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Uncensored CMO
Startup masterclass - how Seedlip went from idea to Diageo exit in 3.5 years - Ben Branson
01:02:43
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- [00:07]
John Evans
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to Uncensored cmo. Now, one topic I absolutely love is innovation. I really love talking to founders, finding out how they did it. And this next guest is Ben Branson, the founder of Seedlip. I totally admire what Ben has achieved with Seedlip. It is genuinely one of those innovations that transform the category and, and did something that no one else has done before. So I caught up with Ben in this episode to find out a bit more about what's it like being a founder. How difficult was it to come up with something genuinely groundbreaking, brand new in the category? I also wanted to chat to Ben a little bit about his charity that he's just set up and his own podcast called the hidden 20%, which focuses on people in neurodiversity. I think what Ben's doing is very special and so I want to dig in a little bit about what inspired that and how it's impacted the world. It's a great conversation. I know you're gonna love it. Here it is. Ben, it's great to have you on the show. Thanks for joining.
- [00:59]
Ben Branson
Thanks for joining us. Thank you.
- [01:01]
John Evans
Now we are here and we've got a lovely lineup of Seedlip. So I probably should ask, as the founder of Seedlip, where did it all start? Where did the idea for this come from?
- [01:12]
Ben Branson
Definitely. So I think I must have been asked this question. This is no offense to you, John. I must have been asked this question probably 10,000 times in the last 10 years and I have to keep it interesting for myself. So I've never told it the same way twice. But it didn't start as a business idea. It wasn't one of those. I've spotted a gap in the market. It wasn't even actually I went out and had a really dreadful non alcoholic drink and thought, oh my God, I know what the world needs. I like being at home and I'm from a farming family, so I live in the countryside, don't come to London more than I need to. And so I was living in this little Hansel and Gretel cottage out in Buckinghamshire, in the woods, growing stuff at home, herbs, veg, and looking into the kind of weird stuff that I do, looking into herbs that may have been lost or looking into different seeds I could get hold of. Got on the Internet, bought some old books, came across a copy of this book called the Art of Distillation. And I've got a 1664 copy of this book. I should have brought it to show you. It's called the Art of Distillation. It's a little book Originally published in 1651. It's basically a recipe book for herbal remedies using distillation. Some of them make alcohol, some of them don't make alcohol. I thought this was pretty cool and I bought a little copper still off the Internet, a little two and a half litre copper still, and just started having a go. And this was literally picking mint from my garden and making a liquid that smelled and tasted like that plant, which, if anyone listening or if you've ever had the chance to, like, distill something, it's really magical. And I was hooked. So I kept doing it, kept doing it, kept doing it, kept doing it. Tried loads of different things, nothing to do with drinks. I was running a design agency at the time. This was evenings and weekends. And then I had the moment of going to London to a nice restaurant. I think there were four of us. Drinks list comes, looks amazing. Beautiful cocktail list, lovely wines. Do you want still sparkling? Get the food menu, nice atmosphere, everyone's happy. We're out for dinner, but I'm driving, I'm not drinking alcohol. And so I asked, have you got anything that's non alcoholic? And there wasn't a. Sure, yeah, absolutely. There wasn't anything in the menu. I couldn't see anything on the back bar. And so what came over was the tray, a couple of beautiful glasses of wine, lovely cocktail and my pink, disgusting, fruity, ridiculous mocktail horribleness. I just felt like an idiot because we've all been there. You're sort of. You're sat at the table, the drinks come over, what are you having? What are you having? And I'm like, I'm just embarrassed, actually. I couldn't finish it, I didn't want another one. It didn't go with the food. I wasn't even really told what. It was a little thing, little psychological things, like it didn't have a name, it wasn't in the menu. And so I left just thinking, why is it so difficult? That was it. I just thought, why is it so hard? We've got amazing alcoholic options, we've got amazing food options, regardless of allergies, preferences, et cetera. We've got all this choice. And yet if you are not drinking alcohol for whatever reason, your options are soft drinks and water or some fruity, sweet, disgusting blend of. And so I. It was not an overnight moment. I didn't walk out thinking, well, I know what I need to do. I walked out just thinking, why the option's so rubbish. And then. And this, I've noticed this over the last 10 years with new ideas. Actually I need, I can't come up with great ideas on the spot. I need time, I need some marination, for want of a better phrase. I talked to my team about needing to take things for a walk, not a literal walk, but like just a walk in my head. And so it was probably another three, four months before I sort of joined the dots of maybe I could work with my mum in the farm, maybe I can work with my dad who's in the design industry. Maybe there's something interesting in this pot still and what I'm doing at home. Maybe actually there could be a need for a decent non alco option. And then it was all very small and gradual. Maybe I'll take it to a farmer's market. Maybe I'll do this as a little fun project. I work for a design agency. Well, how cool would it be to kind of say to my clients, yeah, I know, I know you founded your business and look, I founded my little brand and that, yeah, ended up then being a two year process. Leaving the design agency, life savings go in. There's no farmers market, you know, I'm there launching it in Selfridges and yeah, taking it to the most incredible sort of bars and restaurants and not really having a clue what I was doing. But yeah, suddenly it taking over my life.
- [06:51]
John Evans
I think what I love about how you've described the story is I've spent most of my career in soft drinks and a little bit in alcohol and none of the companies I work for, I think would have come up with what you came up with because in soft drinks, like we've been on a mission to find the drink for when you're not drinking, as you beautifully describe. I love the way you position that, by the way. But the margins in soft drink and the efficiency of the supply chain is all geared around getting things fast and cheap and it's seen as the poor relation to the alcohol in terms of margins, all that kind of thing. Then I've worked at beer brands and spirit brands for whom the idea of doing something not alcoholic is like anathema, you know what I mean? So it's funny because as you described that I cannot imagine that ever being invented by any of the businesses I work for. They wouldn't have the patience, they wouldn't have the lateral thinking, it would kind of break their minds in terms of, you know, because what you designed with cd, by the way, anyone who's listening that can't watch is absolutely stunning. Thank you and the craft that goes in, the care that's gone in the design, the aesthetic is incredible. Like I can't imagine a soft drink company putting the level of effort that you've put into it. You know, you've really taken the inspiration from real high end spirits and applied it to something that doesn't have alcohol.
