Charles Durazo has been popping up on my LinkedIn feed for a few years now, and it’s always been intriguing. He posts constantly, and not the usual founder content.

A rant at FedEx for delivering three bottles “red hot to the touch.” A slightly desperate pitch to get into a rum festival after striking out on email. A full trend forecast calling Cristalino tequila a fad and predicting nobody will say “non alc” by 2030 because “the word Non to start your category name is a deal killer.”

It’s some of the most entertaining content in the category.

Dare I say - a bit unhinged.

On the phone, he told me about his new thing - Blended Blue Spirits and its debut release, Maravilla, a 50/50 blend of añejo and reposado tequila that launched at the end of June. Durazo and his partner Beto both worked at Clase Azul before striking out on their own.

Durazo sent me a bottle after we talked, and it’s nearly gone. I don’t normally buy expensive tequila. My interest is officially piqued.

The whiskey story, replayed in tequila

Durazo’s pitch starts with a category comparison. “It’s very much the whiskey story,” he told me. American whiskey started out straight because that’s what distillers had. Decades later, over 80% of aged whiskey is a blend of different whiskeys.

He thinks tequila is heading the same direction as it matures, and he wants Blended Blue to be first through the door as a dedicated blending house rather than a brand that eventually adds a blend to its lineup.

There’s also a pricing thesis underneath it. Blended Blue priced Maravilla at $125 MSRP on purpose. “Our research shows that people have a hangover from these very expensive bottles,” Durazo said, “even a $500 or $600 bottle. Most people, myself included, that’s out.”

In a category where the biggest houses have spent years pushing prices up toward collector territory, he’s betting there’s real room in the middle for something that’s clearly premium without asking people to justify a four figure bottle to themselves.

It’s a crowded room to make that case in. Durazo estimates a back bar in California now carries ten or more luxury tequila brands, on top of what buyers describe to him as a glut sitting on off-premise shelves already.

Standing out on price and category alone only works if the brand can also get the bottle into someone’s mouth, which is the strategy question underneath everything else he’s building.

Equity is the new rule, not the perk

The most pointed thing Durazo told me wasn’t about tequila at all. It was about what he learned watching Clase Azul’s Arturo Lomeli, build a company that size without bringing other people along as owners.

Blended Blue is being built as the opposite bet. Everyone doing meaningful work for the brand, whether that’s production, design, or sales, gets a small equity stake, generally in the one to three percent range, with room to earn more over time. “You turn people into owners by giving them some equity,” Durazo said.

It’s also how he’s kept the team small: production is handled by Beto and a partner on a few contracted hours a week, a distillery in Mexico handles compliance and fulfillment, and until a few weeks ago Durazo had exactly one other full time contractor. Everyone is compensated in ownership as well as cash.

Win locally before you ask anyone for help

Blended Blue’s entire go to market plan for the next year is contained to California, on purpose. The goal is 250 reordering on-premise accounts and 1,300 cases shipped by the end of next year, roughly 15 months from when we talked. Durazo isn’t interested in expanding the footprint before that, because he’s run this play before.

At Clase Azul, the team built roughly 80 reordering accounts in San Francisco before approaching Southern Glazer’s for distribution, and the accounts did the talking. “What have you done for me lately? Oh, you have 80 accounts. Let’s talk,” Durazo said, describing that pitch. “Southern wants to make money. If you can show them a direct line to that money, they’re going to like you.”

He’s running the identical sequence with Blended Blue: prove the demand exists on-premise first, then go to a national distributor from a position of strength instead of asking them to take a bet on an unproven brand.

That discipline extends to where the company doesn’t spend money. Durazo says most young luxury brands burn cash on things that feel necessary but aren’t, competition medals, expensive festival booths, early retail pushes into accounts like Total Wine that can’t yet make them money. “Ten grand is just a bridge too far, especially in the beginning,” he said.

Tequilas Premium, Inc. had Juan Sanchez when it came to asking if we could spend money. “We used to call him Dr. No. We just stopped asking him to spend money because we always knew the answer was inevitably going to be no.”

He said the quiet part out loud, and his feed backs it up

Durazo was honest that some of his online persona is strategic. “If you’re trying to do a point of view or disagreeing, it seems like engagement goes up,” he told me, describing the advice he gets from social media consultants he says the brand “can’t afford” full time.

His comment history is its own genre. On a tequila founder’s post soliciting investors, he wrote, “Things are going so well yet you’re raising money. I thought it looks bad when you advertise on a social media post for your fundraising activities.” On another founder’s fundraising misstep, he offered, “Let me guess they were a crypto company.”

Getting people to taste it beats any ad

If there’s one thing Durazo keeps coming back to, it’s that none of the positioning matters until someone actually tastes the product. “We’ve been really successful once consumers taste it, converting them into behavior,” he said. “It’s hard to get them to do anything without tasting it.”

That’s shaping where Blended Blue is putting its energy day to day. The brand is running roughly an 80/20 split between on-premise and off-premise, with direct to consumer counted as the off-premise slice.

DTC has quietly been the most productive channel so far, around 100 bottles shipped in the first 60 days, mostly to friends, family, and investors. Paid DTC acquisition starts soon, with the hope that direct sales can help fund the on-premise push rather than the other way around.

NEW RULES FROM BLENDED BLUE

Make the category bet your whole reason to exist, not a line extension. Blended Blue isn’t a tequila brand that also does a blend. Blending is the brand.

Turn contributors into owners from day one. “You turn people into owners by giving them some equity.” It’s also how you keep a team small and loyal without payroll.

Win one market completely before you ask anyone else for help. Prove the accounts exist first. Then a national distributor isn’t taking a bet, they’re taking a deal.

What you post when no one is editing you is the real brand voice. The LinkedIn feed doesn’t match the phone call, and the feed is more honest.

Blended Blue Spirits is currently sold in California, with Maravilla as its debut release. Follow along on Instagram.

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PSA: there’s no jacuzzi without the plumbing.

Chris Maffeo’s family ran a wholesale business outside Naples for three generations, starting with his great-grandfather in 1884 and ending when his grandfather passed and the business closed after a hundred years and two world wars.

Chris went on to spend years in export roles at SABMiller, Asahi, and Carlsberg, working alongside wholesalers and importers the whole time, before he left corporate to start Maffeo Drinks. His reasoning was simple: nobody was documenting what actually works in brand building anymore, because the people who know are always too busy running the business to write it down.

The phrase “bottom-up” started as one line in a LinkedIn post. People kept quoting it back to him, so he built a whole body of work around defining it properly, mostly because most people who repeat it still get it wrong.

Bottom-up doesn’t mean small

The biggest misconception, according to Chris, is that bottom-up means slow, or one relationship at a time, or staying small on purpose. It doesn’t.

“For me, bottom-up is basically working on the foundations, mastering the unscalable things first before you can scale your brand. If you want a nice penthouse with a rooftop and a jacuzzi, you need the building to have solid foundations and the plumbing has to work, because otherwise there’s no jacuzzi without the plumbing.”

Testing bottom-up doesn’t mean grinding through a hundred bars one by one either. It means working with five bartenders and two importers and three bar owners long enough to actually understand the pattern, then refining the approach before trying to build at scale.

Drinks brands are B2B2B2C, not B2C

This is where Chris sees founders lose the most time. Because the end product is something a consumer drinks, founders build like consumer brands from day one: a strong Instagram, a big launch party, a killer activation.

What they skip is everything underneath it, the importer, the distributor, the bar owner, the bottle shop clerk, all the tiers that actually have to say yes before a consumer can ever find the product on a shelf or a menu.

A beautiful consumer brand with no distribution infrastructure isn’t a brand yet. It’s a very expensive party.

He talked about a recent podcast conversation with Mark Ward of Regal Rogue, titled “When Your Brand Stops Being Yours,” about the exact moment a founder walks out the door with an idea and finds out the market has its own interpretation of it.

The only way through that gap, in Chris’s view, is for the founder to go sell it themselves first. Not because a distributor or ambassador can’t eventually do it, but because a founder who’s never absorbed 50 nos in person has no idea what they’re actually asking someone else to do on their behalf.

The boring math nobody wants to learn

Founders love talking about their thousand-case goal. Chris wants them talking about the first bottle.

He walks through the actual mechanics: how big is the bottle, how big is the pour in that market, how many drinks does that translate to, and what does it take to sell one more drink a night at a single bar.

Twelve drinks in a bottle, on a bar open six nights a week, is two drinks a night. Getting a bar from half a bottle a week to a full one is one more drink, per night. That’s the conversation Chris thinks founders should be having instead of talking exits and case counts they haven’t earned yet.

None of this is about the perfect garnish or an invented signature serve. It’s usually a small twist on a drink that’s already selling in that specific bar.

You can’t outspend the big guys, so don’t try

On pay-to-play, Chris used an image that’s stuck with me: if a truck is chasing you, you don’t try to outrun it on the highway, you duck into the alley it can’t fit into.

Differentiation has to be sharp enough that a $2 price difference makes sense to an importer or a bar owner on its own terms, not because you outspent someone with a bigger budget.

The brands he points to as proof that this actually compounds are ones that never stopped repeating their fundamentals even after becoming famous.

Aperol Spritz took twenty years to become ubiquitous. Hendrick’s, launched in 1999, still talks about cucumber and the gin and tonic serve in nearly every market, over two decades in. Peroni was disciplined for years about serving in the Peroni glass, on draft, nothing else. Guinness still makes you wait for the pour. None of them decided they’d earned the right to stop explaining themselves.

The rule for a down market

Asked for one rule going into 2026, Chris didn’t reach for anything about growth.

“Don’t do anything today that you suspect may jeopardize tomorrow. Opportunities materialize and they look like fast growth, but they can ruin your financials or your brand’s image. I’ve seen many brands fail by being too successful too soon.”

THE NEW RULE: bottom-up isn’t a pace, it’s an order of operations. Master the boring, invisible stuff first. Everything you actually want, the culture, the scale, the moment, only holds up if it’s sitting on something solid.

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A few weeks ago, The New Rules profiled Jess Druey and the evolution of Whiny Baby after its acquisition by Gallo. Jess launched the brand at 22 and, three years later, sold it to one of the biggest wine companies in the world. It’s hard not to admire that trajectory.

What interested me more was what happened after the acquisition. Whiny Baby is now becoming Whiny. The packaging, wines, portfolio and consumer target are all evolving. Jess described the change as a graduation, something that would allow the brand to grow with its consumer.

Maybe it will. I hope it does. But watching so many pieces of a very young brand change at once raises a question I find myself asking more and more in my work:

How much do we really know about what created an emerging brand’s success before we start trying to scale it?

I spend part of my time assessing food and beverage companies for venture investment, and one of the hardest things to separate in a young business is momentum from something that is actually becoming a repeatable consumer behavior.

A brand can be growing quickly, adding distribution, posting strong velocities and attracting retailers and investors. While those are meaningful signals, they still do not tell you why consumers are choosing it, or whether they will keep choosing it once the newness wears off.

Was the growth driven by the product itself? A smart cultural insight? A charismatic founder? Great timing? Retail expansion? Or has the brand started to own something specific enough in the consumer’s mind that people seek it out and buy it again?

When I look at young brands, I want to know who repeats, why they repeat, what occasion the product belongs to and what it replaces. I want to know whether velocity holds after launch support settles down, and whether the company can keep growing without constantly creating another reason to pay attention. Fast growth can make those questions easier to postpone.

