the optics should look like for someone else yeah and why would i wake up every day and go to a corporate job just because it's the done thing to do it didn't feel right it didn't feel good and we didn't want to do it so that's ultimately why it was both of us i feel like grace has inspired a lot of people what was inspiring for her about you sorry what was inspiring about her i think it was just how she showed up in such a real way it didn't feel too distant from who we were she was a similar age while she was a lot younger than us she was juggling the kind of corporate side of things she is now yeah I mean I think she was like in her early teens when she started um but I think now she's still like mid-20s which is crazy amazing but I think it was just uh I think the gap between what you know blocks a lot of people from going down the entrepreneurial journey is they see somebody and they're like I could never do that that is an aspiration that is so far-fetched but with Grace it was she was young she was hanging out in similar circles to us she still liked going out she was she kind of trod the corporate path as well and then juggled this entrepreneurial side of things it was gritty it was scrappy and i was like i'm gritty and scrappy this this could work okay amazing it felt within reach yeah i i think i'm right in saying that you were kind of told there's no place for rtds as well within the category but before you go into that maybe was the original idea to be an rtd was that the initial concept with no other alternatives so we actually launched in a 50 cl glass bottle right pre-batched spicy margarita that was our flagship so if we're talking technically rtd means can in the space and then you've got ready to serve which is bottle so we actually started in a bottle but um yeah the market was still very very heavily dominated by kind of six to seven percent drinks rather than 14 and a half percent and that's where we were kind of trying to push so there wasn't a huge amount of noise in the space and it was hugely hugely dominated by the incumbents like diashio and bacardi which is why a lot of people were like they laughed at they laughed at us when we said we were going to do it they were like ha they like you guys think you're going to be able to kind of compete with that yeah and that blind optimism kicked in there that we were talking about when you're walking into something where obviously you're you're going in there with some blind optimism which is always great but when you're going into that and people are starting to say no to the idea and then what i would call a naive idea which is amazing was there any doubt that was really settling in for you guys i honestly think i it's ingrained in my dna when someone says no like all i hear is yes i'm like i will change your mind like i will do it anyway and i think in a space where people are constantly drumming the statistic like nine out of ten startups fail it's just something i think it's internal like either you're born with the resilience and the mindset to do it it's purely a mindset thing but there wasn't a point where i was like this isn't going to work and still five years down the line i've had my moments where i'm like this is fucking hard it's soul destroying like why am i voluntarily doing this yeah i've never said to myself this won't work nice we were talking about it before we started filming around like just uh i think the culture in the uk of failure and also like giving it a go versus the us we were having an interesting conversation about the us market which i'm sure we'll get onto in some way but do you think that that is one of the biggest problems in entrepreneurship here in the uk is the negativity and the kind of the doubt because that stat is so common right that you mentioned it's spoken about all the time we're constantly talking about failure in a really negative way but does that do you think that's a big problem in terms of other brands and other opportunities that might be in the future 100 i think from the get-go if we like take it back to even school you are not given the toolkit to succeed in an entrepreneurial space nobody is teaching you the basics of what the kind of financial infrastructure of a business should look like how to manage your finances what's a p l what's an equity structure all of these kinds of things and if you don't have the toolkit to do that from the beginning you're not going to find that many entrepreneurs who want to make that journey because it feels so unattainable yeah and then off the back of that you marry the negative media you've got all of these phenomenal businesses that are in growth and then the media all they decide to pull out is they made a two million pound loss this year how terrible without they did that was gross actually yeah exactly i saw that when often there is such a logical operational reason that that needed to happen whether it's investments in stores that are going to grow your brand like and all of these kinds of things it will always be jumping on the worst possible outcome and i don't know why we cultivate such an awful environment for this but i mean i guess the uk has not been hugely like pro-entrepreneurialism with everything that's going on at the moment yeah it's really hard isn't it i mean like i'm i'm of the opinion that like i think the school system is deeply fucked but i don't have a solution to it so i don't really have that much of a strong opinion because i think it's really difficult to teach 350 individuals what they need and what they're going to do um and you kind of got to go with the mass which is most people will get a job like that's kind of the difficult part of it but i do also feel that when it comes to the negativity of of press or people talking things and platforms like linkedin etc it is more around like the fact that i think as a as a society in the uk we just love the negativity like i think there's just an element of that which i think comes from so many different places and you know gossip's a big area you know it just comes from those environments the u.s is so different because they see failure in a completely different way and i think it's more of like a i think it's a generational shift that's got to happen in in many ways but i don't think there's an easy solution to it the one thing that's got to keep going is that people have got to keep trying and especially building businesses like we need we need a lot of entrepreneurial stuff 100 i mean what is nice as you can see in the uk that there are loads of grants accelerators things like that which is a phenomenal springboard i guess for people who haven't done it before but i so get why it would be intimidating if you don't feel like you've got the skills and then you also don't feel like you'll be fairly rewarded if it does go well and you'll be hugely scrutinized if it doesn't that's tough like yeah and that's probably why it's so so hard to take the risk um week one of being a thing week one of the of the brand do you remember it week one um were you still working while you were building it sorry actually that's probably a better question yes so i was working at sky for six months okay before i quit and it was during lockdown and a lot of people as i kind of think you were saying um before when we were speaking i think a lot of people said that covid was this horrible prison for them but for me it actually gave me a lot of freedom because it meant i didn't have like a manager over my shoulder so when me and alice and i've actually still got the um we did a linkedin post on it it's so funny um we we made a screen recording of all of the text when we first came up with the idea and the back and forth is so funny like it's just a silly text chat but literally from the day where we were like why don't we try and make like a pre-batched like picante thing um and it was just the silliest conversation ever and then we were like wait nobody's doing it wait we were like researching nobody's done it before oh my god like there are all of these grocers wait where do we buy our tequila like everything was spiraling yeah and the funniest thing I've got a print screen of it is this word doc that I made of tick list to start your own business and it's completely legit it was on my um sky laptop at the time the dates there everywhere and it was like build a business plan right to pitch deck um get product shots of product that we didn't have like develop a recipe what tequila am I going to use do I have to pay tequila supplier a percent every time we sell a bottle like all of this like crazy stuff and uh it was just I think like you said those are the most magical moments because it was ignorance it was blind optimism it was like we can do this nobody's done it before like um but yeah the juggling for six months was it didn't feel that exhausting because I guess what else was I going to be doing Netflix and chilling like when I closed my sky laptop I just opened it back up and I was doing something that gave me this just this like fire I was like this is gonna this is gonna be meaningful and I know it's gonna be meaningful because I trust myself and I trust myself to do what I say I'm going to do and I also trust Alice and it just honestly was I don't get goosebumps talking about it now I was just like it was the most I felt so happy that I had found something that had brought me so much fulfillment which I think a lot of people aren't necessarily in search like they don't care that much in terms of work they just want to get a good salary and go but I knew that from a very young age how I apply myself to things I was like I need to build something extraordinary and that was the kind of start of yeah yeah I get it when was the first time you told start telling people about it um i think it was maybe two months in because as soon as you tell people that's when it becomes a reality and that's like quite bold as well because so you and alice didn't really tell anyone like family stuff like the whole lot you were just like let's see how we get where we get to we registered the business we i've got photos of me and alice kind of the first time that we introduced it to our friendship group me and alice spent four hours building little sample bottles named one two three four five and then like seven of each all with varying levels of agave tequila to kind of like have the perfect picante and that was the first time that we told our friends like you're coming to our house what you think is like a drinks evening but it was a focus group it's focus group that's cool gave them question as they had all of the different samples and we were like you need to rate it on taste is it too sweet what would you pay for this like all of this kind of stuff and that was the first time we spoke it into existence And I think it was perfect because I think once you've got the buy-in from your friends, once you also tell people you're doing something, you can't go back on yourself.

