046 | Jack Orr-Ewing | From Start-Up to 40K 9L cases: Duppy Share's (bumpy) journey to become the UK’s largest independent Rum Brand

Hi, and welcome to the Maffeo Drinks Podcast. I'm your host, Chris Maffeo. In episode 46, I had the pleasure of chatting to Jack O. Ewing. He is the CEO of the Westbourne drinks company, The Dappies Share.

He brings an incredible experience of the various stages of brand development from the start to reaching scale in a market. We dived into efficient and effective marketing spend and how to align the route to market to each brand stage. I hope you will enjoy our chat. Hi, Jack. How are you doing?

I'm very well. Thanks, Chris. Thank you very much for having me on. I'm looking forward to talking to you.

Absolutely. Welcome to the Muffer Drinks podcast. It's an honor to have you here. I think we bumped into each other on LinkedIn for a, for a while, but never got the opportunity to speak. And now, you know, finally we managed.

So I'm really, I'm really happy.

I'm excited. And I'm an, I'm an advocate and a follower of you on LinkedIn and look forward to your, your updates. So always got interesting things to say.

Thanks, Jake. So let's start with you are the CEO of DapiShare. Let let's dive in on, you know, one of my dear topics, which is creating demand versus creating brand awareness. I've been in endless conversation in corporate where, you know, all all the brand managers, marketing managers are talking about we need to grow brand awareness. We need to grow brand awareness.

And I get goosebumps when I when I hear that because, you know, for me, brand awareness as such is a very fluffy term that can lead to a lot of, like, money spent but not in an effective way. So what what is your take on how do you build demand for a brand in your experience?

Well, I mean, one is find yourself a slot on the hottest podcast in the country. That is absolutely the way to go, but I completely agree with you. We've been talking a lot in the office. You know, we are The UK's number one, premium rum brands. We do about 30,009 liters.

We've been marketing ourselves at times, you know, with big budgets, at times with more trimmed budget for nearly ten years in the country. You know, we are still not a well known brand and, you know, brand awareness is something that is incredibly expensive and hard won. And that's just in The UK where we are quite a significant player within the independent spirits kind of category. The big mistake that you, you often make as a independent spirit is to overly focus on consumer awareness, trying to drive your pull through from the consumers by doing expensive events or investing in influencers or putting lots of money into social media. When, you know, as you say, the, the real game is to build your distribution footprint and to work with your trade partners to actually get your product selling.

And, you know, it's an incredible leap of faith when you really think about it, that you're giving away bottles or spending a lot of money in a festival or a, or giving, giving away drinks or spending money on an influencer for those people to go and buy what is an awful loss of drinks from the very few pubs or bars that you might have managed to get listed in at the early stage of your brand. You've gotta sell an awful lot of cocktails to cover a £500 influencer fee, which is a tiny amount of money to spend on influencer. So, you know, I think the big learning for me over the last five, six years of running this brand has been to really delay your consumer marketing until you've got the distribution footprint to back it up. And I think that is later than a lot of, spirits founders might hope for in their journey.

Wow. That's, you, you don't know how happy you make me to, say what you said, because it's exactly my, my philosophy, because especially in my experience is that even if you approach a thousand consumers, potential consumers that by the way, drank your brand for free in that festival, most probably, they bought, they bought it at a fair price or whatever that would be, you know, then even if they love it, they took a picture of it and then they have no idea where to go and find it. That that is the biggest issue. What I always recommend is that, okay, I'm not against doing events as long as they are small, let's say sustainable events, they should be in the trade where your product is distributed. So if I want to go back to it next Saturday, I know that I can find that product in it.

There's a lot of people that do that, that they take, for example, like a fancy hotel rooftop bar or whatever, where they're not distributed. And then they throw a cool party with super cool people. And then these people go back to their rooftop and then it's like, no, never heard this brand. Yeah. There was a party.

There was a private party two weeks ago. Sorry. Like, we've never we've never heard that brand since.