They become more important when a strategic buyer enters the picture because large beverage companies are very good at adding things. They can improve supply and manufacturing, open doors with retailers, add sales coverage, invest in marketing and put a brand in front of millions more consumers. I spent years inside large beverage companies and saw firsthand what those capabilities can unlock.

The risk is assuming that because you know how to make the business bigger, you also know which parts of the brand should get bigger with it.

And the pressure comes quickly. Broaden the audience. Make the packaging work harder at shelf. Expand the portfolio. Enter more channels. Build a proposition a national sales organization can sell. Any one of those decisions may be right. The challenge is that a three-year-old brand may not have existed long enough for anyone to know which pieces are simply the current execution and which ones consumers have started to attach meaning to.

Change enough of them at once and you may lose the ability to tell.

That is what makes Whiny such an interesting case to watch. The original name was unusually specific. It took something Gen Z had been called and turned it back on itself. There was a cultural tension and a particular consumer built right into the brand.

Whiny may turn out to be a much better name for a bigger business. It is certainly broader and easier to stretch. But broader is not automatically stronger, and one comment from Jess stayed with me. She said she felt she had outgrown Whiny Baby.

I understand that sentiment. Founders live with their brands every day and naturally evolve faster than the people buying them. That makes “I’ve outgrown this” an important signal, but not necessarily evidence that the consumer has outgrown it too. Sometimes the thing that feels old inside the company is only beginning to become familiar outside it.

This is where I think both sides of an early acquisition need more discipline. Founders should understand as well as they can what is actually creating consumer pull. Strategic buyers should be equally clear about what their capabilities can improve and what they cannot.

There is a natural tendency in acquisition conversations to focus on what the buyer can add. Distribution. Capital. Manufacturing. Sales coverage. Data. But there is another question that deserves just as much attention: What, exactly, is the buyer buying?

Is it a brand with established consumer meaning? A product with strong product-market fit? A founder with an audience? A distribution opportunity? A growth curve that still depends heavily on novelty and attention? Those can all be valuable, but they are not the same thing.

And scale cannot solve every problem. Capital can put a brand in more doors, but it cannot guarantee repeat. A bigger sales organization can win more shelf space, but it cannot create an occasion consumers do not want. More marketing can generate awareness, but it cannot tell you after the fact which part of the original idea created the connection.

None of this means founders should wait until every question is answered before selling, or that a strategic buyer should acquire an emerging brand and leave it untouched. Young brands change, and sometimes the original expression genuinely has to evolve.

A three-year exit tells you that someone saw enough value to buy the business. It does not tell you that either side fully understands where that value sits.

Before everyone starts improving the brand, it is worth figuring that out.

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NOW, back to wine.

PSA: wine has no legal definition of “natural.” Eric Cusimano (former Whole Foods Lifer) decided to write his own.

Eric spent 16 years at Whole Foods, most recently as director of produce merchandising, before that running the frozen department as the company’s head ice cream buyer. Next week he leaves to become full-time CEO of Red Thumb Natural Wines, a brand he started with two partners almost seven years ago and has been selling in market for four.

The idea came from a natural wine fair called Raw Wine, where an invite to join a friend turned into a business idea. It reminded him of the early days of organic and slow food, before any of it got commercialized - and he wanted in.

Three Guys, one idea, no meaning

Eric’s partners Dave Schavone and Diego Vasquez came with the wine expertise he didn’t have. Dave was the wine buyer for the Beverly Hills Whole Foods and had written a guide to natural wine in LA. Diego ran wine for Wynn properties in Vegas before becoming wine director at Scarpetta in the Cosmopolitan. All three met at Loyola in New Orleans, where Eric was born and raised.

What they found at that first natural wine fair was a category with no actual definition. Nobody could tell Eric what “natural wine” meant, and there still isn’t a legal answer.

“There’s still no meaning of natural wine, and rightfully so. But I’m like, okay, well, let’s create a set of standards. The standard sells the wine.”

So that’s what they did. Red Thumb wines list native fermentation, no added sugar, and the exact sulfite count in parts per million, front and center on the label. Ingredients and nutritionals are on the back. Everything is estate grown and vintage dated. It’s the kind of disclosure most wine brands avoid, because most wine brands would rather you not ask.

And in terms of brand development, the price point came first. Eric ran the math and knew the wine had to land around $20 or under to scale the way they wanted it to. From there, a lucky connection (a friend’s father, recently retired as president of a wine co-op in Languedoc) got them access to growers and winemakers across the south of France and into Spain. Diego tasted hundreds of wines to land on the three they sell today: a Tempranillo, a Chardonnay, a Grenache Rose and a Monastrell added last year.

The part most founders skip

Most brand conversations stay in highlight reel mode. I appreciated Eric’s candor on our call because it hasn’t just been a series of ups.

They launched Red Thumb into 2020, right as COVID hit. Investors who’d committed pulled out, reasonably, and the brand went quiet for years while Whole Foods and every other retailer focused purely on keeping shelves stocked, not testing new brands. By the time buyers were ready to look at something new again, the wine industry was sitting on almost double its usual inventory, and nobody wanted more of anything. Then came the tariffs.

“I’m very bullish on wine in 2027 and forward. I think it’s at the bottom right now.”

Eric was just as direct about where the business actually stands. Red Thumb will do around $500,000 in revenue this year, on a little over $1 million raised across seven years, most of it already spent getting this far.

Hot take on investment in bev right now:

He’s not planning to draw a real salary once he goes full time, at least not at first. And he isn’t precious about who’s good at what: “As a whole, the wine industry has been less business-forward and more dogmatic than I anticipated” he said, including himself and his partners in that. Marketing is the gap he’s most aware of. “None of us are marketing minds. We very much know that we need the help. We’re not doing a great job at that right now, to be completely honest.”

That kind of candor is rare to get on the record. Most founders default to “all good here” the moment a microphone’s on. I really appreciated that about this conversation.

No celebs, please.

Red Thumb has had chances to bring on a celebrity backer in exchange for a chunk of the company. They passed every time. Eric wants the wine, and the actual winemakers behind it, to be the story, not a famous face attached to it.

On the sales floor, that philosophy holds up against something more basic: putting the bottle in someone’s hand. Education matters, but Eric has seen what actually converts.

“I’ll take the Pepsi challenge with anybody. When we put our wine in someone’s hands, they buy it.”

He also thinks the industry is aiming at the wrong drinker. Most legacy wine marketing still leans on rolling hills and spa treatments built for an older, wealthier customer whose spending power is shrinking. Meanwhile the customer Red Thumb is actually built for (25 to 39, mostly but not only women, natural and organic food shoppers) isn’t being spoken to by anyone.

THE NEW RULE: transparency isn’t a label claim, it’s a practice. The brands worth trusting are the ones that will tell you what’s on the sulfite count and also tell you when the last four years have been genuinely hard.

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If you’ve spent any time in wine circles the past few years, you’ve seen Whiny Baby. Jess Druey self-launched it at 22, DTC, California only. By 2023 she’d brought on partners and taken it nationwide into major retailers. Last September, Gallo acquired it.

Ladies and gentleman, that’s a 3-year launch to exit trajectory which we found f-a-s-c-i-n-a-t-i-n-g.

But Jess isn’t chilling, basking in the sweet glow of the acquisition dream on a beach. She’s working. She is now rebuilding Whiny Baby as “Whiny,” in public, inside a much bigger machine, with a brand that’s had one identity for six years and is new getting a new one.

I sat down with Jess to talk about what that rebuild actually looks like.

The rebrand is a graduation, not a pivot

Whiny Baby is becoming Whiny. Four blends launch this spring, up from three, with a new orange blend joining the lineup. The wines are drier than before but still fruity, juicy, and approachable. The philosophy underneath hasn’t moved: begin your wine journey with a blend.

“I found myself feeling like I’d outgrown it,” Jess said of the old brand. “I still love those wines. I still love the packaging and the branding. But I wanted something that could grow with our consumer.”

The target isn’t college kids trying to get drunk cheap and fast. It’s what she calls early career adulthood, people who just got their first job and their first apartment and are figuring out what a weeknight glass of wine actually means. Price point is still being finalized, but her stated bar is specific: approachable enough for a weekly grocery run, elevated enough that you’d feel good gifting it to a friend.

Even the design process reflects the same instinct, expand without abandoning the origin. Jess described a three-way build: Gallo’s in-house creative team, an outside agency that had never touched wine before, and the original designer she DM’d on Instagram seven years ago with no budget to offer. That designer is still on the brand.

She’s using transparency as a defense against dilution

Many founders fear their brand getting swallowed by an acquisition. Jess’s answer wasn’t to shield the brand from Gallo. It was to over-share the process with her own audience.

“This Gen Z consumer has access to more information than any consumer before,” she said. “I’ve been really passionate about being super transparent, super honest. Some consumers care, some don’t, but really showing them that although I’m with this large organization now, it’s actually opened me up to way better quality wine, the most incredible winemakers in the industry, the resources.”

Basically, she’s owning the narrative. Document it and narrate it yourself, in real time, before someone else fills in the gaps. Smart.

Clever idea alert! She’s paying her “taste makers” the same, no matter how many followers they have

This is one worth stealing: Jess built a 14-person panel to weigh in on blends and packaging before launch. Not influencers, in her words, “taste makers,” defined by whether their recommendation actually moves people, not by follower count.

“I don’t care if you have 200 followers or 200 thousand,” she said. “It’s someone who, when they give a recommendation, their community listens.” She sourced them by asking her own audience who they trusted, then vetted the list to make sure it represented different regions, incomes, and backgrounds. One member was an intern who worked the bottling line on her very first production run and is now a lawyer.

Everyone got paid the exact same amount, whether they had 800,000 followers or 200. “We’re not asking them to post. We’re paying you for your opinion.” She said the people with the biggest followings, the ones used to huge influencer budgets, were the ones least bothered by the flat rate. It was the structure itself, everyone doing the same job, that made it feel honest.

She says Gen-Z drinks after all.

According to Jess, this was never really about wellness. It’s about a generation that lost casual mentorship culture, the kind you pick up watching your boss order wine at a work dinner and quietly taking notes. She started drinking wine at 22, during the pandemic, working remotely with none of that in-person modeling available to her. She thinks a lot of what gets labeled generational abstinence is actually a mentorship gap.

She also thinks the tide is already turning. She pointed to the backlash against the Diary of a CEO episode where the host Steven Bartlett said three glasses of wine ruined his entire week, and to the rise of what she calls optimization fatigue, a generation that turned rest and productivity into a second job and is now exhausted by it.

Her evidence isn’t just anecdotal. She cited Barnes & Noble quadrupling its store count in five years as a signal that reading, cooking, and staying in are back in a real way, and argued that all of it is upstream of wine, not competing with it.

She says none of this reads as panic. It reads as a legacy portfolio with decades of stories nobody has told well yet, sitting next to Whiny that still has to prove itself. She’s also fighting a smaller, more structural battle: getting her four blends merchandised together on shelf instead of scattered across a store’s varietal categories, a layout decision retailers control and most consumers are not thinking about.

It’s a rare spot to be in. Jess is working with her brand that’s six years old and already on version two, inside a company with brands older than her parents, proving to both the internet and the wine aisle that growing up doesn’t have to mean losing the plot. She doesn’t treat the scrappy origin and the corporate resources as a tension to manage. She treats them as the same asset, and she’s using one to build the other.