- [08:08]
Ben Branson
Yeah. And I think, I think part of the, part of the challenge is it has been that binary and it has been soft drinks or alcohol. Never the two shall meet. And you know, we forget that we think about soft drinks in light single serve format and cans and plastic and not really glass as much. And then we think about alcohol and we think about historically, well, that's in glass bottles and it's multi serve. And so there are loads of huge differences. Although they can obviously straddle lots of occasions. I think I. And because I have Definitely done my 10,000 hours John on thinking about this kind of stuff. So I did some work looking into what I'd call parallel movements of cigarettes and what's happened there. Cars and what's happened there. Meat and vegetarian side and what's happened there. And even beer and what's happened with the non out beers. And actually it was one of those beautifully wonderful moments of going, holy shit. Am I okay to swear?
- [09:15]
John Evans
Go ahead. Uncensored.
- [09:16]
Ben Branson
Uncensored. Good point. Holy shit. I figured it out. All of these. The first electric car was actually designed over 100 years ago. The first non alcoholic beer was over 100 years ago. The first patent for an E cigarette was over 100 years ago. The first Sawyer based sausage over 100 years ago. Even alternative milks over 100 years ago. So you kind of go, these are all really old ideas actually. But then what happened was around the 70s we had some people start trying to kind of play in that place. So everyone would have heard of corn. What have we got? Prius was doing sort of alternative energy fuel type system for cars. Beck's Blue in the beer side. We had those cigarettes that looked like cigarettes but they were electronic, if you remember those. And they were all real compromises, actually they were a bit downplayed. Prius was quite cool in its time, but Korn was kind of frozen and freezer and the little cigarettes were a bit rubbish. And so it's. And I would call them sort of the incumbents. And then we've had, in the last, you know, 10, 15 years, we've had all the insurgents and we've had Oatley and we've had Tesla and we've had whether you like it or not, the likes of Juul and we've had Athletic brewing over in the US who've done such an incredible job. And these have all come from, not from big corporates. You know, they've not come, they've come from new brands. And I guess that's what I've always sort of held onto. I guess when people have told me that I was a lunatic or that seed lit was the worst idea ever, I've always kind of tried to hold onto that. Understanding that yeah, we have proof points within wider culture.
- [11:10]
John Evans
I think this is why innovators like you succeed because big companies box themselves in, they operate to a margin, they have, have customers that buy in a certain way and the cost of the serve must be way higher than you get in a normal soft drink where it's manufactured sugar, water flavor, carbonated and then it's done sort of thing. How hard was it to create the taste and serve? Because you're setting a benchmark which is way higher than a soft drink would in terms of the experience that you're going to deliver. So how hard was it to match expectations? Because I guess you're benchmarking. Well, I want to feel as I'm having something as good as a premium gin and tonic.
- [11:53]
Ben Branson
So there are so many, there are so many factors involved, I guess sort of psychologically in adding up to I feel like I'm not having a less than experience and I feel like I'm having a really grown up drink and that can be. And so I could kind of plot so many of those from where you might find this drink. So if you find, if you found, you know, seed lip in a, in a news agents versus Selfridges, you're going to have a very different experience if you were served a Seed lip and tonic in a top cocktail bar or a Michelin star restaurant versus, I don't know, your, your kind of local pub or you know, a coffee shop, you're going to have a different experience. And so even the fact that, you know, they're glass bottles, they don't go in the fridge, they sit there on the back bar. The smallest words really on the bottle are non alcoholic. And then we built this brand initially by association and by distribution. And so I never ever had to say that seed lit was any good. That was my number one goal was to never, ever have to comment on whether Sealip was delicious or not. I wanted to go, Heston Bloomthal thinks Sealip is delicious and he knows a lot about how things taste. So if you don't like it or you don't agree, disagree with him or disagree with, you know, the food buyer from Selfridges or Harrods or whatever. You know, disagree with those guys. Yeah. And so it was. There were so many little factors of like selecting the right distribution, even having the right price point, which events we showed up at. I mean, we launched Seed lit, it wasn't even available to buy online. I was really against E commerce. I had no idea, I'd never bought anything online. I was a total dinosaur. But going and showing up with seedlip in, you know, gallery openings or, I don't know, polo events or, you know, we just kind of established it in that premium space without ever having to say that it was premium either. It was like, let's never, let's never say that you mentioned premium price.
- [14:17]
John Evans
I mean, this was one of those launches that I really noticed because I thought, wow, that's genuinely not been done before. But the thing that, the packaging and the taste, all that sort of thing was amazing. The pricing, I'm like, what that, you know, because when you come from a soft drink background, like your price per liter is just like, breaks all conventions because you're anchoring off a much more premium category and delivering it in just such a different way. Did you get any pushback on how much you were charging or was your distribution because you're going to sell Bridges or the Fat Duck or something? Did that help establish that premium?
