Monocle Entrepreneurs Podcast Ben Branson

Transcription

1 NAME Dialogue (MUSIC) Ben Branson spent a decade working for creative agencies helping other people build their brands and gain cut through in the market. But in 2014 he decided to put his skills to the test on his own project, that project was Seedlip a non-alcoholic spirit born out of Bens passion for natural botanicals and hobby distilling. Seedlip has since become a huge success and is stocked in high end London retailers such as Selfridges and Harrods and served in bars and restaurants across the globe. You re listening with the entrepreneurs with me Matt Alagiah. This week Ben is here to explain how his experience designing toothpaste tubes helped him build Seedlip and to reveal why his confident the market for non-alcoholic drinks is only just getting started. (MUSIC) 1 My mother s side of the family have been in farming for 320 years and dad has been in branding and design for about the last 30. An interesting upbringing in terms of understanding you know at a young age the work that was going into grow ingredients and crops that would then end up on people s plates and also understanding what a brand was and how people bought things and the power of design. I guess I grew up loving the outdoors and loving nature but didn t want to sit on a tractor and stay on the farm and was kind of I guess, enamoured by the potential bright lights of London and this brand world and design and what dad was doing and so didn t go to University and got straight stuck in right at the bottom. So you were there for 10 years and what kinds of things were you doing during that time? Everything from I guess the more glamourous projects, champagne to the less glamourous but probably the most important projects of bleach, toothpaste, nappies, you know lower interest kind of categories where you really are kind of fighting for people s attention rather than just all the bells and whistles of the champagne world or more exciting brands. So yeah, that gave me a really good understanding I guess of consumers, of how people buy things of the power of design. Is that because you re kind of with those products that are a bit more, you know fast moving. You really have to, yeah you re on the supermarket shelf among ten other brands, you really have to grab the attention of the consumer. You do, I mean something like bleach, you know people are making decisions really subconsciously, they re looking for deals and they re buying what they know or what they brought before and there s no interest, there s no engagement. Whereas I guess with and certainly the drinks industry there is higher interest, there is higher engagement, brands mean a bit more in that space. So yeah, when you re just sat as a tube of toothpaste on a supermarket shelf with a small little window, you ve got to fight really hard. I mean looking back, we ll obviously come onto Seedlip in a second, but looking back do you see those 10 years as quite a formative apprenticeship for what you ended up doing? They gave me the understanding of how brands are built and how relevant

2 and meaningful brands can be in people s lives. I guess I didn t learn as much about the real world in terms of marketing and running a business. But certainly really getting to grips with the way people shop, the way people think, right down to the detail of what colours we see first on a supermarket shelf. 2 What is that colour? Red and yellow we kind of tend to see first, red, now, hopefully I m saying it makes sense when you think about supermarket aisles and what s on offer. Typically, they re red stickers and we re very drawn to those red stickers, whether we know it or not they re kind of a bit like beacons. So right down to that level of detail to, you know, getting groups of mums together to talk about Dairylea, so yeah it kind of, I guess getting into as much detail as possible in terms of why a brand exists, it's positioning, it's positioning vs competition, it's meaning within people s lives, how design can direct or influence someone s decision. Yeah, really kind of fascinating stuff, especially when you re applying that to bleach and toothpaste. Absolutely, so you were at a branding agency for 10 years and then you decided in 2014 I think to, to sort of go, strike out on your own. What gave you the idea for Seedlip originally? I d worked in design agencies and ended up having my own design agency, small team, focused around luxury clients, that was about a year old and busy and good and you know you take that sort of leap of going, worked for other people, now gonna do it for myself, you understand some of the risks and are we gonna get the clients and are we gonna get the work and...and it was great and it was fast paced and all very exciting. And then in the sort of Summer of, it was in the Summer of 2013 I grow stuff at home and herbs, veg and was just kind of intrigued as to what else I could grow that maybe wasn t the standard mint and you know, leeks... Bit of rosemary......bit of rosemary and just go on the internet and was just having a looking around and sort of, I love history and I love natural history and so was just hobby kind of evenings, weekends having a look at what other seeds I could get hold off. And it opened up effectively this world that I d never been exposed to of botany and herbs and spices and plants, I've kind of grown up knowing about corn and potatoes and turnips and all seed rape, right through from old cook books and ingredients that we used to use in cooking, like roo and hyssop that we still use a bit today, right down to herbal remedies and learning about an apothecary and alchemy and I guess when I uncover something I want to get to the bottom of the barrel, you know I, I want to understand it fully and this was just like, wow, there s like 500 years to learn here. Anyway, I came across lots of fascinating books, but, landed on looking at this ingredients list in a book called the art of distillation and it was a book that was published in 1651, so pretty old, and it had all these ingredients mentioned that, I mean, we don t have names like this anymore like shepherds purse and bladder rack and just really romantic wonderful ideas. Anyway, the more you read into the book the more you uncover that it's actually a recipe book for remedies and this was apothecaries, pharmacies of the day, making medicine and they were making medicine not how we make medicine today, pharmaceuticals, but making medicine from herb, spices and plants. And