THE NEW RULES

Jess believes in radical transparency. Not as a crisis response, as a default. Tell people what’s happening to the brand before they have to ask.

And underneath that: stop solving problems for a consumer you’re guessing at. Put her in the room, pay her fairly for her opinion, and build from there.

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Someone who loves cocktails, but isn’t a bartender, tries to host a party. It goes badly, not because they’re bad hosts, but because making a proper drink for a room full of people is genuinely hard, and most of us were never taught how.

I heard one version of that story from Michael Handman at Deko Cocktails. I heard a different version from Cy Cain at Straightaway. Two brands, same root complaint: cocktail culture has never made this easy on the people who actually want to participate in it.

I’ve also been thinking about two brands we’ve already featured in this category: Hoste, the ultra-premium bottled cocktail brand turning bar-quality drinks into a gifting product, and Wild Mannered soju. Between the four, you can see a whole category figuring out what it actually is.

NIQ puts the ready-to-drink and ready-to-serve market at $13.9 billion, about 12.5 percent of total beverage alcohol dollar sales. Circana says the category has more than tripled since 2018

Why now

Both founders trace the real inflection point to the same thing: the pandemic (it all starts there doesn’t it?)

Straightaway actually predates it. Cy Cain and his co-founder started bootlegging cocktails for friends and family fourteen years ago, batching drinks in their own kitchens and driving bottles to people’s houses for the holidays. They ramped up R&D significantly in 2013, and Cain left his job in 2017 to launch the company legally in 2018. At launch, Cain says they were one of maybe 30 distilleries nationally built around this idea. There are roughly 2,500 brands in the space now.

“This category clearly fits a need for consumers. You just put a match to it with the pandemic.” Cy Cain, Straightaway

Deko Cocktails founder Ushi Shafran had a similar wake-up call, minus the decade of bootlegging. He hired a bartender to batch cocktails for a party at his house. It was a hit that night. Two days later, the drinks had separated and looked, in Handman’s words, “really gross and ugly.”

Shafran went looking for a bottled alternative and couldn’t find one that met his bar, so he and a co-founder, neither with any beverage alcohol experience, found a small incubator distillery on the North Fork of Long Island and made about 150 test cases to gauge interest with friends and family. That was 2021, when the premium end of this category was basically On The Rocks and a handful of regional players like Straightaway.

It took about a year of momentum before Shafran decided to go all in, recruiting Handman, a fine wine and luxury spirits veteran, to rebuild the brand from the ground up. Neither founder set out to build an RTS brand. They set out to solve their own hosting problem, and only later realized thousands of other people had the same one.

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What it says about how we’re drinking now

This isn’t really about convenience for its own sake. It’s about who gets to participate in cocktail culture, and on what terms.

Handman ran the math on a homemade Negroni for me: a bottle of gin, a bottle of Campari, a bottle of vermouth, close to $150 in ingredients for a drink a lot of people won’t even like. A bottle of Deko Cocktails gets you four cocktails from $20.75/bttl.

Cain makes a related point from the professional side. Nobody expects themselves to make a cabernet or mill hops for a pilsner before serving wine or beer to guests. We just pour it and move on. Somehow, hosting a proper cocktail hour has meant knowing how to bartend, and that’s the assumption this whole category is quietly unwinding.

Deko Cocktails expected a younger, urban, female-skewed customer. Their actual buyer skews older than fifty and lives outside major cities, which Handman only learned once DTC data gave him a real read on who was buying. People aren’t drinking less because they’re drinking differently. They want the ritual and the result without the apprenticeship, and they’re willing to pay a real price for both. And listening to the customer is key.

Four different bets on the same category

Deko Cocktails, Straightaway, Hoste, and Wild Mannered aren’t making the same bet, even though a retail buyer would file all four under one category tag.

Deko Cocktails is playing the platform game. Handman rebuilt the brand with new packaging and creative through branding agency Stranger & Stranger, and a pricing strategy anchored to what a bar would charge for the same ingredients, not to shelf comparisons.

Straightaway is playing the credibility game. They’re a dual-licensed distillery and winery that makes its own bitters, shrubs, and modifiers, originally just to build their own cocktails. In 2022, they branded that back bar as Accompani and started supplying the same house-made spirits to top bar programs, including Violet Hour and Whistler Bar in Chicago and Borgo and Le Crocodile in New York. Their new cocktail bar inside the Portland airport, one of twenty brands to win the port’s RFP, makes that case physically: come watch us make it, the way you’d tour a winery.

“We’re a cocktail company. We’re not a widget on a shelf kind of brand.” Cy Cain, Straightaway

That credibility bet is paying off in the data. Straightaway has led the category in weekly dollar velocity on Circana for more than 20 months straight, eclipsing incumbents like Cutwater and On The Rocks by a wide margin, on a sales team of two and a half people. On NIQ's ready-to-serve rankings, they're one of the fastest-growing brands in the category: fourth over the past 52 weeks, trending into second over the past four.

One buyer put a number on what that means at the register. The head buyer at a notable natural retail chain told Straightaway they represent one in every three dollars sold across that store’s entire RTD set.

Hoste is playing the occasion game, betting nobody searches for “best RTS cocktail” but everyone shops for gifts and better hosting, pricing accordingly at $80 to $150 a bottle. Wild Mannered is playing the cultural-arbitrage game, riding soju’s rising U.S. visibility and translating an unfamiliar spirit into something approachable, with a real ingredient story attached. Four different theories of what people are actually buying: platform trust, professional credibility, occasion, or a spirit’s cultural moment.

The real challenges

Two problems come up in almost every conversation I have in this category.

The first is education. Straightaway spent years building the brand while also teaching consumers that a canned cocktail could be as good as one built to order, even though most of the world’s best bars already batch 60 to 70 percent of what they serve.

The second is price perception, and it’s coming from the wrong side of the counter.

“The only folks that are price sensitive to it are the wholesalers and the retailers.” Michael Handman, Deko Cocktails

Handman's point: consumers aren't the ones flinching at Deko Cocktails price. Wholesalers and retailers are, because they assume the shopper will balk before the shopper gets the chance to. Both founders are also watching the category get crowded fast, with newer entrants prioritizing pack format over the actual liquid, and both are betting quality is what separates the brands that last from the ones that were simply first to a shelf.

What they’re actually trying to build

Neither founder is chasing a quick flip. Handman wants Deko Cocktails to become a lasting platform for cocktail innovation across spirit categories, alcoholic and eventually non-alcoholic, rather than a single product line. He’d take a knock on the door from Beam or Bacardi someday, but that’s not the plan he’s building toward day to day.

Cain is even more direct about resisting an exit mindset.

“Any brand worth its salt is a ten-year overnight story.” Cy Cain, Straightaway

Straightaway has put its capital into production capacity, tasting rooms, and now an airport bar, rather than into sales headcount or marketing spend. They're finally, by their own account, close to profitable, on their own timeline.

The New Rule

This category isn't really selling convenience. It's unbundling the skill of bartending from the desire to drink well, and the brands doing it right have a specific, defensible answer for which part of that experience they're actually selling.

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Non founder Aaron Trotman approaches taste through a chef’s lens: fruit, tannin, salinity, acidity, and balance.

Every single bottle of Non has to tick all of these boxes, whether that’s by roasting pears until the natural sugars caramelize and adding in olive brine, or by spending 48 hours dehydrating oranges and mixing them with gourmet salt.

Aaron is straightforward about all of this: “It’s important to get the flavor to unlock,” he says, “because it’s not a juice ... I want you to taste everything that’s on the front of the label: the raspberry, the chamomile, the acid from the verjus, the saltiness, the sugar. They have to have those things, but in a unique way.

“We’re doing the extra work, and I think it goes noticed,” he adds. “It’s something that we care about, and something we’re proud to talk about.”

Non isn’t a wine replacement - it wants to build a category of its very own by being absolutely uncompromising about ingredients and process.

Jar people, just a bit

Our conversation with Aaron focused a lot on flavor, and how anything competing with wine or other alcohol has to be offer layers of taste. One of those layers, according to him, needs to feel just a little bit off.

There’s a famous (and likely apocryphal) quote from French perfumer Jacques Guerlain that — and we paraphrase — says perfumes need a scent of something unexpected and maybe not entirely pleasant. In a similar vein of thought, Aaron says he likes to experiment with throwing in surprising ingredients.

“It’s important to be jarring and thought-provoking,” he explains. “It’s not too hard to get the base, but it’s what makes it special that’s the hard part.”

Tasting expensive means looking expensive

Process and ingredients is such a driving force for Non, and that focus has landed them partnerships with some of the best restaurants in the world. But we shouldn’t underestimate the work that Non’s brand is doing.

Aaron says he knew, from the get-go, that he wanted to channel the highest-level brands out there: Byredo, Aesop, Gentle Monster.

He commissioned design studio The Company You Keep to create a super-minimal brand world: a white label, some Helvetica, and space for the liquid to shine. “The idea is that the color of the drink always pops,” he says. “It’s the star of the show.”

Not just the work, but the agency partnership has been a pivotal part of Non’s growth. Aaron says founders are often distracted by a studio’s credentials, and focus too much on past projects – when they’d be better spending time finding the right person.

“They have to be an extension of you. They’re there to pull the ideas out of your head.”

Start as you mean to go on

Non is now served at restaurants in the USA, the UK, Japan, Australia and Korea. And that’s not by accident. Their first account was The Fat Duck – a three Michelin-starred restaurant in England – and their goal from the beginning was to work at this level.

“It’s about being really careful about where you go and how you do it and not rushing it,” he says. “If you can get these things right, you can build a really good business, and a really good brand in the best places.”

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THE NEW RULES

Cutting corners will kill your brand
Yes, people notice, and yes it makes a difference.

Be a bit unexpected
Humans have a complex relationship with flavor. Sometimes it’s ok to throw them off – just a little.

Find your level and lean into it
Want to be stocked in the best places? Build for that.

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A conversation with Ben Tannenbaum of LineLeap on why the old playbook for reaching consumers doesn’t work anymore.

I sat down with Ben Tannenbaum, who runs alcohol strategy at LineLeap (the nightlife platform that lets people skip the line at bars and clubs, currently live in 800 venues across 125 markets, with about two million users, 98% of them under 30). Before that, he ran the alcohol vertical at Fetch Rewards for eight years, and before that he was in innovation roles at NBC Universal and Mastercard, watching how platforms and infrastructure change human behavior long before he ever touched alcohol.

That background is why this conversation didn’t stay on Gen Z drinking less. It went somewhere more useful: why the entire social structure that used to make drinking happen without anyone planning it is quietly disappearing, and what that means for how long a brand should even try to plan for.

The Shrinking Half-Life of a Drinking Occasion

Tannenbaum thinks about alcohol’s role in socializing as a series of eras, each shorter than the last. The tavern held that role for something like 250 years, doubling as the voting hall, the hiring hall, the place news actually traveled. Post-war happy hour culture, the version where you just showed up because that’s what people did after work, held it for about fifty. The craft and identity era, where what you drank signaled who you were, lasted maybe thirteen. The current wellness moment might get ten, if that.

“It used to be that you would have this 10-year planning horizon for what is my brand identity. I don’t think that makes sense anymore.”