- [14:52]
Ben Branson
Yeah, we got plenty of, I got plenty of pushback. I think the, the interesting thing about the pushback was initially the pushback wasn't about Seed Lib and it wasn't about, oh, you've used oak and allspice and I don't like those or I don't like the taste of it. It was way upstream from that. It was what is the point in a non alcoholic drink? Literally that simple. And it was palpable, it was tangible. It was me standing in Selfridges serving people sealip and ton and a man coming up to me and going, what is this? And me going, this is seed lip. It's a distilled, non alcoholic spirit. And him being angry with me really and saying to me, why the fuck would you work for a company like this? And I'm like, oh yeah, it's my company. But so angry that a non alcoholic option existed, which sounds so crazy to say, but it was, you know, we, we play so much importance without realizing on alcohol, on how we socialize what we drink and our drink choices actually being part of our identity. You know, everybody knows the oh, I'm only a beer drinker or I only drink white wine or she loves Prosecco or oh, he's always on those health drinks or he drinks those protein shakes or you know, we do much, I think more than food drinks seem to be absorbed in sort of part of our identity. Which is crazy because you can now go on Instagram and find thousands of influencers who are sober and teetotal and that is, that's how they earn their living, you know, which is kind of mad from where we were 10 years ago with, with such dreadful. With, yeah, real dreadful response. So that was way before I could even get to saying how much it was. I've already got to kind of try and explain to these people that you can't drink alcohol all the time and shouldn't it be a great option? Like what do you do when you're driving? So that was. We spent a lot of time and given we were the only non alcoholic spirit from 2015 to 2018. So for the first three years we were doing all category jobs, we were doing all the heavy lifting, all the education and actually if you imagine a kind of, you know, a pie chart, I'd say 85% of our time was focused on educating people that they deserve a great NIOC option. 15% of our time was on kind of, let me tell you about seed lit, but actually talking to the world's best chefs and bartenders and people in hospitality, we were, it sounds, it sounds like ridiculous to be saying this now, but we were explaining that we think it's a great mark of hospitality in the modern age if you are offering great non alco options. We think it's better than is better for your business too and you'll make more money and people will stay longer and have more drinks. We were having to do that hand and foot like round, you know, going around every kind of bar, restaurant, etc.
- [18:19]
John Evans
This I think is the phase people don't realize, isn't it? Because I did a. I worked for Britvic for many years and did a little project looking at how long it takes for brands to succeed and I worked out the average time was seven years. So by the way, you're way ahead of that. Take a Fever Tree for example. Fever Tree, they were stuck in about 50 high end bars for five or six years before they kind of kind of broke through. And it's the education thing. Took them forever to go. Well, if you gin and tonics to you know, three quarters tonic, make It a good tonic, you know, which now seems really obvious. But that education job took a long time. How did you kind of keep going through that period? Because like you talked about, you're giving up your job, you've invested in, you know, product. It's not easy to produce. I'd like to know how it's produced actually. But then how did you kind of like back yourself for so long until, you know, of course, eventually everyone looks back as well. Of course it was always going to be a success. I don't imagine through those periods you necessarily sat there and thought, of course this is going to be a success.
- [19:12]
Ben Branson
No, no. I really hated the first six months, really really hated the first six months and genuinely wanted to close the business every week. And I know you hear people who start a businesses say, oh yeah, we wanted to close it and we made all these mistakes, but I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. We went from me producing a thousand bottles and by the way, it was taking six weeks to make and we were sourcing all these ingredients and it kept selling out really quickly. And so I had to go from me on my own making a thousand bottles to then three, four months later, packing a white van with 7,000 bottles and driving it up to rent a bottling line up to Lancashire, filling them, driving it back down, getting people around to come and label the bottles. So we were kind of 7xing production in the, you know, easy within the first six months and then actually having to hire a team and I think, I don't know what, I didn't really know anything about being a founder and what that meant. And so I think in my head I thought, well, I'm just, I just want to kind of make the liquid and sort of stay behind the scenes. I didn't, I sort of was too naive to kind of go, well no one else is going to fucking talk about this. And so I was also having to deal with, yeah, just being, you know, we heard from 100 countries in the first three months. I was invited to Buckingham Palace. We had sit down having to do one to one cocktail sessions teaching Kate Moss how to make drinks with Sealip because she loved it. We were hearing from all these bartenders who are a global community. And so we had lots of people in touch. Yeah, it was, it was, I was totally overwhelmed. Totally.
- [21:06]
John Evans
How did that happen? Did that, I mean, that sounds incredible, right? 100 countries.
- [21:10]
Ben Branson
Yeah. No nice problems. I mean, nice problems to have.
- [21:13]
John Evans
What, what was this? What generated? Was it the sheer like novelty or the inspiration of it or did work get out. What. What led to all that response?
- [21:21]
Ben Branson
You know, we had a really good full page write up. I. I went a journalist called Victoria Stewart, who's wonderful. Me and her did a bar crawl and we did bar crawl, sort of. When would that have been? End of 2015. So just after we launched and Seal it was listed in three places. One of those was Dandelion, which went on to be the world's best bar. The other one was Clove Club, the two Michelin star restaurant. And Selfridges was the other stockist and she wrote this big page, wonderful piece. So we had some really good press. That was great. I think word. Word seemed to get round the trade quite quickly, probably good and bad and definitely felt like in all of our meetings you knew where you stood. You were either it was either a very quick meeting or it wasn't a meeting. And many of those people are the people that then we later heard are like, yeah, I was one of the first tricycles. I knew it was gonna be big.
- [22:23]
John Evans
You know, success has many fathers. Yeah.
- [22:28]
Ben Branson
Or we were having brilliant, you know, in depth meetings and I was, you know, we had a. We got selling online. I had this one customer who was buying it for her husband who was dying from cancer. And I was like, I'm going to. I'm coming to see you. I want to come and see you and I've got this. I want to bring you the old book to come and look at and I'd love to just come and spend some time with you. And like amazing that it could sort of do all of that. What's real startup stuff of really giving a shit about customers and really taking the time. But yeah, the industry is very small, you know, and we talked about it, framing it of like there are only a thousand people that matter in the world for C lip if we can get those thousand people, we've got the keys to everything else. Yeah. And it's same thinking that we're adopting with Season, with Silver, with all of our projects, a thousand people matter. And those thousand for us were bartenders and chefs, I guess, and people in the drinks industry. But I walked into the American bar at the Savoy for a meeting with Eric who was the head bartender at the time, and he was like, oh nice. I was just hearing about you in Greece last week and I'm like, what's going. You know, this is so. Yeah, I guess having a. What can people take from that of. There was something pretty polarizing about having a non alk option that was expensive and premium, that didn't sit in a fridge. And that was. Yeah, that was clearly talked about. And then just being super focused on not trying to be everywhere and really understanding who our first audience, our kind of first buyer was rather than worrying too much about the end consumer.