3 they were making alcoholic medicine and non-alcoholic medicine and they were using a process of distillation to make that medicine, but I like arts and crafts, I learned how to do taxidermy about 10 years ago, you know I paint, I draw, I press flowers, so I was just like right, I m gonna buy one of these little distillation things... Give it a go....and give it a go, I've got a design business, I m not looking for another business, this is like evening, weekend, hobby, no ambition in mind, let me just give it a go. And the process of kind of getting this little copper still from the internet and trying out some of these recipes and taking plants from my garden and effectively capturing a liquid that smelt and tasted like the plant. Given I m no scientist to me was pretty magical, anyway I kept doing this, kept running my design business and then was out for dinner in London, not drinking on a Monday night, I asked this waitress you know have you got anything good that s non-alcoholic and she came back with this... Orange Juice....with this pink, sweet, childish, horrible mocktail thing and it wasn t like a lightening, it wasn t like eureka and it wasn t a kind of, oh my god, I know, I know what I need to do, but I felt like an idiot and that feeling stayed with me and it didn t fit the food, it didn t fit the ambiance, I couldn t finish it, I didn t want another one and to have such kind of amazing food and then just be so let down just stayed with me and I guess no pun intended, but the kind of seed was sown and... It distilled for a while. Yeah it did and I started, the dots started to join of maybe there s something in what I m doing at home, maybe I could use my design experience and work with my dad to bring something to life, maybe I could work with my mum and our farm and use some of the ingredients and I guess then the killer question was maybe somebody else also feels incredibly disappointed if this is what they get when they re not drinking and regardless of why they re not drinking just, this is what you get. Did you do any market research at that stage or did you just have this hunch that there was this kind of market out there that was not being met by the regular drinks company. So that hunch then moved into I wonder what is going on in the drinks world, I wonder how people are drinking. The story became really clear, you know globally with drinking less alcohol, we re spending more on it and we re buying better and more premium products but we re actually drinking less. In soft drinks, we re drinking less of the sugary, fizzy soft drinks and so we re, in both alcohol and soft drinks we re drinking better and so I was like, okay, so, what do you drink when you re not drinking? You know that was this question that was then like, okay, if I don t want to drink alcohol, what are my options, but I don t want something fizzy and sweet and fruity, what do you drink? And then it was sort of like, okay, wow, well then maybe there, there is a gap or maybe there is a need and I thought, I m gonna do this on the side of my design business, I m gonna launch 5 products in two sizes in 6 months and I d just do it, take it to farmers markets, you know just hobby. 3