18:17Otherwise you just look like one of those flaky people who are like, I'm going to do this. And it's just like, oh, let's go into another idea kind of thing. And that's not the kind of person I am at all. So we definitely spoke it into existence.

18:27Olly Fawcett:Was the kind of, when you started telling people about it, is that when people start having opinions? Yeah. How did you deal with the opinions? my my parents who i love and adore but also appreciate they're from a completely different generation so there was an element of me that knew there would be some rebuttal like i got the first bit in there that's important yeah um they didn't understand it at all they were like you're like you're planning on launching your own business to sell tequila like uh they just kind of thought i was 24 and i liked drinking and i was just like starting a drinks business and me and my friends could all drink which i mean to some extent has happened but um just in more structured way and then all of our like immediate friendship group so positive thought it was amazing but then you do get those people who are like and this is where you start to see the negative sentiment from people who aren't that close to you really like you're you're starting a business like what business do you have starting a business so there's that kind of like a weird element where people can't be happy for you because they're jealous maybe they wanted to do it themselves they didn't have the gumption to take the leap yeah so it's interesting at the beginning like people are excited on the surface at the start because they don't know what's going to happen yeah but i think the real the real tell is how people react when you're doing well and that's always interesting to see i do feel like there's never an um there's not another reason at the start of something that people are negative apart from jealousy yeah when it comes to starting something like i just don't think there's any other like even if you're like i'm gonna become a singer even if you're gonna be like i want to become a professional athlete or i'm gonna start business or whatever it might be even starting a podcast like there's no other part of it for me that if someone's negative about it that's close to you that is like any other emotion than just jealousy and I also think there's a there's like some people will be like oh I just don't think it's right for you it's like there's an element of just try and if it doesn't work it doesn't work you know like that's a huge part of it for sure um so try and remember week one what was week one really like obviously there's lots of maybe week one of going full-time as well okay week one of going full-time was so funny because I just laughed at myself so the first thing I did was I went to Selfridges to see what...

20:33Good starts of the week.

20:33Olly Fawcett:Yeah, solid start. Not for personal reasons. I went to go and see what their kind of ready-to-drink cocktail shelf looked like. Because I always told myself, when we launch, I need to have a really clear headspace in terms of like the three listings that I want to get. So I need to study them and make sure that every single decision I make, starting from now, will ladder up to me landing this listing. And Selfridges was on that list. Right. So I went there to see what they had on shelf. So when I finally found the buyer, I could be like, this is what you've got. This is where the gap is. So I can remember moseying on down to Selfridges, taking loads of pictures of the shelf that I could use to like integrate into a deck.

21:09um the next uh couple of days was like me bouncing from various little like coffee shops feeling super proud of myself on my laptop I definitely didn't have like eight or nine hours worth of things to be doing like I look back on it and I'm like bless your soul you I put my set my desktop to the pimenté background it's like now it's official so I would used to when I first