He’s not arguing brand equity is worthless. He’s arguing that a brand rigid enough to ignore what’s happening over the next 36 months, in the name of protecting a 10-year plan, is taking on a different kind of risk now.

Why the Conditions Stopped Lining Up

Ambient drinking, the unplanned, casual kind, the run-in at the bar rather than the scheduled happy hour, only happens when five conditions line up at once. Here’s Ben Tannenbaum’s version of them:

1. Temporal synchronization: people are free at the same time.

2. Spatial concentration: people are physically near each other and near venues.

3. Low planning cost: you just go, someone’s already there.

4. Social permission: drinking is expected or has a legible role.

5. Repetition: the occasion recurs often enough to become habit.

When even one or two of those conditions erode, ambient drinking doesn’t happen. It’s not that people stopped wanting to drink together. It’s that fewer of the conditions line up anymore.

For Gen Z, several of these were never fully in place. More than 40% haven’t reached legal drinking age yet. A large share had their college years, exactly when temporal synchronization and spatial concentration used to happen automatically, interrupted by COVID. And a record number of 25 to 34 year olds are still living at home, which structurally suppresses the whole category of occasions this used to run on. This isn’t a generation that decided to drink less. It’s a generation for whom the ambient infrastructure never fully rebuilt itself.

The Causal Chain

Most alcohol marketing still treats occasions as things you sponsor after they already exist: the tailgate, the music festival, the happy hour that would have happened without you. That’s the bottom of the causal chain. You get impressions and an association, but the moment doesn’t need you.

Tannenbaum’s actual advice is to move to the top of that chain instead, to be the reason the occasion exists at all. He gave the example of a bar in Madison, Wisconsin running weekly Love Island watch parties, pulling numbers close to a Friday on a random weeknight. Nobody’s coming out to drink first and watching the show second. They’re coming for the event, and the drinking happens because they’re already there.

A few ways that shows up in practice:

• Backing a trivia night that’s actually building repetition and proximity, not just buying a logo placement on something that already had an audience

• Treating a venue’s recurring watch party or theme night as infrastructure worth investing in, not a one-off activation

• Showing up as the invisible hand behind an occasion rather than the visible sponsor of one

The Occasions Nobody Has Claimed

Tannenbaum also pointed out how much brands default to the same four planning windows (holidays, summer, the Super Bowl) instead of the smaller, weirder occasions that are specific to someone’s actual life. Tequila shows up constantly around Cinco de Mayo, rarely around Mexican Independence Day or Dia de los Muertos, the occasions a Mexican or Mexican American audience would probably rather be spoken to on. The territory isn’t niche. It’s just unclaimed.

Regularmaxxing is a thing.

“Regular” used to be something that happened to you, a byproduct of a work schedule and a neighborhood bar that existed whether you showed up or not. Now it takes actual effort to become one, which is exactly why Gen Z had to invent a term for it (”regularmaxxing”) instead of just doing it the way everyone before them did without thinking twice.

That effort is the opening. The brands that win the next decade won’t be the ones showing up at the party. They’ll be the ones the party wouldn’t exist without.

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Faccia Brutto makes bitter liqueurs that honour their Italian roots while keeping the modern American palate in mind. It’s a brand that’s grown slowly, honestly and with a lot of discipline – thanks to founder Patrick Miller’s background as a chef.

And it’s not just the exceptional taste; Patrick has created one of those brands where the story, the liquid and the visual world feel truly inseparable.

Here’s how:

A chef’s approach to flavor and structure

Patrick Miller came to spirits through kitchens, and that background shapes how he thinks about amaro. “I think about balance,” he says. “If there’s too much fat or acid or salt in a dish, people know instantly.” When he looked at what existed in the domestic category, things felt off-kilter, either too sweet or too bitter.

His intention from day one was to make products that are supremely well balanced. He respects Italian tradition but doesn’t treat it as a fixed formula — for example, legacy Italian brands use a lot of sugar, but Patrick says he’s made a conscious decision to use a more “appropriate” amount. He also adds salt because it brings flavors out.

These adjustments give Faccia Brutto a flavor profile that feels both rooted and modern. It respects where amaro comes from while creating something more aligned with how Americans actually drink.

A brand world built on imperfection

Faccia Brutto’s visual identity carries the same energy as the liquid. It’s confident without being polished, humorous without being silly, and intentionally imperfect. The name itself came to Patrick suddenly. Faccia Brutta means ugly face, which he loved, but he went further. He intentionally mismatched the grammar.

He laughed when he told us: “I’ve received a lot of emails and phone calls asking why the name is incorrect, but it felt right.” That slight tension is the brand. It’s meant to feel human and slightly off in a way that draws you in.

The design came from Garrett Elizabeth Office, a small husband and wife studio that Patrick worked with when they first broke out on their own. He wanted the typography to feel throwback without being nostalgic, and the designers built a system that feels old-world but filtered through a very American voice.

And then there’s the drinking man. Patrick asked the designers to “put Charles Bukowski on the label in some fashion,” which is how the illustration landed on that beautifully imperfect figure. “I found him extremely funny and grotesquely ugly,” Patrick says. “His whole persona really is the brand.” It is not a reference for reference’s sake. It signals honesty, grit, humor, and a refusal to smooth anything over.

Nothing in the Faccia Brutto world feels like it was tested or sanitized. It feels lived-in. That energy is essential to why bartenders and consumers connect with it so deeply.

Building without shortcuts

Patrick’s approach to growth stands apart in today’s industry. There’s no burn rate. No pressure to scale at all costs. And no need to constantly chase new capital.

“I raised money once,” he says. “$150k. Whatever cash comes in is the cash we use.”

This grounds the brand’s most important rule: “We do not do the pay-to-play model. I would rather save that money for payroll.” This is unusual for the category and extremely intentional. If Faccia Brutto shows up on a menu, it’s because someone believes in the product. That authenticity creates a different kind of loyalty, and it sets the brand up for resilience rather than volatility.

Navigating a changing distributor landscape

The distributor landscape is becoming more consolidated and cost-driven. Many brands feel pressure to overspend in order to stay relevant. Faccia Brutto took the opposite path. It built demand first, often one bartender or one retailer at a time.

Launching in March 2020 shaped its trajectory. With bars closed, retail became the entry point. “The only place people could see our stuff was on shelves,” Patrick says. That retail momentum later informed how the brand moved into restaurants.

Today the brand sits at a 50/50 split between retail and on premise, which is rare and speaks to how well the identity performs in both environments.

The bottle stands out on a backbar. The typography carries from across a room. The Bukowski figure is recognizable without being literal. The world-building does real work in a way that very few brands truly achieve. Bartenders see it, pick it up, and want to talk about it.

A brand that grows thoughtfully

Faccia Brutto runs with a small, focused team. Patrick and one teammate make the liquid. Another manages accounts. Another leads communications and collaborations. Their community approach is thoughtful rather than performative. Every January they host a dog adoption event at the distillery. It is small, warm, and very on-brand. As Patrick says: “It is more of a community than just a product.”

This is a company that knows what it is trying to build, why it matters, and what it refuses to compromise on. That kind of clarity shows up everywhere.

NEW RULES FROM FACCIA BRUTTO

Build from real demand
“I raised money once. Whatever cash comes in is the cash we use.”

Let imperfection speak
The wrong grammar, the disheveled figure, the lived-in world. It all signals honesty.

Honor tradition without copying it
Italian roots, American palate, modern execution.

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If your beer, soda or RTD doesn’t have electrolytes, protein, adaptogens, mushroom powder, colostrum or any other hypey ingredient in it, are you really even alive?

We’ve said it time and again at The New Rules, but it’s truly the era of drinks but ✨extra✨. And things are, arguably, being taken too far. We’ve put so much protein in stuff that there is, reportedly, a global whey protein shortage. We’ve raved so much about matcha that the Tokyo Metropolitan Government is paying tea growers to transition to matcha production.

Why can’t things just be simple? Why are so many brands being built around a hype cycle?

The innovation hook

To understand why the bev sector is so enchanted with trends, we spoke with Leah Keggi: a brand strategist and marketer with a good decade of bev industry experience. She started out in craft beer at a business that was later acquired by a major brewery, weathered the mania of the 2010s, and then moved over to work in wine and spirits. And along the way she became very familiar with how the drinks industry ties itself in knots over ‘innovation’.

She told us: If it feels like there’s more hypey ingredient focus than ever before that’s because the barrier to entry is lower, the trend cycle is faster, and news spreads more quickly. On top of that, new brands lacking loyalty often feel they need the ‘edge’ of being a bit weird to get attention.

“For a lot of brands looking to start,” she explains, “the growth model is backwards: innovation-first to prove your value to consumers, then reversion to tradition. Look at the Ollipop refresh – they’re pulling back on the overt label call-outs now that they’re established, and leaning into the trust they’ve earned.”

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Innovation ≠ acquisition

The problem is that add-ons can feel like a shortcut to success. They might feel like you’re tapping into a movement – and for a period, you are. But things change fast. And in reality, says Leah, chasing those often-fleeting moments can stop a brand from leaning into an audience and providing value. The trend feels like a solution, but it’s really a distraction. And while lots of young brands think the focus on innovation will pin down an acquisition, we’ve got news.

“People think they’re going to have a Poppi story,” says Leah. “I’ve seen this a lot in whiskey, because people think they’ll just bottle it. And actually, you have to do so much work to be attractive. People want to get acquired, so they give it a two-year run and they stop. That’s not enough time.”

The ‘what’s new’ trap

The trap, according to her, is asking: what’s new? The second trap is assuming that what’s new is what’s going to sell. People hope that innovation is going to help them leapfrog across categories or into consumers’ hearts, and while newness can be appealing, it’s much harder to be new.

“When the shelves were all one brand, you could slot in a new item and it was interesting, so people chose it,” Leah told us. “Now the shelves are packed. But people keep asking ‘what’s new?’ instead of ‘how are we talking about this?’ We’re chasing trends, and we’re asking questions that aren’t what the consumer is looking for.”

It’s understandable. The lure of the trend is powerful. It sings its siren call and brands follow. This is particularly risky for younger companies, says Leah, because often they’ve barely started bedding in with consumers, and then they start following weirdness.

Star Wars is cowboys in space

So how to do it? How do bev brands stay relevant without falling victim to a trend that eventually falters?

Leah says the trick is to take the familiar, and twist it ever so. Star Wars is cowboys in space. Absolut’s tabasco vodka is vodka, but spicy. There’s a hint of novelty; a touch of the unexpected but within a framework that’s still familiar. And it helps to pick things that have a reasonable lifespan.

Stores of the Wild West are classics for a reason. Spicy flavors have been loved forever, for a reason. They might feel fairly novel to the beverage category, and they might be in a moment of interest, but they’ve also got roots and they’ve got legs. And, importantly, it’s a good taste experience, wrapped in exceptional branding.

Take smaller steps

Brands need to think about innovation, yes, but they need to consider what form that comes in. Rather than launching a new addition that no-one wants, work on your brand.

“You can innovate your packaging, you can innovate to a new audience with the same products through marketing. Innovate your brand message or what your brands stands for. You don’t have to innovate product to sell more product. Tide isn’t making hand soap, they’re just making new types of detergent.”