- [24:26]
John Evans
I remember seeing a post from you, actually, that struck me. I think you recently shared the very first Gantt charts that you created for the business and you had this, like, offhand comment, something along the lines of, like, this is the meticulous plan that I came up with and then never looked at again sort of thing. What's been the balance between kind of planning for success and actually adapting as you go?
- [24:48]
Ben Branson
That's a really good question because I, with Seedlit, I literally did buy Business for Dummies. And, you know, I remember going and talking to a friend, sat upstairs in Whole Foods in South Kent to spend an hour with her while she talked me through what a value chain was. I wanted to understand every aspect of the P and L. I wanted to understand every job. I was absolutely voracious in my, like, appetite to kind of, I don't know, learn what a business is and learn about the drinks industry and read what other founders had written and get case studies on Fever Tree, Brewdog, Hendrix, innocent. You know, I was just absolutely voracious. And so then I guess sort of vomiting that out into kind of, okay, here are all the things I need to do to launch this. And I was diagnosed autistic in 2022. So I have a very. I can have an incredibly logical, analytical, rational brain and process of wanting to capture everything and getting that all in the right order. But because I had no idea that it's not how it fucking goes and it doesn't really matter. You know, planning is one thing. I think planning now and thinking about launching new things, plans are not what's going to happen. They are an opportunity to think through what needs to happen. And I think that's so important because I spent way too much time. I wasted way too much time, and then I didn't even do it. So I didn't even follow that plan. And that's not how it went. And so even things like in those first, in those early days, you know, forecasts and timings and forget all the brand decks and tone of voice and onions and values and wheels and absolute bollocks, basically, you don't need any of it. You don't need any of it until you've got to tell other people about it because there are more People working on your brand and they probably aren't full time. When you've got a full time team, however small, working on it, you don't need any of that, it will be fine. And rightly or wrongly, definitely don't fucking pay an agency to help you with that. You can do a lot of that internally. But I do think the stress testing, which channels you're going to sell in, at what price point does the value chain work so that everybody gets their margin. What, what rate of sale do you think you need or could hit? What are the reference points for what that rate of sale is? Regardless of sort of what happened, you sort of got to do a plan. But I think you just. Someone told me twice as long and twice as much and that's always what I've tried to stick to.
- [27:46]
John Evans
I think very often a plan is about convincing other people, not convincing yourself. Actually sometimes Adam Morgan, who I think is like the guru of Challenger Brands, he's got this beautiful phrase called intelligent naivety, which I just think you're a really good example of because I don't think you'd have done any of this if you'd come from the industry. Right. Because you'd have had a billion reasons why this would not work. Right. But I think the fact you didn't come from the industry, you came at it from a different perspective and you didn't know the answers necessarily. The answer is quote unquote, like who does to some extent. But that probably helped you because you took leaps that other people would have gone, oh no, can't do that. Or we can plan for this or plan for that. That's part, could be a lot of it.
- [28:27]
Ben Branson
It's so top of mind now knowing that with launching new things and I know a bit more, but I want to maintain as much naivety as possible and that's a delicate balance because I definitely made loads of mistakes. I didn't need to definitely. I definitely wasted loads of money, I didn't need to. But that, I don't know, just sort of lack of resources making you incredibly resourceful and going great. I'm just going to email 500 of the best accounts in the UK and I'm going to ask them what non alcoholic drinks they have on offer. Free. Absolutely free to do that. And the results of that gave me such confidence and such an understanding of the landscape of without driving around the country and without spending any money. Yeah. The sort of state of play of how poor the non alco options were. And so, yeah, having that kind of Resourcefulness.
- [29:32]
John Evans
You touched on another point there actually, which is the beauty of the constraint of no budget, which people, people underplay that a bit. But you have to make your packaging the media channel, you know, you have to make every customer your pr.
- [29:45]
Ben Branson
Yes.
- [29:46]
John Evans
You know, you have to make the serve so good that people will tell their friends, you know, and in a way big companies become lazy because you just started what's the launch campaign, you know how much you want to spend.
- [29:55]
Ben Branson
Yeah.
- [29:56]
John Evans
You haven't got that option so you've got to make all of it work.
- [29:58]
Ben Branson
Yeah, I mean we're launching a shandy this summer and we're doing it as a test and next week we've got. Every single person in the team is going to pitch, they're going to do their launch and because I don't like group brainstorms and I think we're going to get amazing individual ideas and then we're going to pull that together and do a launch plan and we're doing it on a tiny budget and we're doing it as a, a because we want to test and bring shandy back and we've made an amazing shandy. But also I think for a team where we've got two other brands to focus on, there's some sort of light relief and learning here in having real constraints and just using your brain and being resourceful, I think is a good. Yeah, is a good, like it's a good muscle to keep alive and finding ways. We did this with seedlit. Finding ways to ensure that the team doesn't. Yeah, just become rigid or lazy in their thinking. I think it's really important.
- [31:08]
John Evans
You've gone through the kind of innovator stage, you've got into Selfridges, you got into some of the best Michelin starred restaurants. At what point did it kind of get. Get to scale, you know, to the point that you started getting interest from big organizations about, you know, partnering with you. When, when did that bit happen?