21:30Olly Fawcett:started I know the first week I did I like made a business card it was like it was classic thing too it's like you make a business card first that's the start of a business but I know what mean it's like you're doing things that you're like this is important to do exactly whereas now you're like this is exactly and that i can remember so many when we had like launched across socials and things like that at the time it felt really exciting but we'd get vogue reaching out to us being like do you want to pay two thousand pounds for this i was like vogue have reached out this is the best thing it's like no you're you're paying to be in that kind of thing so i think it was very much wrapping my head around like right what's this going to look like what's my day-to-day going to be but yeah when I look back on it it's absolutely ridiculous I had no idea what I was doing I was 24 I just quit my corporate job at Sky I was loving the idea of saying that I was doing Pemente more than actually like knowing what I was doing at all for you like it was the was some of it way different than you thought it would be at the start like and that's not just around it being more difficult but in terms of like how things work yes I think nothing can prepare you for the kind of like operational complexity of it all right um i think everyone just sees the shiny polished products but they don't understand that you have to source the glass what design are we going to have on it what do we want our brand to stand for how do we get the liquid to taste right how do we create a product that is commercially viable so we can actually scale this thing all of these like every single time i made a decision and i think this is part of the reason i think i was made to be entrepreneurial is my brain is always like what could go wrong yeah what do I need to be doing in 15 steps so even from the beginning I was trying to work out when we were building our product how do I make sure our cogs are in a place where we're going to have a gross margin of 40 % blended because I can remember reading this one time that that's what you need to do in order to have a business that's you know going to get the attention from a big global conglomerate so I had all of these ideas going around my head all the time and I think in the beginning when we first launched it was that kind of product development bit that i didn't anticipate taking so much time i was like can't just can't we just like build the recipe really quickly and like get a label that looks like a month yeah how long was it really six you know yeah again blind optimism and we were trying to do all of this in covid as well so of course where we ended up getting our um first batch developed was in scotland and it was all of the crazy rules that were coming out where i was like you can travel either is not a thing i would have thought happened no it was they had um there was this facility called startup drinks lab okay where they would literally like hold your hand throughout the whole process which i was like perfect i need my hand held like please help um but there were like boris was coming out with all the crazy rules where it was like you can you can travel here but you have to be oh boris john sorry who the fuck is boris no fair enough i forgot about him he was creating the most crazy rules on travel so getting to scotland it meant like we could travel like halfway up the country but then the rules would change and all of this kind of stuff having to try and do product development over camera was absolutely crazy so there were so many different obstacles that came to play and i think that is the part that people underestimate they just see you going live with the fancy bottle and all of this kind of stuff and it's like no to do this we had to pour our life savings into it we had to find an artist to hand paint all of the artwork had to find like someone to build out our logo had to trademark it had to get all of the ip rights so much of this stuff only comes to fruition when you're doing it and there is no playbook or like toolbook and like here are all of the things that you guys should be thinking it's just when there's an obstacle then you deal with it when someone says you need to speak to a lawyer about this then you speak to the lawyer when someone says you need to take seven exams to be able to even sell alcohol then you have to do the exams so there was an element of excitement but also i was like this is gonna be hard but i loved it is there anything you would do differently if you were starting again in those first couple of months and stages um

25:27well it's so difficult to say because i think having to go through every single obstacle gave me a realistic view on how to just be a lot more resilient but um do you think you weren't resilient before i think the level of resilience you have in a corporate is very different to you know the obstacles that you overcome as a founder it's your own money in the business it's your brand reputation it's your career and all of those kinds of things but if i had to do anything differently i think it would be to be less focused on you know what five years time looks like and just be like getting something out that is good enough and having a minimal viable product that you can kind of get feedback on is fine like perfect is the enemy of good enough and at the beginning if you're constantly finding a reason not to launch because something's not 100 ready it's going to slow you down and you need to happen for you guys i think there were definitely times where like we didn't have the right product photography we didn't feel like the website was polished enough we were actually exactly exactly or like oh is do we need to do one more like iteration of the recipe to get it to you know like xyz um we had loads of those moments and i think we i mean six months is still pretty fast from my like ideation to launch but i think if we were prepared to be a little bit scrappier it would have been like slightly faster but i'm yeah i am a perfectionist it's one of my i hate myself for it how is uh your analysis relationship in the first kind of six months tested at all tested but as i said alice is the most relaxed human being in the world and i'm just like i have an argument on the wall right um so she's very very grounded but i think working in such an intimate capacity with just one other human you have to develop this crazy sense of trust with them like we're gonna this is like the closest thing that i have to feeling maternal and it's like i have to trust that in your time you're going to be doing absolutely everything you can do to drive the business forward because we are the only people pushing it it's not like at sky where i had a manager where if i was like you know sick they would kind of keep the ball rolling it's like this is me and you and every single win every single failure is a result of us so like let's fucking get it right as many times as we can um um but i've honestly got to say like in the five years that me and alice have been doing this and especially at the beginning we have never had a huge huge falling out really we've definitely had like miscommunications we operate in very different ways she's chill she kind of like you know she'll operate on a more like relaxed level whereas i'm like if i ask for something i ideally want it 10 minutes ago and that's just how i've always been as a person yeah so in those moments it's a bit like okay right we both need to level with each other and we actually put in a like weekly cadence call to be like how can we work to better like work better with each other um and we would come to the call and she'd be like okay these are all of the things that you're doing that i think it would be better if you approached it like this and vice versa just to make sure that

