How do you build the demand for a brand like yours? How how do you show up and make sure that, you know, when you start, actually, people have heard about you before you show up at the door?
Alex Ouziel:Well, I think the the probably the first thing is to be honest and to live up to the expectations. When you build a new brand, perhaps the first time that you feel that something is going in the right direction is when somebody says, oh, yeah. I've heard about you and I wanted to try it. Right? And and then whenever you get that that kind of reaction, you you have a hell of a lot of questions.
Alex Ouziel:You've heard about me, where, from whom, what did they say? So at the end of the day, every single interaction is an opportunity to take the brands over to the next step. And how do you build this first one? You call it build the brand bottom up. Right?
Alex Ouziel:I tend to think more of inside out. Seeing it more as an epicenter of where you you put a seat or you put a radio wave and then little by little beat from your friends, your family, that bar that is close to you or that shop that is nearby. And these people that know you well, I mean, if they are not going to help you, why should anybody else? So you cannot convince the ones close to you. How do you have a chance in hell convincing anybody else?
Alex Ouziel:So put as many of those sheets as you can and then spend time watering them.
Chris Maffeo:And I was smiling now when you said that because if all of your friends wants wants a free bottle, you already know what's gonna happen in the trade with people wanting sampling and free bottles. If you can convince your friend to buy your product, then it's a bit of a challenge. Right?
Alex Ouziel:Yeah. And the real problem is when you give a free bottle and then people say, what do I do with You know, you've got a problem. I was reading somewhere and it said, Look, you should give as many free bottles as people ask. Probably you need to link that to as you can afford as well because you're paying the taxes and maybe sometimes the VAT and things like that. I think that you need to get as many signs behind the brand.
Alex Ouziel:You know, people who when they go into a bar, they or they go into a shop because they know you, they will ask for, in my case, Nove Dante, Ouziel because they know they're not gonna find it, but they're spreading the word. They're starting perhaps a conversation of what is NovellaDante? So is this new vermouth? It's amazing. You should try it and so on.
Alex Ouziel:Right? So unless you have millions of dollars, in which case I think we would have a completely different conversation today, which in most of the cases is not is not the case. I think that you need to really get into get rid of tactics and to extract as much value as possible of every single opportunity that you get.
Chris Maffeo:I love that. When you start with the brands, there's always this conversation. I'm always talking about, you know, don't try to be a jack of all trades. Create your own category, you know? And then in a way that's what you did when you brought something to the table that was different than the regular vermouth category.
Chris Maffeo:You were one of the guys who rejuvenated the category, no? So in terms of trade, not much in terms of you know, liquid development and journey, but more on from a trade perspective. What did you bring to consumers to the to bars, to bartenders, to distributors and so on?
Alex Ouziel:Well, the first thing you need to bring is a is a good product. I think that if we go back, I don't know, two hundred years, I mean, okay, maybe even seven hundred to the chaturuses or whatever, right? The first brands in alcohol started because people were literally dying from that product. So having that brand was a way of knowing this is safe and this is good and this is gonna be a good experience. I think we've moved on from that, right?
Alex Ouziel:And today we're in a situation where the technology around making drinks, the the quality of the ingredients and how readily available are, the excess capacity that there is in the industry, make it almost harder to make bad drinks than make good drinks. So it's it's kind of like a given, that you are making a good drink. Right. So if it's not good, you should be doing something else. So I don't think it's about.
Alex Ouziel:Yeah, that's nice. Right? Because most models you're to say, yeah, that's nice. I like it more. I like it less or whatever.
Alex Ouziel:So I think you have to have you need to bring something extra to the table. Right? In in the case of of Vermouth, thank you very much for for putting me in the group of amazing people that are that are doing a lot to continue to rejuvenate the rewards category. I think we are at the beginning of a journey. I think there are lot of very good products out there, and I could not just try to replicate any of them.
Alex Ouziel:Either I brought a new philosophy and a new perspective to how the category should be addressed, or I might as well just do something else. In my case, it was about the importance of wine in vermouth making. Right? So if if vermouth by law in Europe has to be minimum 75% wine, I was asking myself why was nobody talking about wine? Why why did we regularly see the varieties of the wines that were used in that product?
Alex Ouziel:Right? Why Why was wine something that was very often covered by the flavor of the botanicals rather than use wine in itself as an additional botanical in the vermouth rating? Because each wine has its aromas and its texture through the tannins and its color and its taste and etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. So so that's what we decided to bring on the table, right? We we make a vermouth that is centered around Piemonte wine.
Alex Ouziel:We use only a 100% wines from the Piemonte region where Vermouthe Torino has to be made. And then from there, we start to build our our story. Now, the fact that I have a differentiated product doesn't mean that automatically I have a queue of people saying, oh, thank God that this person arrived and did that. Right? So we need to go and explain it.
