Hola Outliers ☀️
Hope you’re having a glorious Sunday! 🍸
If you love a margarita, you’ll love this story.
More importantly, if you want to learn how MOTHS’s brand pivot supercharged their growth, you’ll love it even more.
So you don’t have to love margaritas but I would recommend trying one.
Changing direction in your business can feel scary, especially when you’ve put so much time and effort into your current product/brand.
BUT if you’re not growing and makes sales is a slog, it might be time to change things up.
Here’s how MOTH went about it plus a few actionable steps for you if a pivot is on the cards for your company.
Let’s get into it… 👇
P.S. I found this photo on MOTH’s website and just couldn’t resist. Brilliant, right?!
Here’s what to expect today:
📰 Story: How MOTH pivoted for scale and secured its first Waitrose listing
🧠 Insight: You can pivot for scale without losing your values
💪🏼 DIY: 3 steps to pivot your brand for success
🔗 Good links: The full MOTH story, a great positioning guide and 14 famous pivots
📰 Story: How MOTH pivoted for scale and secured its first Waitrose listing
Co-founders Rob and Sam launched their premium cocktail brand, Buveur back in 2018 after noticing a gap in the ready-to-drink market.
“Why couldn't I have an Old Fashioned as easy as a can of beer or glass of Sauvignon Blanc?” — Sam
They set out to make 5* star quality hotel bar cocktails that can be served as easily as a beer or a can of Coke.
They succeed.
Rob and Sam were making Buveur cocktails themselves — they were served in beautifully branded glass bottles and were expensive, naturally.
Buveur unlocked some amazing listings including Harrods, Selfridges, Daylesford, The Hoxton Hotels and The Ritz.
There was certainly a gap for a premium, Ready-To-Drink cocktail brand but something wasn’t quite right.
Getting bigger listings with the likes of Waitrose or Tescos was impossible.
Scaling the brand on the small margins they had just wouldn’t work.
Buveur was too premium and too small.
So Rob and Sam took a different approach…
They’d been emailing Waitrose for two and a half years but one day decided to go cap in hand and ask for advice instead of a listing.
“We don’t want a listing but we want your advice”
They were already considering a rebrand and managed to get suggestions from Waitrose that helped them refine their offering into something the supermarkets would stock, enabling the brand to scale beyond its current luxury listings.
And MOTH was born.
They moved away from glass bottles and switched to cans which were far cheaper to produce and helped them increase their margins. They also found a production partner who could create their bar-standard recipes at scale (not easy but they did it).
Knowing that they had to stand out, they did the opposite of all the other Ready-To-Drink brands currently on offer in supermarkets.
They needed something that looked as different on the shelf as it tasted to its competitors.
“It was standing at a supermarket shelf and going, right well everyone else is colourful, we'll be black and white. Everyone else is in big cans, we'll be in small cans. Everyone else is shiny, we'll be matte.”
In 2021, along with the rebrand, MOTH launched into 200 Waitrose stores across the UK.
The pandemic then supercharged their growth further and since then they’ve partnered with grocery delivery startups like Gorillas and Zapp, and launched a direct-to-consumer offering through their website.
Their ‘meet the cocktail’ pages are brilliant too… Say hola to the Pina Colada >
🧠 Insight: You can pivot for scale without losing your values
MOTH started as an ultra premium brand and quickly learned that by doing everything in such a handcrafted way just wasn’t going to allow them to scale.
But instead of sourcing ingredients cheaply and reducing quality to increase margins, they found different ways of making their premium drinks stand out and attract the right customers.
A well positioned brand, plus a high quality product (the cocktail in this case) is a recipe for success — glass bottles are not the only way to communicate high quality.
💪🏼 DIY: 3 steps to pivot your brand for success
Pivoting your business can feel like a big decision but it can also be the decision that keeps your company alive. In fact, you may need to pivot a few times in order to find product-market fit. Here’s how to make sure you’re pivoting in the right way:
👉 1. Understand why you need to pivot, what’s the problem that you’re trying to solve? This means speaking to one-time customers and understanding why they haven’t bought again OR speaking to retailers to better understand why they won’t stock your product.
👉 2. Identify the real value you offer and who it’s best suited to. With MOTH it was actually less about fancy glass bottles and more about the liquid inside, combined with modern branding that appealed to an audience who would try something new.
👉 3. Adapt your product and/or brand to meet the requirements of your customers and figure out how to craft an offer they’d feel stupid saying no to.
🔗 Good links
🔗 The full MOTH story on the Hungry podcast
🔗 Product positioning for pivoting startups
💌 Tell us what you’d like help with…
We started this newsletter for entrepreneurs just like you, and we want it to be as helpful as it possibly can. So tell us what you’d like help with and we’ll dig into it.
Or if there’s a brand you’d like to know more about, let us know and we’ll reach out to them.
Until next week…
Keep being an Outlier,
J + K