4 And is that, is that how it started? It was farmers markets was it? No, it was two years to launch one product in one size, and me selling my stake in the design business and getting our Seedlip crest that we d had designed at this time tattooed on my arm and going for lock stock, time, everything into Seedlip. That s interesting, it s a tattoo on your arm, that s quite a commitment to the cause. I sort of weed it out a little bit because I didn t get Seedlip written as the tattoo, it's a kind of fairly non-descript crest that it's quite a nice piece of art rather than getting the name emblazoned sort of over my chest or my forehead. Yeah, it was a, it was a good way to mark the moment. You got the New York Agency, Pearl Fisher to do a lot of the creative work, what was your brief to them? I mean, what did that document look like when you said okay, I want you to design, design the branding for this, but here are the parameters basically. It was an interesting time because I was used to being briefed, you know, I was used to being agency side, receiving briefs from clients, suddenly I was like, oh my god I want to do the killer brief, it's more time invested in the brief, smoother process was my experience, so, I put a lot of time and work into the brief and I think gave a really good brief to Pearl Fisher, you know right from the positioning and all of the aesthetic direction through to some sketches and kind of quite clear brief, I think, they did a beautiful job, I think that the unanimous kind of response to just even looking at our bottles is this world love and that to me was always the holy grail of what you want to say about, you know your agencies work on a brand that that would be the response and to use that kind of highly emotive word on first glance, on any animate object, that you can't have a relationship with, I guess speaks volumes for Pearl Fisher s work. Absolutely, I mean it's one of those things, you, you haven t fallen into that sort of minimalist trap that a lot of people seem to fall into now, you know where it all Sans Serif fonts and it's all very clean lines and basically three colours in the same colour palette for every brand of the world now presumably... Yes....was that part of it as well? You said look I want it to feel a bit classic and a bit you know older than it already is? The reference for some of the design work I was inspired by things like Victorian Botanical illustrations and then at the same time a man called Karl Blossfeldt who is a photographer, German photographer from the 1920s, he would do these beautiful sepia images of plants in macro, that actually, kind of their forms look like other things, so actually it was, you know the head of a flower, but it looked like a star. I was very interested in this idea of we work individually with each ingredients, so we treat each ingredient on its own merit and then they come together as a blend and so representing those ingredients individually on the front of the bottle in the shape of an animal that you d find on my farm in the shape of an s I mean ancestors initials hidden in it, but to, to produce something that looks effortless was another key aspect of like, it should look effortless even though all of this work, thought had gone into it. 4

5 5 But you re sitting there on, on bar shelves, a bit like supermarkets, I notice there s no, there s no white and there s no red, those two colours, red and yellow, those two colours that you said kind of grab attention. How else do you grab attention, I mean are bars like supermarkets, do you, do you have to grab attention or do you kind of hope that people already know about you before they re looking for that drink? It's a really good point, because the goal has always been twofold, number 1, I never ever want to have to say that Seedlip s any good. I want people to hear that from other people and so that s been a great marker of, no, no listen to these top chefs or these top cocktail bars or listen to Selfridges or listen to Kate Moss or Tom Kerridge or whoever, you know whoever have been great kind of champions of what we re doing. And then the second one was no one s just gonna pick this off the shelf as an impulse purchase, so it's not kind of like, oh what am I looking for, oh yeah distilled non-alcoholic spirit, there s one, I ll just pick it off the shelf. We ve never had a bottle returned because anyone thought it was alcoholic and I think that to me has been an incredible marker of the work we do outside of the bar and outside of the stores in terms of the awareness that bars, restaurants, hotels and retailers become the place where you buy a drink or you buy a bottle, not the place that you necessarily hear about it all and learn about it all, I think that s, we ve not had to go down the, the red or the yellow route and any traffic light and allergies in all of that either, which I think, you know is testament to the people that we work with, the strength of, of our marketing and the awareness that we ve had and I guess the uniqueness of the proposition that we ve put out there. You mentioned there that you don t want to ever feel like you have to say it's good, you also don t put any labels like luxury or premium anywhere near the Seedlip brand, it's kind of a less is more approach which I think it's another interesting sort of lesson I guess for new brands, I mean, some, some brands completely throw the word premium at everything, I think the word luxury seems to be tainted now for a lot of people. Yes. But premium has just taken its place and actually everyone just plasters premium all over everything, it doesn t sort of match up anymore, you kind of, as a consumer that just washes over you a bit. Yeah, I think you re right, I think, you know, words like natural, what does that mean? Luxury, what does that mean? I can think of lots of luxuries like being able to take my dogs out into the fields when I m in the UK, that doesn t cost me anything and so, I think (a) people are bombarded left, right and centre by these buzz words and, and Kraft has certainly been one that has been tatted in the drinks industry of what does Kraft mean? I guess we wanted to do it all by deduction rather than declaration, so if Seedlip is sold in Selfridges and Fortner Masons and Harrods and Dean & DeLuca and David Jones and all these, these wonderful retailers I would deduce that a product that sold in all those places is a high quality product and is a good product in the same way that being in the Fat Ducks in the Michelin style restaurants is that same kind of level of endorsement rather than us ever having to say premium luxury Kraft, natural, etc. I guess it's deeds not words when you set up the brand, that was kind of when the Kraft revolution was in it's kind of fullest and I guess did you find that people were more willing