Exactly. And the one thing you quickly learn about super cool people is that they very rarely buy their own alcohol. You know, they all go to the same parties and, drink for free the whole time and none have ever bought a bottle of spirits in their whole life. So, the worst market in the target, with your sampling anyway.

We spoke about distribution. So how how do you move the first steps in a country? What was your experience or at least what what would you recommend to do? Because does it start with a neighborhood? Does it start with a city?

Does it start with a country itself? How do you pick the city? How do you pick the place to start?

So so I think we were very lucky in our timing. So Duckby founded in 2015, right in the middle of the gin boom. There was there was kind of new gin brands and distilleries popping up all over the country, you know, let alone London. And, know, we were going into a bar and saying, can I talk to you about my rum brand? And they would say, don't you mean gin?

And so the refreshingness of, of it being a rum brand was a, was a little bit of an, an end, and there was less of a, you know, we were one of the first big independent. I think we were first independent rum brand found in The UK for over a hundred years when we started in 2015. Now, you know, that is not the story that is today. And it's incredibly easy to found a spirit brand today. On master of malt, when I started, there were two fifty rum products.

You know, there are over a thousand now. You know, there's that just sort of show the kind of innovation and the growth in the category, all great things for a leading independent spirits brand, but it does, you know, makes you a lot less unique and a lot, so, you know, your sales pitch much harder to land. From Dave and Duffy's perspective, we don't own our own distillery. We don't have a, business center. We were hap we were founded in Notting Hill and Notting Hill Carnival is the Europe's largest street party and a huge celebration of cal Caribbean culture in the sort of center of London.

That for us feels like a bit of a marketing and a kind of, that's where our tribe kind of go to. And it's a wonderful melting pot of English Caribbean and Caribbean diaspora people that all come to one place. That's a one moment in the year where we kind of own it. But broadly, you know, rum in The UK is a, is a broadly drunk spirit, but you need to be listed in an awful lot of places. So while our heartland has always been London, our desire as a brand is to get into national listings as early as possible.

And we've always managed to find ourselves that spot as the one independent brand that sits in the rum category alongside the kind of mainstay competitors. And, you know, I love walking into a pub and seeing your Appletons, your Mount Gay's and your Krakens, Bacardi, captain Morgan and Duffy. And I love being that one quirky independent brand within that category. And there's probably always a nice space for an independent brands within those kind of more mainstream brands. You know, you might be seeing a fraction of the volume that they would be getting because you can't afford to buy your space on that list, but you can definitely justify your place on that shelf.

And that's kind of how Duffy's been successful in The UK. It's slightly different story when you talk in the international markets that we're in, in Czech Republic, where you are is a good example of that. You know, we don't have that biggest independent, you know, kind of cast category card that we can play. So it is much more of a traditional bartender by bartender, starts in Prague, spend a few days in Brno, try and get ourselves into the top 20, top 30 bars and play more of a kind of premium traditional route into the market. But I do think, yeah, UK and and the kind of route to our biggest success has been get into the nationals as quickly as possible and try to expand your distribution footprint from as early as you can in your journey.

It's very interesting because what I, what I, what I usually talk about here is, is, is also like the fact that there is always for any spirits category, there's always a traditional consumption occasion and a modern, more modern one, you know, a wider one. So of course, like when you think of a rum occasion from a restaurant perspective or from a bar perspective, were discussing this that you don't actually have a clear ethnic provenance to, to look for, like in terms of like what agave would have or Italian spirits or beer would have. You don't have, like, a Chinese, Japanese. You know, you don't have the the very widely available kinda, like, cuisines of the world. Caribbean cuisine is

not even in the top 20 most searched for UK cuisines, you know, in The UK. I was listening to your podcast by Paul Donnelly. I was listening to him talk about it. If you are a tequila brand, you can legitimately go to Mexican restaurants in every city and to build your tequila brand through that. The same for Maltzey gin or Peroni.