- [31:25]
Ben Branson
So we, I worked out that in our first three years we were growing faster than, I mean, fuck, you name it. Innocent Brewdog, Fever Tree, Hendrix. We were growing really fast and you know, ultimately we went to 35 countries in three and a half years. We had three offices in three continents and I spent a lot of time out of the UK on a plane and flying around and launching and opening markets with Seedler, which I wouldn't want to do again actually. It was kind of hell and that's even with a non alcoholic drink. So yeah, it was, it was a lot it all the first year. I mean, it was just, it was, it was fast and big and it was relentless. There actually just wasn't even a. There just wasn't a moment to kind of. Yeah, there wasn't a kind of. I don't know. I've not had it before. In a business where you're like, oh, it's just good, guys. Yeah, it's good. It's nice just ticking along. It just wasn't. And that was either because we were dealing with problems or stuff was happening and we were, you know, launching another market or launching another product. So yeah, it was just, it was fast and big and you know, we took investment from distil ventures in 2016 to pretty early on and that was good. They, that was very hands off. But we had the funding that we needed to kind of scale the business. And so, yeah, it was. I mean, interestingly, the spirits industry looks at those same. How long does it take to grow this kind of stuff? And they get to about seven years before there's an intervention that's needed. And ultimately, you know, we exited in three and a half years. Because the other mantra is, well, 10 years for an overnight success. We hear a lot in the drinks industry. And so actually when you think that, see, it's been going for 10 years. I had the brand, I guess for four years. I'm still a shareholder now, I'm still involved categories now, you know, tens and tens of billions of dollars and there's thousands of options. I'm just clearly a sucker for punishment because I want to go right back to the beginning into the independent startup, scrappy, messy bit. Yeah, it was, it was really, it was really relentless. It was really stressful.
- [33:58]
John Evans
Any, any advice on that? I think people are surprised to know how stressful success is. I think people look at it and go, wow, you're flying around the world. You got this brand, you're the founder, it's glamorous, good on you. And there's elements which, you know, you should never complain about that because they're once a lifetime things. But scaling something at the rate you did that puts a lot of stress on the supply chain, on your, your leadership, on, you know, keeping the investors happy. In this case. Any advice on how you go through that scaling process? Because I see a lot of great ideas or creators that just don't get to that. They've got a wonderful idea, but they can't make that jump to scale which, which is what they ultimate to do. Any advice on how to navigate through that?
- [34:41]
Ben Branson
I mean, the first thing says, I am. I'm scared of that happening again. Which is probably the wrong thing to say when you're. I'm at the beginning of launching, you know, two other businesses. I think having a great team around me was brilliant. All I did over that period is started doing everything and gradually everything got taken off me in a good way. And so I think I was doing the Instagram for like two years and I was, you know, and actually I just got more and more funneled and focused into what I could really do for the business. And you can only do that when you have a great team around you. And so having an amazing team of bright, young, driven, hungry, curious people who for the most part were equally naive and not from big drinks industry backgrounds, you know, the real requirement to join seedlit was that you needed to love nature. I didn't really care whether you drank alcohol or not. Didn't matter, but you needed to love nature. And so, yeah, I think having a great team, I think it's really easy in this day and age if you spend enough time on things like LinkedIn to, and I do this at the moment to kind of go, we're not growing fast enough. We're not going fast enough. We need to be bigger. Oh, my God. It looks like they launched yesterday and now they're like, massive. And we have this weird aversion to actually building something and actually growing something and doing it properly. I think we just. Everything seems to be overnight and it's not. And, you know, I've interviewed enough people, I guess, on. On our podcast, where people might have just come across them or they're a singer that, you know, went absolutely huge on TikTok, but they've been singing for 15 years, you know, and so, yeah, I, I kind of. I do think it's important to enjoy it. I do think it's important to have a really great team around you, and I do think it's important to kind of do it properly.
- [36:54]
John Evans
I resonate with that a lot, actually. I mean, even though I've just taken podcasts as an example, I think thinking long term, I mean, the amount of podcasts that have a go and then give up, you know, so I think there's a bit of consistency and persistence is a big part of it. And as you say, having a team around you, that is the old. I don't know if this Branson came up with this. Employ people better than you. Yeah, absolutely. Damn right. You know, just understand the key skill sets you need for growth in the different Areas, whether it's supply chain or production, whatever it is. And you hire for, you know, talent in those areas.
- [37:22]
Ben Branson
Yeah, I only, and that was only an exercise in what am I good at. And therefore there's my hiring strategy. I'm just going to hire for what I'm not good at. That's literally as simple as it was. Yeah.
- [37:35]
John Evans
Now you did in three and a half years, right? You got to an exit.
- [37:38]
Ben Branson
Yeah.
- [37:39]
John Evans
So you beat you 50%. You halved the average time. By the way, the seven years is the successor. This is the other thing I found wild actually looking at the soft drink data that I'd looked at is the seven years was only the successes. Boy, there were like for everyone success. There were 19 failures.
- [37:54]
Ben Branson
Yes.
- [37:55]
John Evans
So you're basically looking at the real successes. Had the persistence, they carried on, did the right things, they didn't go to mass too soon as well. So like you, they stuck at the high end to create the adoption and then, then kind of blew up. But doing three and a half years is, is genuinely incredible. How do you come to make that decision with Diageo to go right. This is the moment that I do the exit. Because it's personal. Right. Because it's you. It's you.
- [38:18]
Ben Branson
It is personal. But I'd already, we'd already cleared that up. It was already part of the deal. It was already part baked into the investment deal. And that really suited me because I had already known very well that my skill set is not about scale. I am not interested in scale and I'm not the best person to scale a business or kind of, yeah, have a big business. I'm really good at the beginning and getting things started. I also knew and understood that I did want to have a big impact and that continues that, that wish continues. I want to make a big change and I want to have a big impact. And in order to make a big impact, I couldn't do that on my own. And so it was a very deliberate choice to want to work with a company that was global premium, understood spirits and cocktail culture, had a track record of building huge brands like iconic brands and had an understanding that founders were important in doing that. And Diageo are second to none of that. Yeah. And so I had no hang ups on am I selling out. It was all open, transparent. You joined the business. This is what we're doing. This is the goal. We want to change the way the world drinks. That was always the goal and Diageo are going to help us do that. And so it was, yeah, it was really, really clear, really, really simple and really, really open. I gave 20% of the business to the team and so everybody was driving in the same direction and it was all open, transparent and was yeah, hugely incentivizing for people.