And, perhaps, brands need to take smaller jumps. If you’re an alcohol-free beer and you release a limited edition nectarine version for the summer, that makes sense. The novelty could bring in some new interest, which could bring in new fans of your core brand. BUT, if you hear that everyone at Expo West is talking about tallow, and you’re now wondering how you can release a buzzy beef tallow beer, really ask yourself: why?

Ingredients aren’t competitive

Finally – and we cant emphasize this enough - you cannot compete on ingredients. Unless you’ve sourced something so rare and unusual that only you know where it grows or lives, it’s a dead-end.

”You need to build everything around the ingredients,” says Leah. “If everyone is using mushroom powders, what makes you special? You need to compete on your brand and your messaging to stick around for the long haul, because anyone can access ingredients – unless you’re like David, and you buy up the supplier.”

I think the beer sector is a perfect example of this. In essence, every major beer brand uses the same ingredient list. None of them are telling consumers, ‘wow, we’re made with hops’. Instead, they compete on brand. And beer brands are some of the most tribal and successful examples of branding you can think of.

So put down the beef tallow. Forget about protein, or adaptogens, or mushroom powders in such minuscule amounts that they make no difference anyway. None of that is marketing strategy. Don’t chase the ingredients or the trends, chase the people instead.

As Leah says: “CPG needs to stop trying to be the best in the room with other CPG brands. Start thinking about how you’re the best thing for the community or the room you want to be in. There is a lot of untapped potential in a lot of places.”

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In the agency world, the ultimate asset is usually a beautiful render—getting to that perfect final case study, putting your finest work on the Dieline, and securing the press hits. Most people don't expect their branding agency to do end-to-end execution, including liquid strategy.

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But Mike Perry, owner of the Brooklyn-based beverage branding agency Tavern, wants his clients to know that Tavern does exactly that. As he points out, “no one knows the deep strategy that goes into it. No one knows the liquid strategy, which is what we work on with a lot of our major clients.”

For years, Tavern has operated deep in the trenches of the beverage-alcohol sector for global conglomerates like Beam Suntory and E. & J. Gallo.

Yet, when you’re an agency servicing massive corporate clients, it’s hard to show early-stage founders and venture capitalists that you actually understand the gritty, end-to-end reality of launching a brand from scratch.

So, Perry decided Tavern would write its own brief.

They set out to build a physical product to prove they could handle the entire roadmap—from liquid formulation to distributor pitches. What started as a clever marketing exercise, however, quickly spiraled into something much bigger. They built a product and brand so compelling they had no choice but to go all-in.

The Proof of Concept: Handling the End-to-End Roadmap

To prove to clients and skeptical VCs that Tavern wasn’t just a design shop, Perry wanted a single, highly tactical case study that demonstrated a deep understanding of the entire beverage lifecycle.

As Mike puts it:

“One thing we’re trying to achieve with this is to show that we’re deep experts in this category. We’ve demonstrated that understanding in the past, but this time we’re doing it through a single brand that can act as a case study. It’s not just about liquid strategy and product development, it’s also about getting a brand onto shelves and understanding how to pitch it to distributors.

Tavern didn’t want to just mock up a concept; they handled the logistical heavy lifting. They mapped out a lean distribution framework, proving to early-stage founders that you don’t need massive, wasteful budgets to make an impact:

“You don’t need huge billboards. I think a lot of companies will come in and try to sell you a bunch of stuff you don’t actually need. When you’re a super early-stage brand, what you need is highly tactical, highly effective, strategic work and outputs that can have an immediate impact.”

History Doesn’t Repeat Itself but It’s Rhyming Pretty Hard

Mike didn’t want to just make a random RTD. He built off his understanding of how trends are resurfacing in different forms. I found this interesting:

The Pivot: When a Case Study Rules Too Hard to Ignore

The vehicle for this masterclass in brand building was Hyper Blast, an upcoming 12% ABV RTD inspired by late-2000s alcoholic energy drink culture. Tavern designed a massive, rich brand world around 80s and 90s jet ski culture, mapping out an entire universe of physical, ancillary products like riding grips and fuel jerry cans to show how far a single creative concept could expand.

Originally, the plan was simple, lean, and highly risk-averse: soft-launch the brand, create a killer case study, bootstrap it minimally, and maybe eventually offload the intellectual property to a major client.

Mike openly admits the plan was to “offload it as a PDF more or less.” But then they put the brand into the wild—and the market responded with absolute chaos.

The market reaction was so overwhelmingly positive, and the structural fit between millennial nostalgia and Gen Z’s love for high-octane RTDs was so perfect, that the agency realized they were sitting on a goldmine.

Mike describes the exact moment the strategy shifted:

“It started as the former. We’re like this f***ing rules. It’s so perfect. There is such a perfect time to enter the market with a product like this that it’s like we’d be fools not to just go full blast on it.”

Tavern quickly pivoted from a temporary design experiment to a fully invested beverage startup. They scrambled to build an investor deck, walked away from the bootstrap-and-sell model, and are now moving aggressively toward a summer launch.

Balancing the Agency and the Startup Burn

Going all-in on a liquid brand while running a 12-person agency is a logistical tightrope walk. To make it work without letting client work slip, Perry reallocated Tavern’s internal “design practice” hours—the time the team normally spends experimenting with new mediums and software—entirely to the execution of Hyper Blast asset builds, influencer kits, and campus launch materials.

It’s an exhausting pace, but Perry views the startup burn as an investment that feeds back into the agency’s primary mission. In his words:

“All of this should be in service of making everyone on the team, designer, strategist, even account people better at what they’re doing for our client work. So it serves us, but it also serves the client in the long term.”

And perhaps the secret ingredient to why Hyper Blast is generating so much organic momentum is that Tavern isn’t choked by the typical founder anxiety. Because they have a thriving agency backing them, they can afford to take massive creative risks.

As Mike bluntly puts it:

“Hyper Blast could be gone tomorrow, and that’s fine. Honestly, I think that’s part of why it might work. I’m not so f***ing precious about it in the way a lot of startup founders tend to be.”

By successfully taking Hyper Blast from an internal agency brief to a living, breathing retail product, Tavern didn’t just build a case study to show clients they could handle end-to-end strategy—they actually went out and proved it.

THE NEW RULE

The best way to prove you can do something is to go out and build it yourself. Stop waiting for a client brief to validate your team’s deepest strategic capabilities. Create your own incubator, run the hard yards from formulation to retail shelves, and don’t be afraid if your proof-of-concept takes on a life of its own. True expertise isn’t practiced on a slide deck—it’s proven in the market.

I wanted to share the following video because Mike is really talking about BRAND BUILDING in bev/alc in a super clear way.

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“It is forbidden. No new rules.” ~ Tad Dorda, founder, Chopin Vodka

At The New Rules, we obviously are into the new rules. Tell us what you’re doing that’s different. Show us how you did what no one said you could do. We’re always looking for the ways the industry is evolving, and the people and brands that are moving it forward.

But when I sat down with Tad Dorda and his daughter Alexandra Dorda-Marcu – the founding family behind Chopin Vodka – I was aptly challenged in my approach. This industry (myself included) is obsessed with the “pivot,” the “secret sauce,” and Chopin’s strategy is the opposite of that: a radical commitment to the permanent.

For thirty years, the Dordas have played by a singular, ancient rule: make vodka the “good way, the original way.” They are not planning to change that.

The strategy: the war on neutrality

Chopin’s central mission has been a decades-long war against the very word “neutral.” Legally and culturally, vodka has been defined as a spirit without distinct character, the spirit you can mix with anything and not taste.

Tad Dorda views this as the industry’s greatest misrepresentation.

“If it’s a neutral spirit, there’s nothing to talk about,” he explains. “But vodka is not a chemical product. It has terroir. It has a place where it grew, people who planted it, and who distilled it.”

By producing single-ingredient vodkas (potato, rye, and wheat) side-by-side, Chopin forces a conversation that most of their competitors would rather avoid. They are betting on the liquid’s character in a category that has spent a century trying to erase it.

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The radical simplification: scaling the “slow way”

Perhaps the most contrarian move in Chopin’s 130-year history (that’s how old their distillery is!): is their refusal to scale at the expense of season. While most brands chase growth by ensuring 365-day production cycles, Chopin is beholden to the harvest.

Their signature potato vodka is distilled only when the ingredients are fresh during a tight three-month window from September to November. While they could store potatoes in refrigerated warehouses to produce year-round and juice their margins, they flatly refuse.

“Don’t rush it,” Tad warns. “Don’t try to make much more of it very fast because you will have to sacrifice quality. If we change something, we’ll only mess it up.”

Intuitive identity: from Podlaskie to Vera Wang

Truth be told, Chopin looks like a lot of other vodkas on the shelf today. But there’s a reason for that: they invented the look.

Alexandra explains that the frosted wine bottle with the clear window, now a category standard, is a design originally patented by Chopin and created by the factory workers at their distillery in Podlaskie, Poland, in the early 90s.

Instead of hiring a high-priced London or NYC branding agency to define their “vibe,” the Dordas rely on intuition.

This authenticity is what led to their recent collaboration with Vera Wang. It wasn’t a “normal corporate arrangement” engineered by agents; it was a lunch between two people who shared a passion for craftsmanship. Vera designed a bottle – and personally selected the liquid inside – for a brand she had already been drinking for twenty years.

Simplicity as the final achievement

As we wrapped up, Tad returned to a sentiment often attributed to Frédéric Chopin himself: “Simplicity is the final achievement.”

In a sea of 4,000 SKUs and endless gimmicks, Chopin is happy to remain “small and tiny” (I asked them to define “tiny” but did not receive a conclusive answer). They aren’t chasing the next generation of drinkers with a rebrand; they are waiting for that generation to realize that the cleanest, most honest distillation in the world doesn’t need to change to stay relevant.

Kaboom.

The (NOT) New Rules:

1. Standing still can be a disruption. In an industry obsessed with the “new,” a radical commitment to the original process creates a distinct brand whitespace. If everyone is pivoting, staying exactly where you are makes you the landmark.

2. The liquid must tell the story. “If it only sells when you’re demoing it and telling the story, you’ve failed,” is a common industry mantra. Chopin takes this further: the liquid should be so distinctive (like their creamy potato profile) that once a consumer tastes it, they can never go back to “neutral.”

3. Simplicity is a virtue, not a lack of effort. Refusing to add SKUs or rebranding etc. isn’t about doing less; it’s about protecting the “final achievement” of a perfect product.

Last week The New Rules invaded Brooklyn for BCB!

If you caught up with us at Industry City or swapped notes with the team, thank you for making it an incredible week. If you are still nursing the general industry fatigue that comes with navigating today’s volatile landscape, read on because we have some notes for you.

For the first half of the year, the beverage industry has been speed-skating through what feels like a massive, unpredictable curve.

We are navigating a multi-layered reality characterized by distributor inventory corrections, a historic wave of strategic M&A (Molson Coors buying Atomic Brands, Gallo snapping up Four Roses, the list goes on), and a fundamental evolution in how people actually consume liquid.

To get a real, unfiltered pulse check on how independent brands are handling this mid-year shift, I caught up with three distinct The New Rules alums during BCB week to talk about market velocity, Gen Z realities, and where the momentum is shifting for the second half of 2026.

1. Mother’s Milk: The Convergence of “Turning Up” and Functional Wellness

When we last checked in with Jen Roman-Matito and Kristie Kish for our “Newbies” series, they were building out their vision for a coconut-water-forward, anti-hangover canned cocktail. Halfway through 2026, they find themselves sitting exactly at the intersection of the two most explosive trends in modern beverage.