You could just do that through Italian restaurants, but you know, the, the number of searches for Caribbean food in The UK is less than 5,000 a month, you know, versus in The UK, you know, on Google search, the, the equivalent in the top 10, they're most of them are half a million plus. So there's really isn't a sort of massive interest in Caribbean food that is changing. And Turtle Bay restaurants is the kind of absolute lighthouse, most amazing partner that we've got. And their founder, Ajith Joe Acrema, is one of our investors, has given us amazing access to the Turtle Bay menu, and they're one of our biggest customers. You know, they sell more through 50 Turtle Bay restaurants than we do through 400 Alsdas or 400 Morrisons.

So they, you know, they're a fantastic partner, but there just aren't many of those in The UK. You know, the second biggest Caribbean restaurant chain, I think, is Cottons who have six or seven sites. And the third biggest is rum kitchen with two.

So how did you, how'd you select the, the, the bars that are right for you? So when, when it comes to what could be a target occasion or what could be a focus that you have, like, do you have a typology of outlet that for you makes sense to start from?

So our sort of perfect example is between five and twelve sites. Informal premium is our kind of what we call an informal premium. It's quite an urban trend that we've definitely seen in London. You'll see it in New York. I probably don't know enough about the FNB scene in Europe to make comment on it, but places where you've got sort of reason, you know, high quality, high quality food that's served in an informal way.

So places like Gourmet Burger Kitchen, Honest Burgers, Hassian Bun, Pizza Pilgrims, Meat Liquor, they're high energy food led. They've got a small menu of maybe 10 drinks and you can take one or two of those. They're the sort of places that might do three or 4,000 bottles a year. And they're, and you, and you can get your arms around them. You can train their staff.

You can give them incentives. You can get them all wearing t shirts and they're selling enough per site to make it all worthwhile. And that's our absolutely perfect account. You know, they're not particularly geographically set, you know, even pizza pilgrims doesn't necessarily call itself an Italian restaurant. And it's really about, you know, right target audience.

They like to have a pre or during dinner drink. They're the really, really nice sites. We love to target those. To go back to your question about rum's occasion, I would say rums greatest strength is it also its greatest sweetness at the same time. And it's, it's kind of versatility.

You can have a rum punch. You can have a rum old fashioned, mojitos, daiquiris, pina coladas. There's this kind of enormous range of drinks that you can serve. And, you know, you you're talking everywhere from your sundowner on a beach with your family, where you might have a pina colada all the way through to drinking rum and Cokes at 03:00 in the morning in a nightclub. It's a huge stretch of occasions to go after.

And unfortunately, none of them are really big enough for you as a independent brand to own. You know, there is no Aperol spritz moment where enough people are drinking Pina Coladas for you to become a pina colada brand. I, I was, you know, listening to you and Paul talking about some incredible brands, you know, your, your Guinness moments, your Peroni moment, your Aperol moment, your Magnus moment, you know, Hendrix. You absolutely know as someone even not inside the industry, what those moments, those occasions are, how that drink is served. They are big international brands with great distribution power, as well as marketing money to, to create that moment and to deliver that moment in that occasion and to have a little bit of power over your distribution, to be able to kind of make sure that that moment's delivered.

And I think the kind of difference of experience between the independents and the startup versus the global, it's just absolutely no control of your distribution until quite late on in your journey. And even with a great distributor, you don't really have that portfolio power. Yeah. So, you know, as much as I would love to say, share is in our name. Rum is a collective collegiate experience.

It brings people together. There's no better example of that serve than the rum punch. It's got it's steeped in history. It's a delicious drink. It's very popular.

We would like the Duffy moment to be a sharing serve, you know? So we want, you know, punch bowls. We spent a lot, a lot of money and time and thought building out beautiful punch bowls, ordering, you know, extra large cocktail shakers. It's really tricky for a brand our size to go into the trade and say, we want to be a rum punch group serve. And I want you list my punch bowl.