- [40:17]
John Evans
I love the humility in that to know like what you're good at and unique at and what you want help with. And like as you say, you don't get any bigger or better than Diageo to get a non alcoholic spirit out into the world's best bars and yeah retailers.
- [40:30]
Ben Branson
The longer I do this, the more I realize that I'm dreadful at selling and I'm not excited about selling and I don't get excited about selling. I'm dreadful at marketing. I don't know, I think the more I learn about my brain, the more I realize that me and marketing are real opposing forces. I hate brands. I'm really skeptical of them and I don't, I don't have a good enough understanding. I don't think of like how to market a brand. What I can do is make really delicious products and start them in the right way. That means that they are set off in the right direction from a, from a strategic perspective. And yeah, I'm sort of becoming increasingly okay with that.
- [41:29]
John Evans
I love the fact you say that and you're one of the best marks on the planet because you're so clear about why you're here. Your eye for design and is incredible. Your storytelling is on point. The way you describe like the drink. When you're not drinking, there will be people paid hundreds of thousands of pounds in big soft countries, soft drink companies around the world trying to get to that clarity of insight, your ability to influence other people and get them to tell your story for you. Inspire a big corporate organization like Diageo to scale you up. Mass marketing genius marketing.
- [42:01]
Ben Branson
Okay.
- [42:02]
John Evans
A lot of people could learn from that.
- [42:03]
Ben Branson
Maybe then it's more about the, some of the execution of marketing to a consumer where I, yeah. Where I struggle. But actually building the foundations of, of asking a really great marketer like hey look, I've made this and clarified it and made it simple and sticky. Now can you go like.
- [42:33]
John Evans
I think, I think what you've done is you've done the really, really, really hard bit. Because most, most, I mean most people shortcut to advertising when they say marketing, which you shouldn't do, right?
- [42:43]
Ben Branson
Yes.
- [42:43]
John Evans
But most people, most people with an advertising brief are trying to invent some authenticity and tell your story right. Created all that organically and naturally and authentically. So when you look up seed clip, you get your story, you know, you get the farming story, the botanical story, the maturation, the whole thing. Right. You've got naturally what 99% of the world's brands don't have already, which is authenticity, which I think is marketing gold dust.
- [43:11]
Ben Branson
Yeah, I think it's, you know, I see this really clearly with, with silver, with our age spirit at the moment that I love trees so much and they are so full of flavor that the world has had absolutely no idea about. Apart from oak, basically there are 73,000 tree species on this planet. Like the, the scope of this project is, is enormous. But what it is giving me is, I guess I'm going to such extremes that most people will not bother to go to nobody. I've, you know, I've bought two domestic ovens to cook wood. No one's fucking gonna do that. Or stand out there and pick thousands of hazel catkins just at the right time when they are so fluffy and powdery and full of pollen, and then distill them straight away so that I can capture all that freshness and like I'm. This is all scalable, but that's not important at the moment. What's important is, yeah, slightly selfishly going, I think there's an opportunity for something that's neat and that you sip and it's got that ritual and that occasion of age spirits that you have to fill with mixes that's full, kind of full bodied, but actually gives me a real opportunity to learn more about trees.
- [44:39]
John Evans
Yeah, but the other thing I think you've naturally done, even in the way you tell that story, is you're joining some dots together that other people just don't join. You know, most people would stop at I really love trees and they'd become really obsessed with trees.
- [44:53]
Ben Branson
Right. Yeah.
- [44:54]
John Evans
Some people might stop at. I love distilling in my back garden.
- [44:57]
Ben Branson
Right.
- [44:57]
John Evans
Some people might stop at. I'm a great designer and I love designing. Right. But the jump I think you've made, which is incredible, is you brought those things together to create something that didn't exist in the world before. And that's what I find so inspiring about it. And then you've managed to package it in a way that people go, yeah, that makes sense. Why didn't that exist before? I mean, back to your, your, your sorry season as well. Sorry, I was going to link to that. Years and years ago I was brand manager for about five minutes on Angusta Bitters.
- [45:25]
Ben Branson
Amazing.
- [45:26]
John Evans
Same thing. In fact, they invited me out to Trinidad and Tobago, right. Because I had invented a cocktail book and they were so excited by the fact that someone had shown a bit of love to the brand.
- [45:36]
Ben Branson
Love it.
- [45:36]
John Evans
I said, come and show the board.
- [45:38]
Ben Branson
I love it.
- [45:38]
John Evans
I had this two week trip to Tobago to join their board and talk about cocktail. Insane. That, like, that would be a thing that got me an invite out there anyway. Random, but I mean, even then, like the pink gin and tonics, you know, just adding a little seasoning to a drink and it transforms the occasion. But you've got amazing insight there, haven't you, with the way you frame that as salt and pepper of drinks. I just think it's very clever.
- [46:01]
Ben Branson
It's. I, I think and I think this stands up for any food and drink product mostly. And it's, it's based on the fact that, and I'm talking sort of startups and small businesses here and founder led kind of brands, but when you start from the point that nine out of ten are going to fail, right, you're kind of like, okay, the odds are really against me. So therefore your next move has to be how can I do whatever I can to ensure that I've got the right conditions to mean that I've got that chance of being that one that succeeds? And relevance and need in people's lives. I think of everything. It doesn't matter how good it tastes or what it looks like, if it's not meeting a need in people's lives and therefore it's not relevant to them. I just wouldn't start anything if it didn't have those core components. The next bit is, can it connect in to what is going on in culture? Can it have a place beyond just the product that can sit in people's brains or tag onto various reference points? And so, you know, season is the salt and pepper for drinks. That's very deliberate. Foodies have a big understanding. You know, I went to chef school, I had it drilled into me every day. Season, season, season, season, every day. And foodies who want things to taste nice and will spend money on condiments and seasonings and spices, they know that and chefs know that and bartenders do know that too. And so rather than. It's the difference between, let me tell you about cocktail bitters, what the fuck are they? Or have you heard of Angostura? Let's start, start by telling you about the competition, you know, who have 85% market share. No, that's probably not the best way to start either. It's trying to find another way a Bit like with seed lip of. Instead of going, do you drink alcohol? It's what do you drink when you're not drinking alcohol? It's a real different frame on it. And so, yeah, season, you know, season's only about a year in, but having, you know, a white pack and a black pack, making it simple for consumers that you've got a light one that's green and lovely, put it in your lighter kind of drinks and a dark one for your darker kind of drinks. It's not kind of, you know, branding by numbers, but I just gotta make things simple for people.