6 to kind of accept you as a new brand in the drink space because of the Kraft breweries and the Kraft gin distillers and all those people? I think if I was, had been working on something perhaps a bit more established or a category or product that people had come across before, maybe, I got a lot of you re crazy, this will never sell a bottle, I m sorry we can't help you, are you really sure this is what you want to do? Rather than, hey, that s amazing, you re doing this little Kraft thing from your kitchen, yeah that sounds exciting, and obviously there were people who, who were massive help and were massively behind what we were doing. To get to November 2015 having made a thousand bottles and launched in Selfridges, having thought it would take 6 months and do it on the side and you know it ll just be this little hobby, was definitely a kind of, I learnt a lot in those two years, just about, (a) about the drinks industry, (b) about where marketing was at, where consumers were at, where trends were at, where all these buzz words were going, I think, like you said premium replaces luxury and something else will replace natural and something else will...artisan will replace Kraft, you know, there will just be this consistent cycle. Just give us a sense now of where we stand, where Seedlip stands when it comes to sales, when it comes to the scale of the business, I mean, are you where you thought you d be, I guess, when you set up the business 4 years ago? I mean definitely not, we re 135 weeks old as a business in terms of you know how long we ve been trading. We ve gone from me and my kitchen to 55 people globally, an office in LA and an office here in the UK and selling Seedlip in 20 markets working with, well over 300 sort of Michelin style restaurants and many of the world s top cocktail bars and top retailers is growing very fast, it's quite surreal and overwhelming at times, but 99% of this is down to the timing, that, people are actively looking to be healthier, they re looking at what they look like on social media, they re watching what they eat, they re reading the backs of labels, they are interested in where things come from, who s behind them and all of this kind of, all these cultural shifts, all speak to, well actually, yeah I don t want to drink alcohol all the time and what are the options out there, so we ve been very fortunate, you can't really plan the timing, but we ve been very fortunate and that s just really acted as a huge catalyst when you put something out there that meets a need in people s lives, can be the difference between success and failure. It's an interesting one when you, you talk about culture there, I mean, obviously there s the, the LA culture where people are, as you said watching what they re eating, very conscious of their own wellbeing, and probably not drinking as much alcohol as they used to. I guess there s also, you know there are some markets in the world where no one drinks alcohol at all. We ve opened 12 or 13 markets in the last 6 months, we re not yet in the middle east, it's somewhere that we ve got in our plan, it's a constant balancing act between, you know we wanna do things properly, sustainably, grow fast, but do things at the right time for the right reasons and so yeah, middle east in our plans and you know we ultimately, we do target people who do drink, you know, they re, they re the people who instead of a glass of wine on a Monday night might have a Seedlip and tonic, but it's growing body of (a) people who are t-total, (b) the 16 to 24 generation who are not really 6