Here's a punch serve. I want you to put that on the menu at £25 and serve it in these gold cups. They're like, who the hell are you? You know, you can't be no one drinks this. Darn it.

No one's walking into, into pubs asking for golden punch bowls at £25 each. There isn't an occasion for that. And we're not big enough to drive it. The role of that independent is to be nimble and to be flexible and to work with your sales opportunities and to kind of fit your brand into what they need. And if they're looking for a late night daiquiri served, you you you damn sure you can make a damn good daiquiri.

I think like what you were mentioning before, like, you know, the Epirus Priest, the Hendrix Jain and so on, like, kind of moments that they are also, you know, coming through many, many years of trial and error. I don't, I don't have evidence of this, but, know, I'm, I'm pretty sure that in the beginning, like even those big brands, they were not sure about what to go for. I mean, I always bring up the example of Campari because, know, I'm an, I'm a big Negroni and I'm American drinker, but I'm pretty sure that, I mean, when you go to Italy, there's a lot of Campari Spritz going on. So, so I'm pretty sure that there is still imperfection into their execution on, okay, like, well, do we go for Campari Spritz, but then we cannibalizing Aperol Spritz and then, oh, are we going single mindedly for an American or an, or an Negroni? So I hear what you say about the agility, the blessing and the curse of rum on, know, from old fashion all the way down to Pina Colada.

But when you can get into that and put that foot in the door, then, you know, trying to to make the most out of it. Because I I what I was thinking was when you were mentioning all those brands that, you know, Dapi Sherri sitting next to is how to differentiate yourself. And in a way you answer with the fact that you're independent, but then in the moment in which there's more independence fighting for that shelf or next to DAPI Share, then how can you differentiate yourself into the mind of that bartender or that bar owner?

Yeah. Well, it's a really good question. You know, USPs are easily easily explained, but poorly understood, I think, from our perspective. We've over the course of time, as we've scaled, what we've managed to do is use design and the blend to create something that tastes really premium and looks really premium, but can, can operate on a commercial basis that is competitive with our biggest competitors. And that's been a real success story for us and that we can go up against Havana and with our white rum compete with like for like on price with Havana three, but offer a much superior liquid with a design that is, you know, looks a lot more premium and can command a higher price point.

So a lot of our pitch into the trade is to say, you can get the kind of big global house products commercials, but you can charge your consumers a independent premium, you know, positioning. So we're better commercials than our independent competitors and better kind of look and feel design and command a higher price point than our house kind of global competitors. So we are kind of offering them an, an improvement against both of our competitor sense. And I think that is, you know, we're able to do that by leveraging our position as the largest independent, you know, because we've managed to achieve that kind of scale of production. That means that our kind of cost of goods is pretty competitive with our, with our major global competitor set.

And that said, I think where Duffy is always gonna be good is gonna be in those kind of medium scale UK brands where we can put a brand ambassador in there. They're gonna meet me or meet George. They're going to get kind of bespoke menus. We'll come up with some names for the cocktails. We'll give them sort of signed bottles from our, our, you know, brand partner Kano.

You know, we can do some things as an independent brand that are pretty kind of big and interesting, adding value on a more emotional level than, than either our small independent friends or our kind of global competitors. So, you know, I think a lot of those intangibles do end up playing quite a big part in kind of winning those listings. Right. Because, know, we can get our arms around and make a difference in there.

Well, that's, that's very interesting what you're saying, because that's the, the, the best thing when you deliver to your customers and to your consumers a very good, you know, quality price ratio. And, and you basically basically is not worth for them anymore to go with a more mainstream brand because all of a sudden it's like, I'm gonna mean like, you know, can premiumize effortlessly and convince and command higher margins for me. I was having this discussion with one of the guys at Barconvent in Berlin last October, and we were talking about this with, with some of these brands that are very premium, but then they are very unaffordable. And then all of a sudden it's like, yeah, I would I would love to to support you and I would love to support your independence journey, but it just doesn't make sense for me. You know, I can do it because I love you, Jack, and you're a nice guy.