28:36Olly Fawcett:there was no resentment building in the background but um yeah we've never had like a crazy falling out which is great that is great yeah it talks a word um i imagine there's been setbacks in the early stages right who how would you kind of show up for each other in those moments because it's quite easy as co-founders and people have been on the show and people i know sometimes when you're both in the mud you can't really be there for each other that you kind of need the other person to be there and you're going to react differently right so was it how how did you experience that so first of all anyone who is a solo founder and i you're a solo founder yeah hats off i've got no idea how people do not have a sounding board or like someone to at least half the burden with yeah but um there's actually a really specific example where like alice was just absolutely phenomenal and i can talk about this now without wanting to have like a panic attack okay but um we won our first listing with waitrose it was our first national retailer and that was your first listing completed no that's our first national what a start oh yeah run before we can all yeah um this was i think it was a year and a half into pimento which is we were so happy with that and our manufacturer at the time had made a colossal blending issue which had meant that one of the skews that were going live in waitrose on one of our cans had uh it pretty much just tasted like absolute rocket fuel they had not mixed it properly and it tasted terrible so was alcohol or was it just like rough a bit of both they hadn't blended it properly so the alcohol hadn't dispersed equally within the tank and when they gave us a sample to taste because they took it from the top it tasted fine but because they hadn't blended it properly the liquid at the bottom tasted completely different so we yeah so we didn't realize so you had actually tasted that batch yeah we had tasted it we had approved it it was all fine we were the only reason that we knew that something was wrong and kind of similar to the story you just told me i was about to get on a flight to south africa first two weeks i was gonna have off was feeling just like okay cool everything's in a good place before waitrose yeah alice had got some stock sent to her house um just from the batch which was kind of typical for the which was gonna go to waitrose exactly got it that's what the manufacturer does they'll send us um a case just so we've got it um all of the stock had been packed and sent to waitrose already so this stock was it it was 25 grand worth of stock it was just for the first order um oh my god and alice tried it and it tasted when i say it tasted terrible it was like pure tequila but worse it was just awful it tasted terrible and we've got a 15 delicious smooth cocktail and alice was like i didn't know whether to call you or not winter but obviously all of that stock has gone to waitrose it's now on shelf and they'd already put on the shelves they'd already put on the shelves do they not try it before they like is with what you guys did or are they just there's a whole process of like we're getting the deliveries going on yeah so where we where we got our product manufactured we had to do an emergency batch just because we lost our production slot with our normal manufacturer so it was just like a one-off time with these guys and i'm not gonna not gonna name but as you can tell i'm so over it uh um but anyway no waitrose don't have to sample that like our manufacturers should have that all covered with uh so they're towns that should have done the quality control exactly right at the start at the end of the batch and uh what happened next was a very defining moment for me and alice when this was our largest national grocer listing like our our reputations were on the line it was rolling out 250 waitrose stores and we had to call every single waitrose stores and visit the ones that we could to get the product off of shelf because waitrose hq could not send out like a mass recall email um without us getting charged like 40 grand you would get charged for that yeah because it was a recall a product which obviously cost them money exactly so they so did you have to call waitrose and say we've got a problem they said well if you've got this problem you've got two options you get off the shelf or we do yeah pretty much hell that's stressful and i'm such a freak with all things liquid quality even if i was to put one of our margaritas in front of you and you said it tasted delicious and i knew it was slightly off i'd be like no it's not blended correctly like not proving it not so this for me is like the worst thing that could ever happen alice so so calm so amazing she's just like okay winter this is what the plan is we've got all of the stores here these are the ones we're going to separate them between all of the team members we're going to call these ones this is what we're going to say this is the script because my brain was just like fireworks um yeah and i was like who can i scream at obviously exactly thankfully no um so yeah she just comes with so much calm and she's always like winter we can manage the relationships we can get the stock off of the shelf and she is always just such a fantastic voice of reason and whenever we've had any other issues moving forward i'm like if we can deal with that and get all of that product off of shelf and it's fine and we've maintained relationships and all of these things there is honestly nothing that we can't do yeah and uh yeah she's just phenomenal in the face of really really adverse situations did you still go on the plane um yes did it all work itself out for were able to sort everything out um but yeah for me i was just like this is the worst possible thing that could happen it's the first pallets that are arriving in waitrose like i guess you guys as well it's always about test runs right so like the thing that was what was the biggest thing in your head that was going to go wrong at that point in terms of it's already gone wrong what's the worst outcome from here so what i thought would happen was waitrose would lose kind of all trust in us and then that would tarnish our relationship in terms of growing distribution like launching new products with them but most importantly i think it was the consumer perception this was the first time that customers could get us nationally like waitrose have stores across the whole country and if their first experience with pimento is a product that tastes like rocket fuel they're not going to come back like all it takes is a little bit of word of mouth for you know rate of sale to nosedive and that's the thing that keeps you on shelf rate of sale and if it's not that i like that's that it can be game over yeah do you know what on this show we've had three stories that are very similar to that oh good yeah um a guy called sam who now runs a great brand called batch oh my god yeah yeah he was on the show punchy right yeah so it was a punchy uh-huh where they put the wrong product in a can and it was like uh i think it was meant to be like a really refreshing citrusy juice and it was actually like i think he described as baby guinness in a can type thing so like completely this thing it just happened one of those things right like as a founder especially when you're starting it's like how do you react to these things that are completely outside your control because screaming down the phone to the supplier isn't always going to fix it right and it's kind of having that having that adjustment yeah um you guys kind of went on to the festival scene pretty quickly right but it wasn't a very easy easy journey from what i understand going into festivals firstly i imagine festivals felt like quite a good synergy between the brand and what you were building and probably where you wanted to get cans in hands right tell me about that journey and that decision so i actually think we owe a lot of our growth to the festival space for many many reasons so when we first launched Pemente everybody was saying events festivals you can't make any cash from this it is purely marketing and it's the marketing budget me and Alice very quickly realized the commercial structure that we could put in place to turn it into a profitable revenue stream like you said mass customer acquisition channel for us it was the kind of start of the funnel to get people into our community get them engaging with the brand and then we could use you know over the course of one year it's two million consumers coming to multiple different festival bars that we would have yeah because we would so at the moment we do like 20 to 30 festivals every summer well so everything from like the glasgow luxury campsites wimbledon house henley regatta polo in park taste london crank brother highlights waterworks you name it we've got a beautiful 360 tropical tulum-esque activation there so i always say like imagine teleporting yourself to a beach club in tulum we've got the branded vw wrapped in pente artwork we've got our saxophonist in there we've got dj willie g and then we've got the kind of rustic 360 bar with the six tap balls so we can just plug our kegs into there and we create this immersive brand world because you probably know more than anybody consumers buy into moments to connect they buy into experience like gone are the days where mass distribution alone wins we we very strategically built this immersive brand world yeah and built this cult-like community that we have now in the festival space all whilst doing it in a very profitable way um and i just think it's a really really unique way to not just push a product in somebody's face but it's like come and join us come enter this gorgeous environment where you feel like you're anywhere else but the uk and then you can enjoy pimento and that's where they build the brand affinity and that really intangible feeling that you can't quite put your finger on but when they see pimento on shelf in waitrose they'll go back huh i remember having a pimento listening to tunday play the saxophone and it's that intangible connection that you just can't build anywhere else no out of home campaign will do that that is a moment that is a memory and that's because we've emotionally connected with our consumer yeah and again we do it in a profitable way how do you do in a profitable way when most people don't so certain festivals have different commercial revenue models and that's the first thing so we pick the ones that aren't trying to charge us 100 grand to just breathe in that airspace it's crazy yeah it's absolutely nuts i'm involved in a very small drinks brand and they they were built in festivals in a prosecutor space and like some of the numbers i've seen quoted at festivals is like mental it's the biggest form of daylight robbery we need to like charge these people or report them somewhere to the higher it is crazy because also a lot of newer brands like that's kind of why i'm asking is because when you're naive building a brand like a lot of brands go oh i'll spend 10 grand on a pitch i'll make that back because there's 3 000 people coming and that's why it becomes deeply unprofitable for so many people exactly and i think unless you have absolutely nailed the kind of one commercial model so are you going to retain 100 of the revenue or is a third party going to operate your bar i think that's step number one yes um step number two are you creating a sticky experience not one where people are going to kind of come and buy one glass but how are you creating an atmosphere where people want to spend the whole night there which is what we do at taste london probably our flagship oceans of people dancing enjoying pimento were you guys there last year yeah i feel like i did see a little festival happening inside yeah that's the one and people come back to taste and they're like i specifically want to go to the pimento bar and that's the affinity that we've built and i think that's why festivals are such a fantastic place if you can get the model right mass eyeballs mass sampling get all of these people into your community and i 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 25 yeah geez 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 would like and it is about festival space um so we went live Clemente in March 2021, quit our corporate jobs like a couple of months after that.

