Today’s piece comes to you from Courtney O’Brien - founder of brand strategy consultancy The Outlier Initiative, and a former senior marketer at Coca-Cola, Gallo and Danone.
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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