You're always here having gold fashioned at my bar. So as long as possible, I can try to squeeze you in with margins and so on. And we were discussing this with Morris Doyle, you know, the the love and money in in one of the one of the episodes. No? Like, you need balance out the love and money.

But at some point, you know, the love ends if you don't deliver money either, either with higher margins or with, you know, lower cogs versus another independent brand. And then all of a sudden you gained your spot and you're going to be there for a long time because it makes sense all of a sudden.

You don't want your bartender kind of wincing when they have to, buy another one of your brothels. If it's too expensive, I think you're gonna create a huge barrier. I think within rum, rum probably has a little bit of a category issue that there's not a huge amount of appetite and interest and understanding of rums above £30 or €30. You know, I think there's a very few brands that hit any kind of scale above that price point. Dom Pafford and Diplomatica are the kind of standout success stories.

And Stephen Carroll did an incredible job with Dompafa, get, getting it to that kind of a scale, sort of 250,000 nines in a similar kind of timeline to us, did an amazing job at that, but it's really challenging to do it, you know, and, and, know, he, he focused on markets where there is quite a good culture for drinking, you know, neat spirits and creating an occasion, but couldn't really make it work in The UK beyond, beyond kind of eight or 9,009 liters. Cause there really isn't like this, this big, big kind of premium rum interest, you know, people aren't aren't willing to spend that much money. So you've gotta kind of compete in the cocktails and the name cocktails and rum doesn't have its names, even category call out to like the gin tonic that is getting people even aware that they're drinking rum. Yeah. And as a, as a rum brand operator, the number of times you talk to someone either at a trade show or a friend that's in a party and they're sort of gumption, they'll say to you, I don't really like rum.

And you're, oh, well, great. That's basically my entire life selling it. So thanks very much. But you sort of then say, well, do you like, do you like daiquiris? And they're like, yes.

Do you like pina coladas? Yes. You know, they're, well, they're all rums. They people don't necessarily know that rum is the kind of primary ingredient in these super famous, successful cocktails that they drink all the time. You know, rum is always three or four out of the top 10, cocktails in the world.

I, I can, I can imagine like, you know, the average person like doesn't really know because there's, there's no rum in the name? It's not like a whiskey sour that you automatically know it's it's made with whiskey, you know? And, and even rum in the

name and

old fashioned is another example. It's like, you can be done with rum with whiskey, but some people don't, you know, I only drink old fashioned, you know, but they, they only know their category of old fashioned and they don't know the other ones. It's very, it's a very interesting one.

Quite a small number of people even know that Bacardi is a rum. They think of it as a category that kind of sits on its own. They think, oh, I drink Bacardi, but they don't really know that that's even a rum.

And what, how do you play with your, with your portfolio? Do you, do you play different games with different SKUs or do you have one, one that you use as the foot in the door and then you expand distribution with the others? Or is there like a flagship or is more of a portfolio So kind of

we launched them kind of sequentially. So Duffy Aged was the, it was just called Duffy Share in those days. That was the first product. It was a blended golden rum, three year old worthy park Jamaican rum and a five year old four squared Barbadian rum. And, you know, it sat on the shelf.

It was a, it was a bit of an everything product. We were using it in cocktails. You could drink it on the, on the rocks. It worked really well with a rum and ginger or rum and Coke. And as that product grew, you know, we were seeing it kind of sitting on the shelf at Morrison's and having to do a, you know, 28 pounds down to 22 pounds discounts.

And at the same time, it's sitting on the shelf in Selfridges at 33, four, thirty four pounds. And it was kind of being stretched in every direction as we kind of chased growth and we were taking on investor money to try and kind of scale the brand up. You knew that you had to kind of release products at a lower price points to protect your initial brand and spiced rum in 2017, 2018, when we launched our spiced rum was absolutely flying and growing from a small base, but really succeeding. So we launched our spiced rum in order to protect the premium positioning and the price point of our aged rum. So our, our spice rum was kind of built to do the retail job of starting at £25, coming down to 20, driving awareness and allowing the aged rum to stay there as a kind of premium product.