41:05And 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. At 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 that 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 wow so we could i know daylight robbery um and we did the festival that was the first festival we'd ever done yeah and we hit the 60 grand in top line revenue and the best and biggest learning from that was one we can't 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 pimento we think that you guys are onto something with this kind of experience led brand world that you're creating yeah we later found out we outsold patron at taste london because of creating this in revenue yep and they had spent 250 grand on their activation which was nuts oh my god and that's why distil was 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 yeah and that's when we realized 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

43:28Olly Fawcett: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 we 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 leverage that debt with amyx and yeah it was like 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 was 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 has developed and we've got a build team it It was just like a little future look into the crystal ball of what things could look like for us.

44:45Olly Fawcett:I guess it's kind of the proof that the MVP works, right? You kind of did it pretty quickly and understood pretty rapidly that it would work and there's legs to it. You mentioned Distill Ventures. For those that don't know, could you explain what that is? Yes. So Distill 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 um 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 um and one of the criteria i guess for diageo at the time was tequila super high growth and rtd and Pimenti just happens to sit at the intersection of both at the time.

45:34So, yeah.

45:35Olly Fawcett:Is this 22? 2022. 2022. So, like, the American market at this point is going pretty crazy on tequila, right? Yes. You've got the kind of 818s of the world, Casamigos of the world. Casamigos, yes. 818 wasn't about then, I don't think. Fine. But it was like kind of, there was a lot happening in the States. 100%. Like, it's still the most consumed spirit out there by a country mile when we launched Pimenti. Yeah. And I think that's the aim of the program. distal ventures they want to bring brands under their wing like whilst they're young and low in value and things like that so they opposed you at the festival yeah they prospect they prospected us at taste london and then there was kind of this whole process that came after in terms of we had to like present to 20 members of the international diashio team and we again like 25 at this point like you know i thought we were just running bars like well how have i landed in this mess now um but again so incredible because i think that gave us a real insight into these are all of the things that diazio were looking for and i think it just gave us that extra bit of credibility and motivation that they've got eyes on us they see what we're doing as valuable and if we can kind of have their name on the literature and that credibility that's going to be such an incredible springboard to kind of get pimento out there yeah and at the time the store ventures they were offering kind of varying ticket sizes to inject into the business to allow them to grow there wasn't kind of like any crazy equity structures attached to it it's all on a safe note it was like really good for a brand of our size to kind of get the cash in allow us to grow without being tied to them taking a majority share in the business just for context safe note being cash now cash now equity later at a certain conversion point so we had to do xyz and capital for that to trigger and you you so you pitched them to 20 people and i imagine So that was what, 45 minutes an hour?