- [48:43]
John Evans
Yeah, it's really well done. And yeah, if I. Angus, you wouldn't start with Angostura, would you? Like, if you were to kind of create the category that's being created. I mean, the oversized label and the weirdness of it and all that kind of thing. I wanted to move, if I can, to talk about your podcast and your charity as well, the hidden 20. Yeah, extremely powerful and, you know, inspiring as well. You know, you obviously, Seedlips now moved into the azure. You're still inventing what led to the decision on hidden 20% you talked about earlier, you know, discovering you had autism. It's quite late, presumably to discover that. How did that come about?
- [49:18]
Ben Branson
Yeah, so ironically, it came about from where are we, summer 2022. Starting to just connect into hearing some snippets of other people talking on podcasts and kind of going, that sounds a little bit like me. I, you know, I had, I'd never heard the word neurodiversity before. I knew such a tiny, ignorant, limited amount about dyslexia or Tourette's or autism or ADHD. I had no idea that it's 20% of the population globally, like 1.6 billion people. I hadn't even really properly understood the fact that every single person on the planet has a different brain, you know, and so I went and, you know, I had this 12 week assessment and the psychologist said, congratulations, Ben, you're autistic. And I kind of really felt that. I really, I really believed that. And nobody was surprised when I told them, which, you know, feels like I was kind of the last to know. But it just answered loads of questions and made a lot of sense. And I've been able to then I guess start embracing that and learning about that and kind of going, fuck, I've got this tool and I've got a photographic memory and I have really acute senses, palette, hearing, smell. I've never really realized what I can do with these things. Or why I gravitate towards making ridiculously long Gantt charts or obsessing over tree species or just attention to detail on hiding my ancestors initials in, you know, the fox on the bottle of seed lip or just all these little things. And also why, ironically for creating drinks businesses that are about including people and socializing, I'm incredibly antisocial. You know, I'm not the consumer for my drinks. I sort of, in the nice possible way I don't really care what happens after I've made them. I kind of, that's the most important thing for me is kind of making them and then finding other people to work with who want to take them on and make them big in the world and make them sell and all the rest of it. So I was diagnosed and I, I then real, I started doing a whole load of research into it and I found two things. One, so many people that I look up to, so many of my heroes or so many icons in the world and in history thought differently. And lots of people listening will know the 1984 Apple ad. Most of those people featured when youn're a Divergent. You know, everyone from Newton and Agatha Christie and Marie Curie and Einstein, except like all these people neurodivergent. All these incredible contributions and inventions and discoveries. So I had that on one hand and then I had on the other hand. The 8 out of 10 autistic adults are unemployed and 85% of children who are diagnosed dyslexic are ashamed of it. And 94% of autistic children are bullied at school. And autism is the second leading cause of death for autistics. And some studies of up to 85% of people in our prison system are neurodivergent. And we got waiting lists for assessments on ADHD of up to 22 years in some places in the country. I just couldn't understand these two things. So I was like, I just want to join the gap. And this is about telling the truth. And then I did another piece of work on looking at why have these huge social change campaigns happened, like climate change, MeToo, Black Lives Matter, Jamie's school dinners, Paralympics, like what are the keys here? What are the codes? Because this is not about a physical thing. I know about that. This is sort of about a movement and ideas. And so I broke that down and I was like, you just need a big enough cause that affects enough people. Okay, good. Got 1.6 billion people on the planet. Great. You need a medium and a format that can travel and scale okay. Digital. Pretty good at that. Great. And then you need some spokespeople. And so I was like, great. I've got three. I've got experts, I've got entrepreneurs, and I've got celebrities. Okay, great. So, yeah, I thought, well, I'm going to start a charity, and we're going to launch a podcast and a campaign that was the beginning of last year. And we're going to sort of put in place some role models and some representation that so many people have not had to basically try and break this cycle. And it's going really well.
- [54:31]
John Evans
Wow.
- [54:32]
Ben Branson
Yeah.
- [54:33]
John Evans
I was listening to you talking to Heston Blumenthal.
- [54:35]
Ben Branson
Right.
- [54:36]
John Evans
Well, firstly, congratulations. I mean, like, what an awesome guy. The thing in. It really hit me hard, I have to say. I cried after listening to it. Was. Sorry. I'll say again. Sorry.
- [54:52]
Ben Branson
It's okay.
- [54:54]
John Evans
The. Hang on. Yeah. Essen said something in that episode which really hit me, which was you. He was talking about himself. Said I was the last to know. And I thought, damn, why is that? I. I've experienced people that have been through really tough things, and they were the last to know, and nobody helped. Nobody spoke about it. And it was the un. It was the not speaking about it that I. That just got to me.
- [55:22]
Ben Branson
Yeah.
- [55:22]
John Evans
And that's why I think, you know, kudos to you for speaking about it. And people we look up to, like Heston, who are, like, role models, or Millie McIntosh, we know the people we've had on. It's amazing to see these people, like, you know, we. We admire them, they're so successful, and then have that vulnerability. I think it's incredible.
- [55:38]
Ben Branson
Yeah. And I think it's, you know, I. Getting to sit down and talk to, like, the world's leading expert on autism.