Jen: “Two things that I’ve seen that are really positive for the business is: one, canned cocktails are the fastest-growing category in alcohol - period. Secondary, in the non-alc space, functional beverages are through the roof in every way, shape, or form.”

For Mother’s Milk, navigating this landscape means scaling up with aggressive, deliberate liquid choices. They are bringing two new spirits to market via a tequila and a rum SKU. Currently anchoring the Northeast territory, the brand is mapping its next big move southward, targeting Florida as its next anchor state for late 2026.

2. Wild Mannered: Shifting Toward Sessionability and RTS Economy

For Michael and Perry, the childhood best friends behind the premium soju brand Wild Mannered, the first half of 2026 has been a period of macro-stabilization. Emerging from what they call the “COVID hangover period,” they are watching consumer trends solidify around lower ABV, clean ingredients, and sessionability.

Michael: “We’re all shifting a little bit more towards lower ABV, sessionable, high-quality ingredients—things that are easier to drink, but also a little bit of a different riff on traditional spirits.”

While industry analysts obsess over whether Gen Z is drinking like previous generations, Wild Mannered has found their core traction by positioning their 13% ABV liquid against traditional, heavy RTD incumbents. Looking toward the remainder of the year, Michael points out that the real category breakout to watch isn’t another single-serve can, but the evolution of Ready-to-Serve (RTS) multi-serve glass formats, driven by macro giants entering the fray and a consumer desire for shared, economical social experiences.

3. Little Saints: The Death of “All-or-Nothing” Sobriety

We included Little Saints in our first-annual New Rules of Brand Building in Bev/Alc report, tracking their rapid growth. After a Shark Tank appearance that generated $2 million in a single month on her website, founder Megan Klein has watched the brand settle into steady retail momentum across Sprouts and Whole Foods. Her internal consumer data reveals a massive behavioral shift in how people view the non-alc category in 2026.

Megan: “In 2025, non-alc still felt pretty new to most people, and people were thinking about non-alc like very ‘all or nothing.’ They were either going out drinking or they were like not drinking. The 2026 survey was totally different. People are not counting the days they don’t drink anymore.”

Instead of rigid sobriety rules, consumers are fluidly blending categories within the exact same night out, swapping between standard pours and premium non-alc cocktails. This data aligns with Megan’s production strategy. While their premium bottled non-alcoholic spirits carry a strong dollar value, volume velocity is overwhelmingly driven by packaging format, with 90% of their unit volume moving through cans.

The Takeaway: Stop Looking at the Hinges

As the industry navigates the final stretches of this mid-year shift, it is incredibly easy to get bogged down in the hyper-calculated metrics of distributor contraction or macro consolidation.

But as these three brands show, market validation does not come from waiting for 100% certainty or begging a legacy system for permission. Velocity belongs to the founders who look past the noise of the test, focus entirely on the raw truth of consumer connection, and simply burn the boats to move forward.

Let’s go 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥.

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The New Rules is proud to be the official media partner for the ultimate BCB kickoff party. We are taking over Jolene Sound Room for a Daiquiri Time Out hosted by 2025 Daiq-Off winner Katie Sips, featuring specialty cocktails fueled by Ten To One Rum, Mike’s Hot Honey, and Mothers Milk, alongside live music by Snips and a live stream of the Knicks game playing throughout the night.

The details:

• Monday, June 8th, from 7:00 PM – 11:00 PM

• Jolene Sound Room (353 Bedford Ave, Brooklyn)

• RSVP!

For the first half of the year, the beverage industry has been nursing a massive, post-COVID inventory headache. Distributors are bogged down, consolidation is rampant, and the rumor mill has been insisting that Gen Z has abandoned drinking altogether.

But according to Brian Rosen, Chairman of Investbev, a firm managing nearly a billion dollars of capital for the industry, we aren’t looking at a permanent decline. We’re looking at a much-needed market correction.

To get an accurate pulse check on the industry ahead of Bar Convent Brooklyn (BCB), I sat down with Brian.

His take? The macroeconomic headwinds are finally turning into tailwinds, but only for the founders who understand what the modern consumer actually wants to put in their glass (or can).

The message is clear: Stop blaming the market, stop building vanity brands for an audience of one, and start looking at where the actual liquid velocity is moving.

The Myth of the Teetotaling Gen Z

One of the loudest narratives in beverage right now is that the younger demographic has permanently walked away from alcohol. Brian’s response to that?

“I’m going to give you a beverage specific word. It’s pronounced b*******.”

The narrative was born from a perfect storm of bad timing. The cohort that should have been turning 21, doing frat party keg stands, and learning how to talk to sommeliers was instead stuck in their parents’ basements during the height of the pandemic. It wasn’t a structural shift in human desire; it was a three-year developmental stunting.

Now? They are officially back. Data is showing that Gen Z is currently the demographic hitting on-premise accounts the heaviest, and they are the most open to experimentation and retail recommendations. The drinking population hasn’t shrunk; the curve just artificially dipped from a pandemic high and is now correcting right back onto its linear, pre-COVID upward trajectory.

The Inventory Hangover vs. The M&A Reignition

While consumers are back at the bar, the middle tier is still feeling the pain. Distributors are currently saddled with a massive inventory hangover due to brand liquidations and retail consolidation. If you want a distributor or retailer to care about you in this climate, your product has to be undeniably compelling.

The good news? The major conglomerates like Diageo, Constellation, Pernod Ricard, and LVMH have officially reignited their M&A pipelines after a completely stagnant couple of years. Brian pulled no punches about why these corporate giants are hunting for acquisitions:

“They do not know how to create brands, period, end of story. They need to acquire brands.”

The capital is moving heavily toward alternative categories. Ready-to-Drink (RTD) cocktails have officially overtaken vodka as the drink of choice, a shift that just hit the wires. Born out of the home-mixology movement during lockdowns, the format is now dominating because it solves a massive margin and labor problem for rising weight-staff wages on-premise.

At the same time, all eyes are on the upcoming federal regulatory shifts this November for cannabis beverages, with Investbev portfolio brands like Cann and Willie’s seeing explosive growth ahead of the ruling.

We are also seeing a massive orbital effect in non-alc, with industry leaders like Athletic Brewing factually expected by Brian to cross the M&A finish line soon (interestingly, Brian also flagged RTD brand Carbliss as a prime contender for an acquisition exit soon. He noted you can always tell a brand is prepping for a sale when their social media shifts away from lifestyle and starts obsessing over team, profit, and revenue to pump up valuation).

What to Expect at BCB This Year

Brian shared his blueprint for how independent founders should navigate the BCB floor and look at the market right now.

First, you have to cure your “Executive Chef Syndrome.” The number one mistake independent founders make is creating a brand they personally love, resulting in an audience of exactly one person. You cannot build a business on a hyper-niche liquid that fills a gap nobody else cares about. Build for market reality, not your own palate.

Second, realize that trade shows are not for discovery. Brian has notoriously zero patience for the traditional trade show circuit:

“I have never liked trade shows. I think there’s no ROI. I think it’s b*******... BCB is not where you invent the relationship. It’s where you close the deal.”

Finally, remember that the consumer holds the product remote. The era of big suppliers forcing a brand down the throat of the market through sheer distribution muscle is dead. Thanks to low-cost digital media, the consumer now creates brands through pure demand. If they want it enough, their cultural collective desire will force the market to supply it.

“At the end of the day, you still have to make a good product. You have to make a good liquid that appeals to more people than it doesn’t. That’s how brands work.”

That’s all, folks. See you there!

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In the crowded landscape of modern tequila, where premiumization has shifted the focus from hype to producer-led craftsmanship, building something that truly stands out is a feat. So many brands start with a formula and look for a story. Sofía Paloma Juárez did the opposite.

She spent nine years building CASA J. It is a project rooted in heritage, meticulous R&D, and the simple desire to bottle a memory. It’s also beautiful.

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The road to tequila

The story of CASA J begins in Jalisco, Mexico. “I wanted to bottle a memory,” says Juárez, who nine years ago reconnected with her dad, a native of the region.

“That memory was driving over the rolling hills of Jalisco for the first time with my father... it was a sweetness in the air that I had never smelt in my life with this fiery, ashy, smoky natural earth and wood.”

Coming from a high-level background in luxury brand building, including stints at Veuve Clicquot and Belvedere, Juárez understood that a great story is not enough. You need the liquid to back it up. She spent years visiting distilleries and building relationships with maestros tequileros before ever going to market.

Something that struck me about this interview with Sofia is just how clearly she has articulated her story. Its tight. I mean, really tight.

The ensemble innovation: old world meets new

While the tequila industry is flooded, CASA J is carving out a niche as an ensemble – a term traditionally used in the world of mezcal to refer to different agave species being distilled together.

CASA J uses an ensemble of traditional and ancestral production techniques. This is a rare technical achievement in the tequila space, utilizing a blend of 93% traditional production and 7% ancestral methods.

• The ancestral soul: The 7% ancestral portion is the brand’s soul, cooked in stone and adobe ovens over wood fire, hand-macerated in hollowed tree trunks, and distilled in copper stills over direct flame.

• The traditional foundation: The 93% traditional portion provides balance, using stone brick ovens, roller mill maceration, and stainless steel distillation with copper coils.

“It’s a marriage of both old world and new world,” Juárez explains. “We wanted to bridge the old, be inspired by the historic, but be a contemporary brand that would be lasting and future-proof.”

A vessel with purpose

Juárez knew that in a crowded spirits market, the bottle needed to be as intentional as the liquid. She wanted a design that bridged historic Mexican architecture with a contemporary, contemporary aesthetic.

To realize this, she partnered with John Gilsenan of IWANT Design, whose work for other female-helmed brands like Wölfer Estate Vineyards and H&H Talea Beer had already earned her admiration.

The resulting ceramic vessel reflects a deeper mission: empowering Mexican artisans. Juárez spent years identifying a ceramic factory in Pachuca, Hidalgo, that shared her values, specifically one that empowers working mothers with flexible schedules and provides full-time roles for individuals with disabilities.

Every bottle is handcrafted by these artisans using natural raw materials, turning the packaging into a tangible commitment to the community behind the brand.

The case for ultra-premium

CASA J enters the market at an SRP of $129, a price point that positions it firmly in the luxury category. In an era where consumers are trading up for products with authentic connections to heritage and additive-free status, Juárez is betting on the intelligent, educated consumer.

Currently, the brand is available throughout New York State and via their website, where they ship to over 40 US states. Despite being in the early stages of distribution, the brand has already caught the attention of experts. Without paying for a single placement, CASA J has secured incredible organic press, including a 92-point score from the Tequila Report and recognition from Agave Matchmaker and Taste Tequila as one of the best spirits of 2026.

“Consumers are now becoming highly intelligent on this spirit,” she says. “It is not something that brands should hide, their production method, but rather be very frank to the consumer about.”

By focusing on the “additive-free” movement and the superior quality of her ensemble production, Juárez is justifying that premium price not through marketing gloss, but through transparency and integrity.

Her thesis is that when you have a story that is authentic paired with a high-quality product, aligned consumers will gravitate towards it.

What’s working?