I think what I thought was the same consumer sitting across aged and spiced as we kind of understood and did more insights and talked to more people, people are normally either a spiced rum drinker or a rum drinker. And, you know, you can see it in The UK. There's Ian Burrell who runs The UK, rum fest, the global rum ambassador. You know, there was a couple of years where he ran two separate rum fests. You know, there was the spice rum fest and the UK rum fest.

They are massively different consumers. So there was a very little kind of crossover between those two brands. So, so no cannibalization and definitely acting in different spaces and often a different space on the menu or different space on the shelf between aged and, and spiced. And then we had this great opportunity in 2021 with a brand partner that we had been in conversation with for five years before that. There's a UK actor in Rafa called Kano, and we've been talking to him for years and we saw he did a bit of promo for Rare Nephew.

And we got obviously very jealous and felt, why you, why are you working with them? Come on, let's do a brand together. And we started talking to them about, to Kane about doing a white rum kind of in partnership together. And in the process of doing that, as soon as we even came up with the idea of a brand called Duppy White, that was gonna be 20 pounds on the shelf. It got listed in Saint in Tesco straight away before we'd, before we'd even put a label on a bottle or put any liquid in it.

So we suddenly felt ourselves potentially being dragged down to a less premium price, you know, less premium portfolio. So at the same time releasing Duffy white, we released Duffy XO, which was a 40 pound product. So our, our, our portfolio has kind of evolved out of needing to kind of protect the overall positioning. But now that we've got four products sitting across the kind of rum spectrum, we're able to have quite a clear commercial strategy. So Duffy White is house poor competitor to Havana three, put it in the bar and you want it to be your rum and Coke and what, you know, your, your highest selling cocktail.

It's a brilliant, brilliant product for its commercials, competes on price with probably a pound more than Bacardi in most bars. So it's a pretty good proposition. And then the spice and the age, so your kind of premium upsells and Exo sits in the back bar and doesn't move a huge amount, but it premiumizes the portfolio and it does as much of a brand positioning job as a volume job for us.

Wow. That's a, that's a, that's a really great strategy. It sounds like it was really built bottom up because it's not something made on a PowerPoint presentation of a portfolio strategy, but it comes with time and, you know, issues and challenges and opportunities and, you know, like making all things fit with each other. You know, consumers see the end result, which is a back bar with three or four SKUs. But but, like, in in the end, there is something for each type of consumer.

I heard you guys talking about the different consumer and the the the downside of having a broad portfolio is that you are talking to a huge number of people. You know, our Duffy whites is a predominantly urban younger audience. Duffy whites and Duffy spiced tend to be drunk by more female consumers. And then you've got age and XO, which you're talking to an older male consumer. XO is kind of tends to be above 45.

So a tiny brand like us with, with limited resources is actually trying to talk to kind of students all the way through to grumpy old men having a cigar in their library, you know, and it's a, there's a lot of different occasion for a lot of different people in that. The strength of having something for everyone, the risk is that you've got nothing for anyone.

What I would argue there is that there must be a type of person that looks for that type of brand regardless of the taste profile. It could be someone that is like it's a connoisseur, but then wants to introduce other friends and people into the categories or maybe they buy another one for other people or vice versa, know, it could be like a a young girl that, you know, loves that brand and then introduce the XO to the father or to the Yeah. Uncle or whatever, the aunt or like the rum drinker of the family. But it it I I guess in seeing what, you know, your communication, your website, and your your product, your label, you know, it speaks to a certain type of people re regardless of the age and the taste profile.