- [55:47]
John Evans
Yeah.
- [55:47]
Ben Branson
Or, you know, someone like Heston, who's my hero, you know, who said to me, I'm gonna. I'll. Come on, Ben, but we have to go for dinner beforehand. Oh, okay.
- [55:58]
John Evans
That's a tough one.
- [55:59]
Ben Branson
Okay.
- [56:00]
John Evans
If you insist.
- [56:01]
Ben Branson
If you insist. You can choose the restaurant. So, yeah, I. I kind of. I don't know. I feel like if I think about all my projects, they're all incredibly selfish, actually, because they are all about me wanting to, I don't know, continue my family's legacy of working with the land or getting fully into my foodiness and my chef background and getting to work with just the most amazing ingredients with season. Or getting to dine out, learning about trees and woodworking and some of the science and the process around how you do maturation without barrels, like just some of that geeky kind of stuff. And then the hidden 20, you know, my daughter's just been diagnosed autistic. She's five, she's absolutely brilliant and I don't want her to be one of the stats.
- [57:01]
John Evans
Yeah.
- [57:02]
Ben Branson
And so, but the trick with all of this is whilst these are all selfish pursuits, they all have a place in the world and they all have a relevance to enough people that make it a kind of win win in that sense. And so, yeah, there are so many similarities, I'm finding, between the sort of non out movement and the neurodiversity movement. Not just because they both start with N, but they're both about breaking down beliefs, they're both full of myths, they're both charged with stigma, they're both about, you know, changing perception.
- [57:40]
John Evans
Yeah.
- [57:40]
Ben Branson
They both need role models and great examples of sort of what good looks like. And so, yeah, I, I, that feels really good because that feels like everything that I'm doing feels connected in some way, even though they are about, yeah, drinks and a charity and actually disconnected. Yeah. So it's, it's nice to, I haven't done a podcast where I've sort of talked about all of them like this, which, yeah, is nice to do.
- [58:10]
John Evans
You asked this lovely question, actually, which is, if I could give you a pill and it could take it away tomorrow, would you take it?
- [58:18]
Ben Branson
I definitely wouldn't.
- [58:19]
John Evans
Yeah. It's not interesting. It's not interesting.
- [58:21]
Ben Branson
No way. And, and even though, and I don't, I personally don't look back and go, oh, if only I'd known. Or why didn't anyone spot it? Or I don't, I'm too, I'm too sort of matter of fact and literal to kind of go, well, that's waste of time thinking about that. There's like, it's pointless energy. But yeah, Heston was, it was sad hearing that he was the last to know because he's, you know, he was really vulnerable, you know, sectioned and like, life took a really bad turn. And it is interesting, the reaction I get. Not I go around telling people I'm autistic, but it's funny, I, I usually get two reactions and one is people laugh and actually think I'm joking. Not, they're not being mean, but it's, it's kind of, oh, oh, they're a bit ADHD or, oh, I'm just being a bit autistic. You know, it's those sort of, where these things become adjectives or people dive into the oh, yeah, my mate is really bad. He's autistic and he's really bad, which is just really dismissive. Right? Yeah, you know, it's really dismissive. So we've got. We've got such a long way to go even further in what's going on in the US which is really, really terrifying what's happening over there, specifically with autism. But we've got a long way to go to kind of just be able to talk about this and understand that everybody's brain behaves differently. And actually there can be. There can be some real greatness and some skills that can come from, you know, having a diverse load of brains on a project which the marketing community will always tell you, oh, yeah, you want to get loads of different voices in the room. And I remember being agency side, where, yeah, let's get that guy. And he's a really good thinker. Or she'll give us a great. But actually, when you put it on the lens of like, actually, have we got a diverse mix of brains in here? Yeah. I'm excited to kind of see what. Yeah. What magic will come.
- [60:30]
John Evans
And again, you're applying your marketing genius to. I like your great minds. Think differently. Kind of just reframing of that whole thing, which is amazing. Maybe to finish up then. What do you hope happens next for you for hidden 20%?
- [60:46]
Ben Branson
I mean, the big hope is to close the charity. That's the goal. And so the faster I can do that, the better, which is. Yeah. However, whether that's a strange goal or not.
- [60:58]
John Evans
A fast exit again.
- [60:59]
Ben Branson
Yeah, it's a fast exit. And we're still trying to work out how do we know and what does that mean and how do you measure that and what's that based on? But last year was a kind of test and, you know, we built 150,000 community and won some great awards. And yeah, we can safely say we've got something that people want and that is relevant. And so now we've got to figure out, okay, if we want to close the charity because we've broken the cycle and we've driven enough awareness or education or we've put a stop to bullying rates or suicide rates. Yeah, we just need to figure that out now. But, yeah, just want to close it.
- [61:43]
John Evans
Great. Well, that's a great place to close. But anyone listening and watching, check out hidden 20% podcast, wherever you get podcasts and go check the website out as well. Got more information on there. And go listen to those stories. They're very powerful. Ben, thank you, mate. It's been.
- [61:56]
Ben Branson
No thank you.
- [61:57]
John Evans
I personally find this so inspiring because you're doing a lot of stuff I dream about so it's just like, it's just so cool. And mate, you are one of the best marketers in the world so take that away from this episode.
- [62:08]
Ben Branson
Oh, thank you.
- [62:09]
John Evans
Good to have you on man.
- [62:10]
Ben Branson
Thank you very much.
- [62:11]
John Evans
Thank you. Cheers. Thank you very much for listening or watching Uncensored cmo. I hope you enjoyed that. If you did, please do hit the subscribe button wherever you get your podcast. If you're watching, hit subscribe there as well. I'd also love to get a review. Reviews make a big difference on other people discovering the show. So please do leave a review wherever you get your podcast. If you want to contact me, you can do I'm over on XenSoredCMO or on LinkedIn where I'm under my own name, John Evans. Thanks for listening and watching. I'll see you next time.