7 within our price bracket and not really go into Michelin style restaurants or nice cocktail bars or Selfridges. But, who, where for them that age group, you know the studies, all point to alcohol just not being a priority in their lives, they re our consumers of the future. 7 Right. And so, suddenly these, we re not greedy either and so, it's sort of like, well, just one thing at a time and we re not going to launch a product aimed at the 16 to 24 year olds and you know, try and conquer the middle east at the same time as well, it's sort of trying to kind of have this strong measured growth lead the category that we re building. You know, we ve launched 3 products in 135 weeks which is very measured, you know, we ve got now 3 products in our range, rather than loads of new products every different week or every different month, it's very grey in that sense of fast, frantic, huge demand, big opportunity, but also just making sure that we re doing things properly. I was gonna say because, is it possible to launch a new product really quickly with this? I, I imagine that development of a product like this takes quite a long time and then you know the manufacturing takes quite a long time. Is it actually possible to move that quickly with a product like Seedlip? It's, it's not actually, which I guess for a number of good reasons, (a) you know we work with real ingredients that are grown and therefore there s an aspect of nature that we have to take into consideration of when things are in season. You know planning volumes around harvests, so that s great, that s a really good break to work in tune with nature as much as possible. Number two, you know it takes us six weeks to make a bottle and that s not quick and it's not cheap to make, so that s another great break. But, for example you know it took two years to develop Seedlip spice and Seedlip garden. We just launched 5 bottles for one night only of the first ever dark spirit at the World s 50 best restaurant awards in Bilbao. That s a 3 year project to get to 5 bottles and so I love that, I love that we can't do everything in our business really fast, I think it's a great problem to have you know, we just can't do that quickly, and that s okay. You spoke there about wanting to lead your category, I mean you ve kind of created this category, it didn t really exist before Seedlip came along. For anyone out there who s, who s sort of in a similar position, kind of trying to create a new category, where do you get your inspiration from? I mean did you get your inspiration from drinks companies or did you look outside of your category to create the brand? I split it in two, there s information and inspiration and I needed to learn and continue to learn and be a kind of complete student of the drinks industry, that s information gathering, what s expected, what's normal, how do people do things? What do things cost, how do things grow, what do you need to have as a kind of core base, you know the cars probably got to have 4 wheels kind of thing. Then because I m not from the drinks industry, I try as much as possible to kind of celebrate how naive I am, and how curious I am that I kind of get to go what if? And so, it's a bit like being a, a thief of stealing all the best bits from other brands that are not in the drinks industry, brands that I, I don t buy but I hold really high in high regard for the culture that they ve created and the fact that they ve ultimately transgressed their product. When you think about, when I think about brands like Raffa or AESOP or Farrow & Ball or

8 Monocle, those brands, or Patagonia, you know they have, there s something about them that s just not their product. That lives in people s brains, I find that really interesting in terms of kind of breaking down how a brand is built and made and then taking away all the different little bits and going, community, build a community that s important and Raffa do a fantastic job of building a community for example. We run Seedlip as a nature company and not a drinks company, you know you look in Instagram, you look at drinks companies and they ve got wonderful feeds, but it's all about drinks. We connect with an audience who share our love and respect for nature, very diverse, very universal, very rich, very important, fascinating, unpredictable genius, magical, you know just really, really rich and that gives us an amazing passport to be able to access opportunities that perhaps just being a drinks company we wouldn t get to do. Ben, finally, when it comes to you know look into the future, next 6 months a year, however long you want to look at, I guess what, what can we look forward to from Seedlip in the future? Good question, we ve got a couple of things in the pipe line, one is building a laboratory, an experimental nursery up on the farm, so a real cathedral to nature and to research and development from, right from the soil to the plants, to drinks and techniques which is very exciting and then the second one is, we re taking it upon ourselves to expand the options within this category and launch a new brand within the next 6 to 9 months, so that s really exciting, new liquid, completely different products from process etc... Wow, how much can you tell us about that? That s about all I can tell you. But yeah, really, really excited and it just feels like we re just getting started, this category is just getting started and so yeah, I m, I m looking forward to the next 135 weeks. And I m afraid that s all we have time for on today s show, thank you very much to Ben Branson for coming in and sharing the story of Seedlip, this show was produced by Daniel Bache and mixed and edited by Kieron Matthew Banerji, I m Matt Alagiah, thanks very much for listening, goodbye. (MUSIC) (End of Recording) 8