NEWBIES: Wild Mannered – soju cocktails made for group hangouts
As soju gains cultural currency in the US, Wild Mannered is building a brand designed to slide into social occasions.
We’ll be sharing quick profiles of some newer bev/alc brands (like Vigie and The Original Southside), to understand how they’re building their business. If you like this, then we’d love you to subscribe.
Wild Mannered is a RTD soju cocktail brand that prides itself on being free of artificial colors, flavors and sweeteners. It’s founded by a pair of ex-tech workers (Meta and AbleTo) who are also childhood friends (they were born in the same hospital).
We quizzed co-founder Michael Gu on how Wild Mannered is introducing people to soju drinking culture by tapping into the joy of communal experiences.
“We set out to create a beverage that kept the easy drinkability and communal nature of the drink, but with fewer additives and real fruit flavors.”
The brief back-story
Picture it: a pair of young post-grads, working their first corporate jobs in New York and supping soju over Korean BBQ, or at karaoke, or in a friend’s apartment before a night out.
These are the roots of Wild Mannered’s origin story, according to Michael, who says him and co-founder Perry Ya fell in love with the spirit’s “easy-drinking, communal-friendly nature”. As he says: “Soju was always part of the moment”.
There was one hitch though: over time, the flavoured sojus they’d loved so much suddenly started getting a bit harder on the body the morning after. Naturally, the pair decided to try and make something that was less sweet and less artificial tasting, by infusing unflavoured sojus bought from the corner store with fruit – and then sharing that with friends.
“The real fruit flavour was such a refreshing contrast to the artificial ones we were used to that we knew we had something worth building on.”
It’s all about the ingredients
Purity of ingredients is something that’s absolutely essential to the Wild Mannered brand. As founders that love food as much as they love soju, Michael says him and Perry were clear with their manufacturer from the get-go: nothing artificial.
Wild Mannered’s recipe uses a distilled grape soju and wine base, combined with real fruits and botanicals that creates a 13% cocktail that’s a little more drinkable than trad cocktails like negronis or old fashioneds.
A moment for soju
Before we get deeper into the brand story, we should chat about soju itself. There’s a growing interest in Asian spirits that Michael attributes to “the globalization of the American palate and the increased visibility of Asians and Asian Americans in media (think Squid Game, Shang-Chi, Everything Everywhere All At Once).”
If we travel back to his early years living in New York, soju was mainly something found at liquor stores in Asian enclaves. Now there’s soju in most of the city’s liquor stores, and LA’s Dodgers Stadium has a dedicated soju bar.
Even so, Michael says one of the challenges of building Wild Mannered is educating people around what soju is. Their product doesn’t fit neatly into legacy categories such as beer, wine or spirits, which means they sometimes feel as if they’re creating a category of their own.
“For some of our customers, our product may be the first accessible entry point into soju, and we hope our approachable presentation helps them understand what made us fall in love with it in the first place.”
“Non-traditional but deeply personal”
Part of that soju education is complicated, says Michael, because most commercial versions today use neutral spirits distilled from sweet potato, tapioca or other sources rather than the traditional method of rice distillation using a nuruk starter*.
“As a non-traditional brand — and as Chinese-Americans rather than Korean-Americans — we’re intentional in how we present it. We make a point to honor and acknowledge soju’s Korean origins, while being clear that what we’re creating is non-traditional but deeply personal.”
What’s working? Grassroots comms, community, behind-the-scenes stories
The Wild Mannered brand is growing through a mix of digital marketing and in-person hard work. Michael says off-premise sales channels have been key, because soju is the kind of drink that’s centered on hosting and gathering – meaning most customers are buying in-store for those occasions.
“Our approach has been to grow regionally and go deep, building a loyal customer base and strong following. One early mistake (probably out of naivety) was targeting trendy restaurants with a ready-to-drink product served straight up. In hindsight it probably made a lot of sense why we faced headwinds there because their margins are much better on freshly made cocktails and that’s what their customers are looking for.”
On social media, the brand focuses on behind-the-scenes moments and founder-led content (btw, this is something that a lot of brands have had success with).
Wild Mannered also benefited from a grassroots launch campaign, which saw the founders place stickers near retail locations – “not scalable, but memorable and something we could only pull of at our current size”.
Finally, Michael says a partnership with NYC’s Green Tile Social Club – one of the largest mahjong clubs in the city – has been a very natural way of introducing Wild Mannered to a likeminded community.
Finally, we asked Michael, what’s the brutal truth about building a bev/alc brand?
“So many lessons…but one that stands out is just how critical distribution is, and how gatekept it can feel at times. The business of bev/alc, like any industry, has its difficulties on multiple fronts: navigating complex regulatory and legal hurdles, securing the required licenses to sell, dealing with funding challenges like ‘vice clauses’ that prevent some investors from backing bev/alc brands, and operating in what’s been a challenging year for the industry overall, just to name a few.”
Then we asked: with the wisdom of experience, is there anything you’d tell other bev/alc founders?
“I’d advise founders to really think through their go-to-market strategy and clearly define their target consumer - then focus on meeting them where they are.
Consider the occasions when your product will be consumed and whether you’ll displace existing options (because yours is better) or create entirely new occasions around it - and how you’ll make that happen. Also, do more user interviews and customer surveys! There’s a wealth of insight in those conversations, people are usually more than happy to talk about a product they’ve purchased with their hard-earned money and I learn something new every time I talk to someone who’s bought a bottle.”
Thanks so much for having us :)