47:26Olly Fawcett:Was that the first big pitch that you guys had done? Was that the kind of biggest thing you'd pitch for the brand at the stage? So there was one pitch that we did before then. And it was for, I can remember it was Brown Rudnick at the time, because it was Camilla Vasquez who had just won the Johnny Depp trial. Really weird association, but it was a pitch to them. They had like an FMB investor day and this was just post-COVID. So people weren't doing like live pitches in front of people, but they had 50 like high net worth individuals in a room and me and alice got roped into it like 24 hours before to pitch and there was an award for best pitch and then best product and pimenti ended up winning them both so that was the first pitch that we did and we met some high net worths in the room that later went on to invest which was great fantastic and then the diazio one that was our that was the kind of most formal um pitch that we had done into the pimenti journey what did you focus on in a 45 minute pitch to diashio at that time so it was uh the macro and micro environment in terms of really understanding what tequila and rtd looked like and what we thought that meant for us what was our kind of defensible usp in the market and at that time we were the only brand doing 20 litre kegs cans and bottles um which meant diversified revenue streams which is great for investors they don't like over reliance were they as a brand i imagine they're very focused on the commercials as much as they are the brand yes both which was even waiting i would say probably more on brand at that point because we were still 18 months yeah exactly still pretty early stage it's different exactly whereas now everyone's like be profitable or you will die um then brand because obviously i think that's the thing that a lot of the larger incumbents struggle to do create a brand that really engages with the consumer it's all pretty traditional and archaic and commercial isn't it in the alcohol space um so yeah it was also on supply chain making sure we understood what like the longevity and tequila looked like how we would import in bulk and then about me and alice as well because we it was us who was running the business and i think the main thing is like and i like we didn't create the margarita like ideas are really easy to copy i think how you execute it and the people behind it are the things that you cannot copy so they were you know wanting to find out about us and what our visions were how we work together and things like that what was the reaction from the conversation immediately like obviously this was in person right so you're seeing oh no diazio this was on laptop because it was all the like global people there were people from the u.s joining and all out of there right like for you guys running through this like your your role in the business now feels like a lot of pitching right and a lot of like that you know recycling of information and that element but doing this for the first time do you remember the experience or does it feel like a bit of a flow state kind of went through it i can remember it because we had a festival the whole weekend before and we got back on the sunday at 9 p.m and we had the pitch at like 11 o 'clock on the monday and we had done so much prep so distal ventures distal ventures work with you for like three months to make sure you're like as pitch ready as possible but they can't guarantee you'll get the investment so distal bench just kind of like preps you yeah and then the kind of like crazy thing about the structure of it is you pitch they ask their questions they jump off of the call then you just have an hour where you sit and wait and they call you back and tell you whether you get the investment or not that quickly yeah after an hour and you're going for a certain amount at this point yeah you have that all out in the pitch and that kind of thing exactly exactly and i can remember feeling nervous but i can i think the the overarching feeling was like this is like this is where our journey begins if we get this like if we can have the backing of the world's largest alcohol power like powerhouse attached to us like this early into our journey this is everything that i've needed to like showcase to everyone who was like this is ridiculous that we can do it um so yeah it was this crazy combination of adrenaline nerves excitement and then when we got it i was just like right like now it's game time you just said something that's quite interesting there so this is 2022 18 months old the brand but there's an element of you that's still trying to prove to other people that it was a thing did that actually exist what was it was a doubt from other people still after 18 months crazy festival experiences proving that that concept can be profitable then pitching diageo is that what you needed to prove that it to other people that it was going to work now you say it you know what i feel like it's more proving to myself because i think there is always and you've probably had this as well no matter whatever like listing you land no matter what revenue you hit there's always that like thing inside of me that i think is like do more grow more be better more validation i'm not sure if there's ever a point where i'll actually truly be happy i'd say it's the entrepreneurs curse that yeah i think that's the curse of of doing this thing it's always going to exist and it's painful to live with because it means you don't sit with wins for long enough you never actually recognize that where you are right now is exactly where you wanted to be a couple of years ago but in that moment 18 months in I definitely do think there was this there was this air of uncertainty as there is every single year like when you run out of cash and all that kind of stuff but I think in my mind to get me through I would just set these invisible milestones to be like okay once I do this then everyone will be like you're doing it but in reality like a lot of people were probably just like you guys are doing phenomenally well and I probably just listened to the one person who was a bit skeptical and I was like I'll show you do you think that would drive you though yeah a hundred percent I think I think like an element of being a successful entrepreneur and I'm not saying I am a successful one in any way shape or form but i think it is that little intrusive voice that is like be better do more go faster i think without that you lose momentum you're not constantly like driving to be the whether it's the best margarita in market or the best like entrepreneur out there in terms of how you're doing x y and z um so yeah but you just said you don't think you're a very successful entrepreneur so what's going to make it successful for you the god want to unpack with the old therapist i think you and alice as well like because there is the the element of like i know exactly what you mean and people have been on the show and people that i talk to like there's always more there's always more to get to and i do think that like founders entrepreneurs are so bad at celebrating wins like it's just the worst thing but it's also kind of if if you start doing that obviously when you have a team it's incredibly important right because it's a different perspective but if you start doing that too much you kind of do stop going forward and you kind of get that satisfaction point but for you and alice you guys have gone through so much already knowing half your story there's so much success happening were you not able to celebrate many of those wins but for you guys if you've got such a tight relationship it feels like you must have been doing we're probably two of the worst people at sitting in that moment and celebrating our success i always tell people who are asking me for advice make sure you celebrate the wins do all of that kind of stuff but I don't follow I don't follow my own medicine I can like completely appreciate that it's something that everyone needs to do and I just clearly do the opposite yeah but yeah it's it's a weird reality to sit with I guess and it's definitely something I acknowledge we need to do more of but I think I need to have a sit down with myself and really recognize what success looks like to me because landing Sainsbury's that we did that was my my previous like I always set myself like a yearly north star like this is what will be the best thing like for the business and every single decision we make ladders up to that amazing so we had Sainsbury's this year I can probably say we celebrate like I was happy about that for all of 15 minutes before I started celebrating or worrying about the next thing and I think that's a terrible a terrible way to operate because why are we putting ourselves through all of this uncertainty and stress if we're not enjoying the journey and arguably that's the most beautiful part of the whole thing that we're doing yeah and that's something that i need to figure out i'll let you know i think i think anyone that's building quickly and building fast or even finding forms of success it's just a very natural and naturally i know exactly what you mean in terms of when you first start a thing when you get to a certain point it's that thing of like i'll be happy then i'll be satisfied then but then but the journey of going to that point always unlocks the next thing in the mind um what was the impact of di show coming in so i can remember it really clearly at the time because we were looking to do a really small investment round of 250 really small investment round 250k in the grand scheme of things like i know what you mean yeah 250k and when i was able to go to all of our kind of warm angel investors and say we've landed the di show distal investment every single one of them immediately jumped on the opportunity so what was a 250k raise turned into like i think we closed at like 580k which at the time was fantastic yeah because i think people obviously there's