CASA J just launched. Already, sales are split 50/50 between on-premise and retail, with a strong focus on face-to-face connection. Juárez is a regular at her own tastings, meeting the skeptics who have been “ruined by tequila” in their past and proving that the spirit can be a refined, high-integrity experience.

For the next five years, the focus is simple: keep the integrity high, continue crafting with the maestros, and collaborate with the chefs and mixologists who are shaping the future of the category.

There’s a patience in Sofia’s approach I found incredibly refreshing. With trends constantly shifting, and the spirits market in serious flux, I see a lot of “rush to market” and “rush to prove” and “rush rush rush” all around. Sofia isn’t bending to that. She’s taking her time to do it right.

In New Rules tradition we asked:

What’s the brutal truth you’ve learned about building a bev/alc brand?

“It is not as simple as doing business here in the United States for many reasons. I had many agreements that fell through and distilleries that changed their process. You have to be incredibly patient. But if you have that high level of integrity and you really take the time to build authentic relationships, it pays off.”

Is there anything you would do differently or tell other founders to do differently?

“I would tell them to trust the process of discovery. I spent nine years doing R&D and community building. It might have felt like a long time, but it ensured that when we launched in early 2026, we were not just another brand. We were a product with a soul.”

THE NEW RULE

Innovation is not always about creating something brand new. Sometimes, it’s about having the patience to honor an old-world tradition, finding the right partners who share your values, and refusing to cut corners just to get to market faster.

“We don’t want you to drink this in a leather chair. We don’t want you to drink this in a saloon exclusively. Take it and do whatever you want with it. Pour it over ice cream. It’s meant to be fun and meant to be empowering.” ~Charlie Rodman

“The bourbon aisle is a sea of brown liquid, sepia labels, and stories of dead white guys who may have nothing to do with the product on the shelf.” ~Charlie Rodman

For some, this is very appealing. For others, it is not.

In many ways, the bourbon category has an intimidating “culture of connoisseurship.” Between the gatekeeping of mash bills and the reverence for specific spring water sources, many potential consumers feel excluded - and frankly, uninterested.

No Sleep Beverage – an alcohol beverage investment and consulting platform in the United States that acquires, supports, and grows emerging, culture-focused alcohol brands – is betting on a new brand that they recently acquired: Nine Banded Whiskey.

Charlie Rodman, CMO of No Sleep, describes this brand as the “gateway to bourbon, not the gatekeeper.”

Having shifted from minority investor to full owner of Nine Banded Whiskey, No Sleep is bringing to fruition the vision for the brand with an updated positioning and visual identity they built with the brand’s founders.

I sat down with Charlie, (for the second time! See our first interview here: How No Sleep Beverage is building transcendent brands), to discuss how they are repositioning Nine Banded.

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The strategy: rolling up the “iconic”

For No Sleep, the acquisition of Nine Banded was a foundational move in a broader roll up strategy. By taking majority positions in brands that address a distinct brand whitespace in the category., No Sleep can focus on the heavy lifting of professionalization.

Charlie explains that brand is a significant differentiator because it offers a shortcut to pull marketing. In a sea of 4,000 SKUs, most founders over invest in the liquid while under investing in the commercial system.

“We like to think of consumers as rational actors. It’s b*******,” Charlie says. “If you can do the things that help you stand out and win in the four seconds that someone evaluates the shelf when they’re shopping for something new, that’s the easiest chance you have to convert the sale”.

The No Sleep strategy is to identify brands with transcendent potential and then use shared infrastructure to scale them. By saturating local markets (what No Sleep calls “deepen before you broaden”), they create a proof of adoption that is far more valuable to a future acquirer than a wide but shallow national presence.

The move to a single SKU: radical simplification

Perhaps the most contrarian move in this rebuild is the decision to move Nine Banded toward a single SKU model. While most bourbon brands chase growth by lining the shelf with endless variations and details about origin and method and barrels and yada yada, No Sleep is simplifying.

The logic is rooted in consumer psychology and the accessible price point. Most consumers shopping at this level are not whiskey nerds; they’re looking for a versatile, reliable spirit that fits their lifestyle.

By focusing on one flagship product, No Sleep eliminates the paradox of choice. This single SKU is designed to be the ultimate Swiss Army knife of bourbon. This simplification does not just help the consumer; it streamlines the entire supply chain and allows the brand to win the shelf instantly.

The rebrand: from utility to good, plain fun

Truth be told: I’ve been wanting to talk about this rebrand since I first spoke to Charlie about it last July. But I could not. I had to stay silent. I was entrusted with this, and by God, I kept my word.

Well, folks, the time has come.

The bottle’s visual identity, developed with Quaker City Mercantile (QCM) (see our interview with QCM founder Steve Grasse who is amazingly hilarious + spot on), sits at the intentional intersection of a wanted poster and a concert poster.

It swaps traditional bourbon browns for a color palette inspired by the saturated tones of a Texas sunset.

Liquid Authenticity: From MGP to Texas

A critical component of this rebuild is the transition of the liquid itself. In its previous iteration, the brand was MGP-sourced (a bulk supplier out of Indiana). While MGP produces quality spirits, it lacked a unique connection to the brand’s roots.

With a new repositioning focused on inviting drinkers to “show up as their true selves,” it was vital that the brand representing Austin did the same. As a result, No Sleep is committing to sourcing Nine Banded whiskey exclusively from within Texas.

By moving away from a generic spirit and embracing a locally produced liquid, Nine Banded better aligns its values with its promise to consumers. This transition allows the brand to remain authentic while maintaining an accessible price point.

Cha-ching!

The New Rules:

1. Fun leads to engagement; fear leads to avoidance.

Bourbon has become gatekept by expertise, turning a purchase into an intimidating exam. The insight for Nine Banded was to remove those barriers. Internally, the rally cry is “all for fun, fun for all,” emphasizing the individual’s choice over the industry’s rules.

2. Tension creates intrigue.

By taking things that should not work together (like a whiskey bottle and a concert ticket) and binding them through a cohesive vision, you create cool. “Tension creates intrigue, but it’s so hard to deliver authentically because you’re deliberately taking things that should not work together and you need some element that binds them or it’s just going to come across as forced.” ~CR

3. If it only sells when you demo it, you’ve failed.

A transcendent brand must connect by itself.

“If it only sells when you’re demoing it and telling the story, you’re already failing as a brand. You need it to be able to tell the story and connect by itself.” ~CR

The New Rules is a labor of love by nihilo.agency.

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We’re about to say something controversial: ‘beautiful’ branding isn’t everything. Perfectly matched typefaces, lofty slogans and slick visuals aren’t always the answer.

As evidence of that, there’s a whole world of bev/alc brands making bank with some of the most chaotic, mismatched, un-honed and unfiltered design you can imagine. (BTW, that doesn’t mean it’s not strategic… but more on that later).

While these brands are raising money, winning over young people and changing the sector, there’s a stable of stalwart old bev/alc brands convinced that doing things the way they always have is the answer.

The same old language, the same old selling points, the same old labels. You only have to look at recent rebrands of some of the biggest names in spirits and beer to wonder if they’ve forgotten how to have fun.

Alcohol brands need to loosen up

People drink for a lot of different reasons. Maybe they want to spend time with friends, or mark an occasion, or come back down after a day sent from hell itself. But for most of us, it’s very simple: we want to enjoy ourselves.

Most consumers don’t want to be told: this beer is going to do you good, or this RTD comes with a moral message you can get behind, or this bottle of spirits was made by blind monks in a 500-year-old distillery. For the most part, they don’t care that your crest dates back to the 1920s, or that your slogan conveys some vague but aspirational message that, really, could mean anything.

They want to see something that catches their eye and makes them think to themselves: yes, I’ll enjoy this, I’ll buy it.

It’s a simple relationship, so why do so many drinks brands make it so complicated? In the alc space, the message frequently leans into the blandly smug, while in the NA space it’s often moralising. As Botivo founder Imme Ermgassen recently commented in a post about how playfulness is “achingly missing” from the category:

“Shouldn’t we all be having a little more FUN with non alc?”

As a response, they’ve just partnered with lingerie brand Coco de Mer on a special, aphrodisiac edition.

When Heineken shares a press release about its ‘ultimate’ alc-free beer – no calories, no alcohol, no sugar, you have to ask, what’s the appeal here? What’s the point of this intensely joyless liquid?

When companies make cocktails that have negligible amounts of adaptogens, and build their brand around those apparent benefits, who is that for? When is it for? How much mileage does that trend have?

Why is it that when Elton John, the master of ostentation, released a NA wine it looked like this? How did Tanqueray manage to hire someone as charismatic as Sarah Jessica Parker, and still make this campaign so bland?

Why do so many drinks brands take it so seriously?

Meet the chaos brands

I want to preface this by saying that I’ve written a lot about branding. As the former deputy editor of a well-known design magazine in the UK, I spent years of my life sifting through press releases from agencies and studios. And I’m fully bought into the power of branding; I’m as susceptible to a beautiful label or a clever tagline as anyone else.

But branding comes in many forms. And right now, the bev/alc brands that are winning are the ones that are cleverly chaotic. They’re ‘unpolished’, unfiltered, experimental. They embrace being unserious. And by doing so they appeal to young people still figuring out what they want to drink – and hence susceptible to what stands out on the shelf – as well as older consumers seeking novelty.

Look at Cueva Nueva, who we recently interviewed. Founder Phi Peinado told us:

With Cueva Nueva, we wanted to build the brand we felt should exist, but didn’t. At the end of the day, it’s booze. It doesn’t need to take itself so seriously. We want to have fun and invite other people to have fun with us.

Consider BuzzBallz. This brand is absolutely everywhere, beloved by seemingly everyone, and I think it’s fair to describe their branding as gloriously unpretentious. What about Surfside, named by Forbes as the fastest growing alcohol brand in America, and reported to be selling nine cases a minute across 50 US states in 2025? Look at the cans: rainbow stripes, a lemon sun, and a wave script font that sticks two fingers up at the cult of Swiss Modernism.

Or how about The Original Pickle Shot. Beautifully unserious. Or Whiny Baby, just acquired by Gallo and, visually speaking, a world away the usual staid wine branding. What about Uncle Arnie’s (shown above)? They just raised $7.5m.

I think one of the reasons 818 Tequila is doing so well is because it isn’t scared to actually have fun - eg by making a mini version that clips onto people’s bags. Can you imagine other big name whiskey or tequila brands doing the same?

And if you want to talk about actual heritage brands enjoying themselves - look at how many people are talking about Smirnoff’s tabasco vodka. Why? Because it’s novel, it’s maybe a little bit silly and it’s fun.

Playful doesn’t mean un-strategic

It’s easy to be a snob about branding – and there will always be a place for high-level, super sophisticated, deeply refined visual identities and advertising and general creative execution (for example, Veuve’s perfectly executed partnership with Jacquemus, or this beautiful Penfolds packaging).

But getting that right is hard. It requires a lot of effort, a lot of consideration, and if you veer even a millimetre off that path you become boring and preachy.

Being carefree and loose and experimental with your brand requires an equal amount of effort, and a deep understanding of who you are and what you’re about. Some people might look at the aesthetic of some of the brands we’ve mentioned and assume they’re two years away from hiring a big-name agency and making it all feel a bit more ‘sophisticated’. But I hope they don’t.

Alcohol brands desperately need to loosen up. Consumers want fun. They’re drawn to brands that are fun. And often that isn’t about beautiful branding – it’s about having a point of view, and a willingness to be less rigid, less scripted, less precious.