Alex Ouziel:We need to see the reaction of the people. Hopefully, it's a good one, and we've had amazing reaction from from everybody. But then also, any change, any significant change, it also means that variations in recipes, different approaches. So hopefully, in the best of cases, our philosophy makes a product that, a, when you open it, you should be able to drink it almost straight from the bottle. Right?
Alex Ouziel:And it should feel very good. And the people who choose to transform it into a cocktail or or use it creatively in their creations, hopefully, it's a product that is going to inspire new creativity in them, either in twisting the old or creating new things.
Chris Maffeo:Nice. This is a nice bridge to a a next question that I've got. When I talk about target occasion, there's always a little bit of confusion about, you know, is it do do we mean like an aperitif and after dinner, a dinner kind of occasion, or do we talk about an actual cocktail like a Negroni, an Americano, and so on. And And you mentioned it there, first of all it's a product that can be drank neat and then you can actually also make cocktails with it. So how do you play that in the narrative?
Chris Maffeo:Like do you have a kind of like a hook in the conversation or do you leave it more to the bartender? Do you leave it more flexible? Still highlighting the wine, highlighting what you said previously about bringing something different to the table and not, you know, just another vermouth.
Alex Ouziel:We obviously do highlight a lot of wine. It's our philosophy, but it also costs us about 10 times more than a cheap wine. We need to explain that part as well. As a brand creator, you have to have a very you have to have both a very clear idea of what you would like it to be and a very humble approach to being wrong. I may want the Nove Dante is the vermouth that's gonna make, is gonna put the name into the Negroni, right?
Alex Ouziel:So that when people bar call a Negroni, they say, make it with nove de dante, please. Right? Or the rest of the of the world follows the Spanish trends the same way they did with the gin and tonic a few years back. And now that whole Spain is drinking, vermouth on the rocks, the the whole of the world is going to start drinking vermouth on the rocks, which I think it will happen. And that Novo Nordisk is gonna be the brand that helps them in that transition towards a great amazing future.
Alex Ouziel:I think it's important to have all of these clear goals that might grow the brand in the future. At the same time, if any bartender, great, famous, or just one in a local bar in some location creates a drink that uses novodante or vermouth in general, and that just becomes a hit. We need to be able to jump on that and help it along. When we look at the success of Aperol Spritz, Campari at the beginning of that did not know that would become one of the five biggest brands in the world. Right?
Alex Ouziel:Did it happen because Aperol tastes straight out of the bottle or because the spritz just happened to be a very cool drink? And is it because it's simple to make or is it because it's orange? Nobody quite really knows. It just kind of like took a life of its own, right? And then all you can do when that happens, and if you're lucky enough to be involved in something like that ever happening to you, is to recognize it and to see how you can jump into the wave or ride that wave without sacrificing the spirit of the brand that you're trying to create.
Alex Ouziel:You have to have a very clear direction, but you need to recognize that you don't know what thing will happen in the future that will exactly lead to the success?
Chris Maffeo:If you make it so well that it looks easy, like to the to the Aperol Spritz example, you know, because nobody remembers that ten years ago or twenty years ago, nobody ever was drinking it. They only remember the big parties and the Instagram pictures and the orange color on it. You make it so easy that then a lot of people want to enter the industry because it's like, come on, it's so simple. You know? Like, let's launch a vermouth.
Alex Ouziel:The first thing to anybody out there listening to this and thinking of starting their own brand, one thing to remember is that every single overnight success in this industry is 12 years old. Right? So they're Probably the youngest. But it happens probably for everything. Right?
Alex Ouziel:Two weeks ago, it was the twentieth anniversary of Tesla. Right? That means that Tesla started in twin in 2003. None of us had heard about electric cars in 2003. Think the
Chris Maffeo:like the iPhone. I mean, I was looking for, like, 2007.
Alex Ouziel:2007. Aperol, we've talked a few times. I think it starts around 2003, 2004. Right? We're talking twenty years.
Alex Ouziel:Right? Now, when by the time the early adopters and the trendsetters have passed the DRINKS to somebody else, we could have been talking that it's seven, eight years, right? Of this whole process of awareness, trial, availability. Even a brand with the support of one of the biggest companies in the world is going to take a longer time. But even more, if now we open an internet page of any of the big companies in the world, and we go into their portfolio, we'll see brands that are probably selling volumes which are bigger than 10 startups and that we have never heard of.
Chris Maffeo:Yeah, absolutely.
Alex Ouziel:And that we never see them. Right? And then the moment you've seen them, you can never have seen them again and then they pop up everywhere. You know? But there is no magic formula.
Alex Ouziel:And you choose which are the barriers that you want to build steps for and make them easier to the people. And if you get lucky and you choose well and you don't stop, because I think perseverance is very important, then maybe one day Harvard writes a case study about you. Don't know.
