We sat down with Daniel Barnes, co-founder of Mighty Swell Cocktails to talk about doing something different in a crowded industry.
Full transcript below:
My name’s Daniel Barnes. I’m one of the three original founders of Mighty Swell Cocktails here in Austin, Texas.
As consumers care more about not settling for flavor, being able to offer them something that hits a genuine fruit flavor, full bodied, basically a cocktail you can take anywhere.
Every single person that works at Mighty Swell comes in every day and they act like an owner. And they began to bring to our attention that there was a dramatic shift occurring in the category. It was going from being let’s be sweet, let’s be sugary, let’s hit people with that to an awareness of calories, an awareness of sugar.
As we looked at the competitive set, as we looked at everyone around us, everyone at one time became aware, shit, calories matter, we gotta fix this. It was like an avalanche. Everybody went that way.
Anytime you’re making a pivot, anytime you’re making a change there’s always those fears. But part of what makes me feel better whenever you’re entering into a situation like that is that deciding to remain the same, accepting the status quo, that also should have some fears because you’re probably going to be losing some people.
We wanted to zig while everyone else was zagging. Everybody went let’s go white, plain, simple. Let’s look like unbranded water.
They went in that direction and they did it in such similar styles because they were trying to catch what other people were doing, and became so bland and in most cases serious with their delivery that they forgot that at the end of the say, we’re making spritzers. We’re making light, easy to drink cocktails to grab on the go that you’re gonna go out and have on the lake or after a long day beside the pool, whatever the case may be. Bringing personality back to the category, bringing some fun, which is what people want in this style of a brand.
We wanted big fruit pop. We wanted that fruit there both to stand out on the shelf but also to remind people that our product, even though we went with lower sugar lower calorie, we didn’t compromise on flavor, we didn’t compromise on ingredients.
When you’re trying to create a brand for everyone, what you’re doing is you’re creating a brand that doesn’t have you in it. Your personality, your care, your drive. When you create a brand that you believe in then you naturally find those people. They’re the ones that come forward wanting the things you’re offering, understanding the proposition that this brand is bringing to the table. Otherwise you’re trying to make something that everyone likes, everybody is going to go for, it becomes you marginalized that you don’t even have a target market at that juncture. And your owners, your team have struggle believing in the brand.
There’s a term. It’s a Japanese word, Hanzoku. Hanzoku means a willingness to rebel from a place of knowledge. And to me that’s the biggest thing. Having a respect for knowledge, for legacy, for heritage but being willing to innovate and go in new directions and try new and different things with those powers.
To be the right leader, to be the right person to lead a challenger brand what you have to realize is it’s not about you. It’s about you creating the environment for these other talented people to go succeed. Being able to guide that ship, being able to play that role is the most important thing. Otherwise you can have the greatest idea ever but if these other people aren’t taking it and running it and living that same feeling, there’s no way for it to succeed.
As hard as it may be.