I think that's true. Again, going back to your your conversation with Paul, you know, I think the the big the big mistake is to target consumers that are too young to be able to afford your products. And as much as Duffy's kind of aspirational consumer is a kind of 25 to 35 year old urban creative, you know, people are working in ad agencies and come to our super cool people parties that we throw. The reality is when you look at your analytics, the very sort of few pockets of light that you get as an independent brand on who's buying your product. You know, you look at your Waitrose data, over 50% of our Waitrose, you know, people that bought Doppy age from Waitrose are older than 50 and they never show up on our Instagram.

They never show up to our parties, you know, but they like the product. The price point's about right. They may be trading down from a malt whiskey or something, and they enjoy brown spirits or dark spirits. And they're making that choice almost entirely on product price and packaging. Having never tried your liquid before, you know, cause you're a new product to them.

You've gotta kind of have a broad enough church to bring everyone in to, to your brand. And we've been so lucky with our, we've got an interesting name that is a nice brand hook that people kind of are intrigued by without, without necessarily understanding what it means. And the packaging is really nice. Our designer is the most genius person and the most valuable asset to our, our, our company. And the price point is, is competitive.

And those, those three things are the things that will get your consumer to try your product. The fourth thing is then liquid. You absolutely have to have a liquid that stacks up and does, you know, follows through on all those premium price points, nice, nice packaging and, and sits on the shelf in the right place. But if your liquid then lets you down, then you're in trouble. But listening to your, your views on whether you start with liquid or start with brand, Your brand is what entices people in and your liquid is what gets them to come back again.

But very few people try, try your liquid on, you know, before they buy a bottle on the shelf or, you know, often it's a gift.

I love that. If you allow me, I'll, I'll steal it with pride and, and reuse And and let's let's clarify actually for the listeners, like, what what's the reason behind the name? Because I I I love that story. So what's the reason of the the the Duffy share?

I mean, the name came from so Du Duffy was founded by George Frost, aged 25, was in The Caribbean. He was waiting actually for his brother to come join him at the bar and was sort of overhearing a bartender talk to a a customer who was, asking what, why there was a shot of rum sitting at the end of the bar. And he said, oh, that's to keep the Zuffies away. And he said, oh, what, you know, what, what are the Duffy what are you talking about? And he goes, oh, well, there are the concepts in, in whiskeys and cognacs called the angel share, which is the amount of spirits that evaporates away during the aging process.

But in The Caribbean, we don't believe that stuff. We believe that these craze spirits called Duffy's, they come into distilleries, they swoop between the island and they steal all the best rum from the barrels that's aging and they blend it together and they have this massive party. And George interrupted and said, oh, what do they call that? And he said, oh, it's, you know, it's called the Duffy share. And, you know, for someone who was at the time thinking about setting up a, a, a rum brand and trying to think of a name and a brand positioning that worked, you know, knowing that you're not gonna have a distillery to be able to have a story that kind of leaned on that Caribbean heritage and recognizing the incredible talent, skill, and heritage of the distilleries that you're working with.

But while also, you know, being upfront and legitimizing the project of being a blended rum, that Duffy share story kind of allows you to lean on that heritage and to, to kind of recognize the talents and the skill of those people and then deliver a beautiful packaged product that tastes great. And there's a blend, a blend of rums, which is kind of what the project was that we were trying to do. So the name and the brand all kind of stack up behind the liquids and that it kind of tied the liquid together with the story. And it was a really nice way of doing it. You know, that story told it a thousand times, but like, it's a nice short story.

That's just enough for a bar sender or a consumer to remember it and become an advocate for your brand without being overly complex or for anyone to have to understand or memory, remember too many facts or figures about history.

I love, I love that. I love that. That's a beautiful story and super easy to re retell to people over dinner.

I think most people are vaguely aware of the angel share of the story. It's a good, you know, I think it's that's a quite a broadly understood concepts. And I think to be able to then twist that concept and tell it from a Caribbean perspective and change it for rum, it'd been quite a kind of useful tool.

I love I love that. I love that. That's all for today. Remember that this is a two part episode forty six and forty seven. If you enjoyed it, please rate it, comment, and share it with friends and come back next week for more insights about building brands from the bottom up.