The New Rules is a labor of love by nihilo.agency

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“It’s definitely striking,” says Jeffery Fowler, CEO of Olujo. He’s talking, obviously, about the incredible sculptural ceramic that holds the brand’s blue agave tequila. Brand strategy can be a lot of things: storytelling, messaging, positioning, visuals... for Olujo, brand strategy is the bottle.

“Whether it’s just standing alone or whether it’s actually standing amidst other bottles behind the bar, it really does stand out,” says Jeffery. “This is obviously, of course, very, very intentional.”

How do you stand out in an extremely competitive, saturated tequila market?

Simple: you do the exact opposite of what every other brand is doing with their packaging. Instead of glass you choose ceramic; instead of the traditional shape, you commission something completely unexpected; and instead of selling people a bottle that they throw away once it’s empty, you create an object that becomes a keepsake.

A “future heirloom,” as Jeffery describes it.

Something sculptural, something otherworldly

The brief for Olujo’s bottle was singular: “something sculptural, something otherworldly.” The brand needed an object that was steeped in high craft, to reflect the artisanal nature of the tequila (and its premium price tag).

And that story of craft goes all the way down. First, the bottle is designed by Ivan Venkov, a sculptor and designer who’s worked with a long list of premium brands.

Then, it’s made by Anfora, a partner in Mexico that has a century-long heritage of producing ceramics. And finally, its grainy, tactile texture is replicated on the surface of every single business card Olujo team members hand out.

“It’s something of beauty, and something that’s deeply connected to the earth,” says Jeffery.

The pursuit of craft

The bottle is Olujo’s calling card. It’s the symbol that signifies: we’re a brand that really cares about how things are made. Some tequila brands lean into lineage or family heritage as their selling point. For Olujo, the focus has always been one thing: craft. Everything about the brand has to come back to that, whether it’s the cultivation and harvesting — focusing on the most mature, high quality agave — through to the way the agave is cooked. And craft isn’t easy.

“It’s pursuing each stage of the value chain and really trying not to cut corners, not to find a cheaper or more efficient way of doing it,” says Jeffery.

Being dedicated to craft, when you’re a bev/alc brand, doesn’t just mean the bottle and the liquid, of course. It’s how you show up in the wider world. Olujo is also forging connections with the world of “beautiful objects” — for example, hosting a dinner at Art Basel Miami, and inviting artists, gallerists and curators that all value craft.

Price can be a strategy

Olujo is working at a much higher price point than most other tequila brands – $500 for a bottle, as opposed to the $30 to $100 range. According to Jeffery, this was a conscious decision to tap into a part of the market that’s a little less busy, and a little less competitive.

“I think maybe in that space it can be easier to defend and lay claim to why you’re there, and what it is about your product that helps it stand out,” he explains.

That high price point is also part of the story. People scanning a menu are going to find their eyes snagging on the dollar sign. They might splash out on that. Or they might ask the bartender or server to tell them a bit more of the story. As Jeffery says: “If that can create the opportunity for them to learn about us and understand who we are and what we do... then hopefully we earn ourselves a new customer through the process.”

Do less, do more

It’s not just the high price tag or the beautiful packaging that sets Olujo apart. The brand has remained purposefully aloof; it’s not available everywhere, and that’s by design. They initially launched in just two states, and are currently only available in the US. They’ve over-emphasized on-premise, because the bottle needs to be seen “in the wild”. “We want to build this brand in an experiential way,” says Jeffery.

It’s also not all over social media. They haven’t put any paid social behind the business, and are relying solely on organic for the time being. That doesn’t mean they don’t have a strategy, however — Olujo posts a note of acknowledgement for every single partner that puts the bottle behind their bar. It’s a very simple expression of gratitude, but it has the magical knock-on effect of getting other restaurants in town interested.

“The easiest thing in the world to do within social media is to try and shortcut it,” says Jeffery. “It’s to spend a bunch of money on advertising to try and target the right audiences and the right people. That can work. But it can also be very inefficient, especially too early on in a brand when you haven’t established your foothold.”

Olujo is a tequila brand that’s beautiful, that’s expensive, that’s exclusive and that revels in all of those things. It’s a reminder that the best brands are unapologetically single-minded about what they’re doing.

NEW RULES FROM OLUJO

Packaging can be a strategy
Don’t underestimate the seductive power of a beautiful bottle – it still works.

Find your angle and laser in on it
If craft is the thing you do best, make everything about that. Be joyfully single-minded.

Be a contrarian
If everyone is going low-, no- and affordable, swing the other way.

The New Rules is a labor of love by nihilo.agency

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Something is happening. I know something’s happening, because I went to my corner shop (in London) a few weeks back and spotted Suntory’s -196 shochu, vodka and soda RTD on the shelves, right next to BuzzBallz and cans of Heineken and Red Stripe.

It’s the first time I’ve seen it there, but it makes total sense because Suntory is actively expanding in Europe and the USA. It also makes sense because it’s a sign of changing tastes and interests.

We’ve all read about the influence of Korean and Chinese and Japanese culture, and we’ve all seen the growing enthusiasm for flavors from East Asia. You can see some of that in The New Rules coverage from the last 6 months – including soju cocktail brand Wild Mannered, and enzymatic cordial JIN JIN.

So when I spotted that British retail institution Marks and Spencer was stocking its first ever sake, I had to chat with the founder of the chosen brand: Dreamsake’s Matt Brunault.

The quick story of Dreamsake

Matt fell in love with sake in New York (he says the US is actually much farther ahead, in terms of beverage, btw. It got to kombucha, craft beer and natural wine first, and is also on its way to fully embracing makgeolli).

Seeing that sake was a hugely underappreciated spirit in the UK, and the west more broadly, he knew there was a space to do something. Matt found brewery partners in Japan, worked with them to develop a liquid that was “approachable” for a western audience, and identified a price point that would grab new sake drinkers who don’t want to commit too much to their first experience.

Education, pricing, flavor… sake is a balancing act

People might think of sake as a spirit, but it’s drunk more like a wine. And then to confuse things further, it’s at an interesting midpoint of strength. It’s not a beer-level ABV, nor is it spirit- or wine. It’s at the difficult middle.

As Matt says: “It throws you a bit, which is quite interesting.”

For the most part, people also don’t know how sake is made. “What’s challenging, especially for a brand like ours, is that there’s a huge amount of education,” says Matt.

Here’s a quick rundown of the making process, from him:

“You take rice and polish it. The more you polish it, the more you polish away the protein and the higher the ratio of starch to protein. Then you steam the rice and use koji – the same mold used in miso and soy sauce – which turns starch into sugar, and then yeast turns sugar into alcohol.”

The process yields different grades of sake depending on how much the rice is polished. Lots of polishing creates fruity, elegant flavors, less polishing produces more savory, rough, umami flavors – which, says Matt, people in the west aren’t so used to.

These rougher flavors are a lot of people’s first experience of sake, when they order the cheapest option on the menu at their local Japanese restaurant. That can throw them off and make life difficult for a sake brand that wants them to keep buying and trying. It means building in this space is a balancing act, first and foremost.

Dreamsake has to find the sweet spot in so many ways: the right price to convince people to try it; the right brand without playing on visual tropes; the right flavor to keep people drinking it; and the right level of explanation and education.

Japan needs those sake exports

It was a surprise, to me at least, to hear that in Japan, sake is actually in decline.

“It’s seen almost like an old man’s drink,” says Matt. “It’s a national heritage point, like pubs in the UK, but you read in Japan how many sake breweries are closing because the demand isn’t there. It’s really sad because there are all these historical and cultural points, but in Japan everyone’s drinking whiskey and beer and wine. For them, export is now really important.”

The good news is that just this year, The Drinks Business reported that sake exports from Japan are up (the second highest level on record), they’ve doubled since 2020, and the Japanese government has set a very ambitious target for the future.

In this environment, ripe with possibility, Matt hopes a brand like Dreamsake is a “stepping stone”. He admits that the category, in Europe at least, is tiny at the moment – and that’s difficult. However it’s also extremely promising, because there’s so much room for it to grow, and for other new sake brands in the west to uplift one another.

What is it about sake?

I think there’s a few reasons sake is really primed to explode.

1)We’re in the magpie era of consumer behaviour.

There are so many drinks brands on offer. People are extremely ready to be seduced by a cool new soda, or a beer brand with a great label, or a spirit they’ve never heard of.

Keeping them loyal is another story, but persuading them to try something new has maybe never been easier. Novelty is an enormous selling point. On top of that, people in the west have had years of gin, whiskey and wine being drummed into them via huge marketing budgets. But sake? Not so much. It’s new, and that’s very alluring.

2)Our cultural influences are evolving rapidly

Japan and Korea have gained huge cultural currency in recent years. Korean and Japanese beauty brands in particular have carved out a path, and I think smart bev/alc brands can follow that trail, and tap into a lot of pre-existing positive sentiment.

3)There’s something a bit deeper about all of this

I think the growing interest in sake and other East Asian flavors also speaks to changes in how people feel. Whether they’re aware of it or not, consumers are thinking more about ingredients and craft and time. They want less additives, and they want something that feels rooted in a deeper story. Not only is sake preservative and sulfite-free, but it’s born from a long, rich tradition.

“What we really recognize, as a culture, is good craft,” says Matt. “When we look to Japan or Korea or China you see things that are well-crafted. There’s a real obsession with craft … I think our consumption habits are shifting towards better and less. Less quantity, higher quality. And I think in an ever-disconnected digital world, it gives our lives more meaning. Interacting with an Asian product just feels more expansive.”

It’s something that JIN JIN founder Sohn Supradya Aursudkij also told us:

“From soju to kombucha to regional drinks and ferments, they all have deep histories and beautiful craftsmanship behind them and people appreciate that now more than ever. There used to be outdated perceptions about Asian products not meeting certain standards, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. There are so many premium, carefully made foods and drinks coming from Asia. People today care about authenticity and story, and Asian flavors offer both.”

There’s a major opportunity here. If someone discovers and loves sake, that’s the first step of discovering more sake, and then more expensive sake. The potential is vast. And I think we’re on the verge of seeing a lot more sake brands – and drinks brands rooted in East Asia – come to the market. The challenge, as ever, is how they use branding, comms, and storytelling to find their place and then sell that to drinkers.

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How to work with us

We started The New Rules a year ago to dissect what it takes to build a brand in the modern bev/alc landscape. It’s been a wild ride, and while many of you know us through your inbox, you might not know that this platform is powered by Nihilo, our brand advisory and agency.

The most common question we get is: “Can you help us build our brand?”

The short answer is: We are not currently taking on full-scale, ground-up branding projects.

What we do offer is a few “New Rules” ways to work with us:

• Advisory & Hourly Consulting: High-impact sessions on positioning, GTM strategy, messaging, or design direction. Think of us as your external “Head of Brand” for an hour or a day.

• A La Carte Creative: Specific, tactical executions for when you have the vision but need the polish. This covers pitch decks, copywriting, social templates, and print collateral.

• Training & Speaking: Workshops or keynotes for teams and industry events. We translate our research and "New Rules" insights into actionable sessions on the current state of the bev/alc market.

Interested? Reach out! hi@nihilo.agency

Cheers,

Margaret, Emunah, and the TNR team.