NEWBIES: Esther: not your usual rum brand
“We’re not really riding on any trend,” says Esther co-founder Emunah Winer. “We are the disruptor brand.”
The food and bev space, right now, is plagued by trend blindness. Entire brands are being built around protein, fibre, adaptogens, beef tallow… whatever founders can grab onto.
The truth is that humans are fickle, and it’s easy to mistake a flash in the pan moment for a long-term business strategy. Good brands don’t care about trends; they care about carving their own path, and ploughing their own furrow – in a field, two fields over.
That’s where Esther founders Margaret Kerr-Jarrett and Emunah Winer (also the founders of Nihilo, the agency behind this newsletter) are right now, as they build a new kind of rum brand.
Why rum? It’s a huge category. The ultra-premium part of it is one of the only spirits categories that’s growing year-on-year, and around a fourth of cocktails consumed in the US are rum cocktails.
“Many people drink rum,” says Margaret. “But people don’t have any brand association with rum, and they don’t think about it in the same way as other categories like gin or vodka or wine, where they have brands they like and know and relate to.”
No pirates, thanks
Esther launched earlier this year (it’s currently on sale at 20 stores in Ohio - where the founders live - and shipping to most states at drinkesther.com) and it brings a completely different take on rum. It’s 100% Colombian rum - grass to glass - and it’s not sugary, it’s not covered in pirates and palm trees, and it doesn’t use any of the other lazy tropes.
Instead, Margy and Emunah made great, surprising liquid (its a unique blend of pot still and column still rum, and the flavor profile is a nod to reposado tequila), and then placed a bet on one major brand asset: that green cap.
“It’s cool to test real language and positioning in the market,” says Emunah. “And the thing that we set out to do is working: the green cap is capping. Everyone, from a mile away, is like ‘get the one with the green cap’.”
That cap was a very early decision, according to Emunah, who says they quickly realized that they needed a cost-effective, different way to disrupt the packaging. The business wasn’t at the point of investing in a custom glass mold, so they landed on the cap as a strategic solution. It would be the visual point of differentiation, and the thing to make Esther stand out on-shelf.
The big, beautiful cap
Getting the cap right took months of R&D. To start with, it’s huge (really, you have to see it in real life). “That meant we had to go in circles, finding the right bottle with the right threading to work with a screw cap that would still feel proportionally ok,” explains Emunah.
Once the practical wrinkles were ironed out, the pair started exploring more aesthetic considerations. The shape had to feel iconic and ownable – not a cube or an orb, but something identifiably theirs. And the color had to work equally hard.
“The green was something we landed on,” says Emunah. “It’s the colour of sugar cane, but that’s just a coincidence. The truth is it’s nothing like anybody would ever expect. We feel like it can cross generations between Gen Z, feeling like it’s punk rock, and older consumers feeling like it’s interesting and weird, but still appealing to them.”
The cap also plays well in the long-term as the brand scales and potentially changes bottles – it might get bigger or subtly change shape, but Esther will always be, as Emunah says, “the one with the big green cap”.
What is a disruptive brand, really?
We’re talking about the cap a lot because it does exactly what branding is meant to do – it stops people, it makes them ask a question, and it opens up a silent conversation.
“Most people aren’t walking around thinking about rum,” says Emunah. “We have to first make them think about rum, and the only way to do that is to grab their attention and make them be curious. I’d rather somebody engage with this from a point of curiosity than not at all, and that’s what we’re trying to do.
“Often we get the question: why the green. The answer is because you’re asking why. That’s what being disruptive means – it’s not for the sake of it, it’s disruptive because the only way people are going to learn that they like rum is by us forcing them to think about it in some way.”
Think about what Patrón has done for tequila, turning it from a throwaway drink you’d do shots of to a spirit you can sip. Then think about the fantastical world Hendrick’s has built around gin, to emphasize that it’s not a dusty old person’s drink.
The right brand can upheave an entire category. That’s Esther’s ultimate goal.
Looking good won’t fix rum… but Esther might
It’s not that there aren’t other rum brands, also hoping to remind people why rum is so great. The problem is that many of them think designing a clean, neat label is enough to do so, says Margaret. Esther has the branding, yes, but it’s also addressing some of rum’s other challenges: flavor and narrative.
When it comes to taste, most rums have additives, they’re sweet, and they’re often found in sticky, sugary cocktails. In contrast, Esther is additive-free, and it’s smoother and more sippable, it has a unique grassy undertone that plays well in cocktails of all kinds, and its more likely to win over drinkers.
The second problem comes down to communication and storytelling. People don’t care about the tired old story of pirates, and unlike other spirits, such as tequila, rum can’t trade on a clear narrative around origins and making either. What Emunah and Margy are aiming to do with Esther is chart a new chapter:
Forget what you think you know about rum, ignore the same old story you’ve heard before, and try this instead.
THE NEW RULE:
There’s always room for a new voice in a category – the trick is finding the angle, narrative or iconic bit of branding that lets you tap into what’s missing, and create your own space to build from.
YOU CAN ACTUALLY TEXT ESTHER: 614-260-6707
www.drinkesther.com (ships rum to most states)
IG: @drinkesther
The New Rules is a labor of love by nihilo.agency
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