no such thing as a risk-free investment when you're 18 months into it if you can say to people that this is a huge focus area for the likes of diazio and it gave us so much credibility it was something that we brought up in conversations with investors um within the industry just so we had more credibility as a brand when we were speaking to retailers and things like that it really really helped and i think on a like more personal level i think it really validated me as well what do you mean by that i think when we first launched pimento it was i mean it's fantastic that tequila and rtd are such huge growth areas now but at the time tequila was still in its infancy in the uk rtd was still like should we go into cans shouldn't we go into cans there's all of this uncertainty all we knew is that we were creating a really cool brand that people loved but like we didn't have that maybe maybe i'm just the kind of person who needs that i kind of needed this like validation from the higher powers that we're growing like we're on the right trajectory we're doing all of the right things yeah and i think knowing that i'd presented our like commercial business plan to diazio and they were like we love what you're doing we love the multi-formats and all of this i was like i yeah okay cool i came up with that strategy i can do it so i think for me it was like i'm building with purpose and i i need purpose i need to wake up and be like have meaning yeah and i think that it turned it from being this fun startup to a business that has legs and with that i mean you raised the cash to invest back into the business where did a lot of that go um a lot of it went into launching the cans so we launched with the 50 cl glass bottles and we did a full launch into like rtd cans not many brands were doing it at the time moth were leading the kind of charge and i think we were kind of second after them to do that which was amazing and now it's kind of it's the fastest growing sector within alcohol right now rtd so it's where the market's at um me and alice were a team of two for two and a bit years we made our first two hires which was amazing we decided to get ourselves a little office space co-working um we launched two new products um and then that also supported the waitrose launch as well so a of working capital in there yeah how did you find hiring a team i'm an absolute freak when it comes to hiring i've got problems when i made it after like katie was our first hire and she's our senior national account manager so she manages like pubs bars restaurants i i interviewed 31 people and 31 31 people it's quite a lot it's a lot good luck to my team they were all like i made it very clear so we we had um we put out an ad on linkedin and then we had a recruiter that we were working with as well but i made it clear that the intro call would just be like a vibe check like 10-15 minutes just so i'm not wasting like half an hour with that to other people but 10-15 minutes um and i think for me it was i came from a corporate environment where i absolutely hated the culture where i was told that bums on seats equaled like productivity I wasn't allowed to work abroad even though my family live abroad there were like so many elements of my previous corporate environment that I hated and I wanted to make sure that when I was cultivating a team that I instilled all of those values and I brought the people in as well who reflected that um and because it's such a small team as well I need to make sure that the person we're bringing in has a founder mentality has is happy to wear like a million and 12 hats every single day and Katie was that there were so many interviews that I had where I was listening to people and i would kind of like tap out and i was like this feels like really rehearsed and then when katie came in i was just like actually rooting for her like in the background i had like the flags out going yes you can do it because alice was on the call too and i was like i found this jet i'm like and i was so excited to present her and i think that's the mentality i still have with every single hire we make i'm like i want the best and we do have a powerhouse team now which is amazing yeah sounds fantastic i mean you guys are growing so it seems like that must be a great team behind it what do you think the most important um trait of a team member for parence is i think on the sales side they need to be resilient as hell but also i kind of alluded to this earlier when someone says no we hear yes it's fine it's just a little like no right now we can pivot we can give you like this maybe we'll do like a little one month free trial we'll do a pop-up with like one of our kegs and you can get two grand in your till then you then you give us listing after like all of these like little nuances you've got to get creative with it when someone says no we're going to pop up and like be in your face anyway to uh like a nice level not like crazy but um yeah i think it's uh the resilience the creative problem solving and just like knowing that as a small brand in a space that's dominated by like diazios throwing 100k to get the listing we need to be a little bit quirky um and then from a marketing standpoint and i know this is your bread and butter and more Alice's but in order to stand out we needed to kind of I think for us we just needed to lean into the storytelling founder side of things so we needed to bring somebody in who really understood that if our competitors were doing this we wanted to do the complete opposite in terms of how we were showing up as an alcohol brand and I think from the beginning we were very good at building in public having this very kind of like a lifestyle led brand but also showcasing all of the hardships so i think all of the people who came into the team needed to understand that they weren't just kind of come into a business that was very traditional in terms of how we show up it needs to resonate with who we're speaking to in a unique way when you started obviously getting the two team members in did things grow quicker or at the same pace or did they grow slower um i think i have a problem with delegating um at the beginning interesting um but not anymore not anymore okay and i think that comes from a place where i just love being across all the detail like i love having my nose in everyone's business knowing what's going on the whole time sure um and i think when you're so used to doing that for two years and being responsible for every single thing when someone comes in and they're like i'm going to grow this side of the business i'm like but it's fine um but then once katie came in i mean she grew the wholesale arm of our business from zero to 250 grand in one year and she's one individual human which is crazy and i think that was the biggest lesson of bringing somebody in who is better than me an expert in her space more so than me absolutely and she she paid for herself within the first three months and i was like okay this is how we hire we bring in people who are the best we bring in people who are better and we give them autonomy i will like upskill you in whatever way I can from like certain areas but otherwise fly free do what you do best that's why you're here I'm here to micromanage you no definitely how were you developing your leadership style in this time um so fortunately when I was at Sky I was managing people right but I think again like I took so much from all of the things that I disliked having a manager there the ones who were kind of very micromanaging the ones who didn't kind of give you the freedom to have your own ideas and I just wanted to make sure that I constantly was asking Katie I was like this is my first time doing it in my own business and whilst these are the ways that I operate please please please tell me if there is something you want more of less of if there's where I'm communicating with you that you like or you dislike because I'm still learning I want this to be as fruitful as humanly possible um and me and Alice would go to like so many talks as well just to kind of try and absorb as much as like as much as we could but I think from the beginning it was always difficult because it was just me and Alice and you know it's you're bringing in people from a completely different industry and when it's like a wholesale team who's used to like being out in trade I can't be like I want you to be in the office every two to three days you have to have that implicit trust yeah and I think that's part of being a good leader trusting people and knowing that being sat in your seat from nine to five thirty doesn't equal success that you'll make up the time if you need to and now I come from a place where I'm so flexible we love the hybrid working model you can work abroad for a month in January if you want to get in if you want to get into work at 10 and finish like a little bit later to miss the morning commute stress do that it's trust I don't interview 31 people for no reason yeah true did you ever feel self-conscious about being a leader um so no I think I I would be worried about not helping somebody develop and progress I think that was my fear but I like to think that I am somebody who would like motivate encourage inspire like bring a lot of humor to situations things like that so I was never nervous that my personality type didn't suit a leadership role just because by nature I love speaking to like c-suite people and like like being like I would be you when I grow up and just like absorbing always got a growth mindset on how I can be better if someone says I need x or y from you sponge I don't think I'm a like you know polished project by any means and I think that's that's what makes a good leader right like you can take the criticism you always want to grow you want to be better um but I wasn't self-conscious I don't I don't think I've got like a personality type that's a bit like oh I shy away from it I'll naturally go into a call and be like this is the agenda this is what we're doing these are the objectives and these are the next steps lean into it exactly 100 % at the end of the investor call so what size ticket are you thinking and what are your timelines straight up yeah brilliant love it the uh the industry you mentioned a few times in the conversation but also some of the competitors as well how do you how do you look at competition um i think the more people who are showing up in the tequila rtd space fantastic it's shining a spotlight onto the growth of the category it's amazing obviously there's an element of our growth that's going to be cannibalized but i think as we were speaking before like i think there is enough market share for everyone there's not just the one successful gin brand hence why we've got 15 gin rtds on like a retail shelf there is enough space for everybody and this is kind of one of the things i was thinking about at the start of this week that i think a lot of people are maybe a little bit scared to do like have a laser focused strategy like be so confident on owning your niche ours is tequila rtd that even if somebody else does launch another margarita cool like i know who we're speaking to i know who our consumer is i know the brand world that we're creating that's our armor like just because someone else is launching another margarita it doesn't mean that all of the kind of barriers to entry that we have created suddenly disappear yeah i think it's just having the confidence and the fact that we've built our product for a specific segment of the like consumer that we're speaking to i'm not trying to speak to everyone in the market there's space for everybody more of a spotlight on tequila is an amazing thing for me it's growing 237 year-on-year tequila rtds everything else is in decline so i'm not surprised more people want to kind of join the margarita trail i would do you thinking about your competitors do you take a lot of inspiration from them as well um absolutely i mean i think moth have done a fantastic job of showcasing the high abv premium rtds they kind of carved that space out it didn't exist before they launched so wonderful that they've done that and it's such a huge growing category so for me it's like if they can scale their business to where they have but they're doing in a very different way I'm like perfect we can we can use them to showcase that businesses can get to that kind of revenue trajectory where you become appetizing for the exit but I just know we're doing it in a very different way we've got different products different consumers different branding and all of that so yeah I absolutely look at brands in the space and go yeah okay that's that's cool but then i do also look at brands as well and i'm like if you're doing that then you know i don't ever look at anyone and go i want to i want to be like you we want to create something totally different if you think the same as everyone else you're going to get the same outcome and that's not what we want either so true what do you think is driving the most amount of growth for you guys definitely definitely so cans make up i think like 50 of our product mix um they're the lowest margin product that we have but they're so accessible it's marketing on a can sure um so the cans are fantastic easily accessible price point great for like retail festivals and things like that but i think the thing that's driving the most growth but also i guess differentiating us is the kind of like multiple formats that we offer so we're not just a retail product we've got 20 litre kegs that attach into draft systems which unlocks like pubs bars restaurants stadiums big focus for us at the moment then we've got a five litre bag in a box proposition which is also great for pubs bars restaurants office spaces things like that so i think it's when somebody wants a cocktail solution that can fit every single consumer touch consumer touch point that's where they'll be that's where they'll bring pimento in so we've just landed a stadium in birmingham and they wanted pimento because we have 20 litre kegs cans and bag in a box and they've got vip suites they've got self-serve so it's us understanding that their consumers all want to consume pimento in a different way yeah so i think that's probably what's fueling a lot of our growth it's super interesting it's exactly what do you know nice wines yes lucy came on the show got about a year over a year ago now it was exactly the same answer in terms of that element of kind of product distribution yeah and the format thing is just a huge a huge driver and i think even she was saying that for brands that aren't doing that can actually be quite challenging when you're just stuck in almost one lane in terms of what who's appealing who you're appealing to but also yeah you're in consumers going to care but actually it's your it's your stock is they're going to get the most 100 and i think the more touch points the more formats the more of a halo effect you can see with your consumers they've got more recall if they can get you in sainsbury's on the way home if they see you at glasto when you're at a bar like yeah you're just so in their face that they're just like exactly yeah and it's also just silly building a business around one format when retail buyers make decisions twice a year if i don't like sainsbury's this year that's a million pounds gone and i'm not able to pivot into another channel which is quite risky in itself so definitely those are all of the things that i guess went through the back of our minds when we were like multiple formats diversified revenue streams yeah that's risk is there any product or format you you thought you were going to make or tried to make that didn't work out um at one point and it definitely worked for some brands but not ours there was like talk of trying to do like a recyclable bottle right it was kind of like a like festival not a kind of but more like the wood slightly more robust and like in a you know the aluminium wine bottles like that but kind of more of a wooden actually exactly but more like wooden and for the festival space got it people were like sustainability recycling like you guys should definitely try this it would fly we didn't end up doing it but i feel like that would have been something that really didn't work for us but other than that i feel like we pretty much do all of the go for everything yeah come through them all so so what does the future look like for you guys then where do you want to go so eu is a big focus for us not america not america really not america um we briefly touched on this earlier i think there have been so many phenomenal brands in the uk like incredible brands who have just not been able to make the us work and i think if you can make it work honestly hats off to you and i think there are some brands where they absolutely thrive and they fly because their proposition just works i think in tequila and in alcohol one there's like a three-tiered like legislation legislation system like wrapping your head around that's crazy um even if you're taking on one state at a time like we would probably need to do a two like a two to five million pound fundraise just for marketing the margins just wouldn't be there for us just to launch into the just to exist in their ether i also think to make the u.s work you need some kind of like talent attached to you which is kind of another obstacle and if there's enough headroom in the uk and eu and we've got really strong margins why would we like why would we pivot there yeah i think when we get to a point where hopefully we're kind of like in the realm of looking at that acquisition piece they typically like to see that you can work in the us so like maybe dip a toe in there just to showcase the demands there they acquire you then they pump it through and then you know they've got the growth and growth to sell it yeah from the very beginning i know i kind of mentioned the North Star the more like realistic ones have been the like grocers or the pub groups that we've landed but for me even from the beginning whenever I could even get 30 minutes and I did like I've been doing this for the last couple of months whenever I can steal half an hour with a ex Perno Bacardi Diageo I will say what are you looking for in a brand that you're going to acquire what revenue what what products what geographical locations so I know that I'm building the business with purpose and we've ticked all of those boxes by the time we get there and i can say look we've executed and all of those i know a lot of them do change but like i'm not just like building a business to like it exactly like that that's that's the that's that's always been the goal nice so last question for me what does it take to build a brand like pimento um i think I think one, a co-founder.

1:14:01I would never reckon, I think there's too much to do, too much, like the diverse skill sets that you need to do it. Like just start with a co-founder if you can, I would say. And go into it knowing that it will be the most soul destroying thing you've ever done, but the most fulfilled I've ever felt in my entire life. Like don't be naive to think it's glamorous at all you will be challenged you'll be tested but my god my brain is always like alive and yeah i just think the opportunities are so so endless but just go into it with realistic expectations of how much graft it's going to be and be ready to like fucking commit

1:14:45Olly Fawcett:fucking commit sounds like a great way to end winter thank you so much for coming on the show it's been fascinating to learn more about the journey you've been on because it's been an interesting one for sure and um yeah i've taken a lot from it i'm sure people will too so thank you best of luck enjoy the summer that we're about to go into how many festivals this year 25 nice we'll enjoy every single one of them and i'm sure we'll see you soon thank you so much for having me pleasure