[00:00:10] Ray Latif: Hello, friends. I'm Ray Latif, and you're tuned into Taste Radio, the number one podcast for anyone building a business in food or beverage. He built an eight-figure brand without raising a dollar of outside capital. Now he's sharing exactly how he did it. In this episode, Curious Elixirs's founder and CEO, J.W. Wiseman, reveals the playbook behind one of the adult non-alcoholic category's earliest success stories. He explains why he bet on the sober-curious trend years before it became mainstream, how direct consumer sales fueled profitable growth from day one, and why relentless product refinement, not rapid expansion, has been the foundation of the brand's success. JW also discusses customer acquisition, retail strategy, premium pricing, and the long-term vision that's guiding Curious Elixirs as it aims to redefine how people drink socially. Hey folks, it's Ray with Taste Radio. Right now, I am supremely honored to be sitting down with J.W. Wiseman, who is the founder and CEO of Curious Elixirs. J.W., it's great to see you. It's great to see you too. We're at the Summer Fantasy Food Show here in New York City. It's breezy where we are, which I know is good for you because you've been in the bowels of the Jacob Javits Center, hot as a dog, as they were, and a little breeze is probably good at this point.
[00:01:43] J.W. Wiseman: Oh yeah. It feels very cool where we are right now. Loving it.
[00:01:46] Ray Latif: Yeah, it's also good that we have some Curious Elixirs with us. We've got a can of your number one. What is your number one? The OG. Yeah.
[00:01:54] J.W. Wiseman: Curious Elixirs number one. So this is inspired by one of my favorite drinks of all time, the Negroni Spagliato. So lightly sparkling Negroni, but finishes like a dry Lambrusco because I'm a big drinks nerd. I've been in the bar business for over 20 years. And that's kind of why I started Curious, was from drinking too much after owning a whiskey bar in a nightclub, decided, Hey, I need to cut back. you know, after having 20 drinks in one night. 20 drinks in one night.
[00:02:24] Ray Latif: Yep. That would give a lot of people a reason to cut back on their drinking.
[00:02:28] J.W. Wiseman: It certainly gave me something to think about when I woke up with no hangover and I thought to myself, that's terrifying that my body can take in that much booze. And this was a number of years ago. When did you come up with the idea of Curious Elixirs? I came up with the idea for it in 2013 and was tinkering in my kitchen until we launched in 2015.
[00:02:47] Ray Latif: So this was way ahead of the trend. I think in 2013 and 2015, the big beverage trends, at least in non-alc, were cold-pressed juice and kombucha. Yes. Not where we are today, which is non-alc cocktails and Better For You soda, which I think are the two really most fast-growing trends in beverage. I don't know. I might get in trouble for saying that, but that's the way I feel anyway. And I think what Curious has been doing over the years is really compelling. And being at the forefront of this movement is not always easy. Being a pioneer is not always easy. But what made you think that in 2013, this could be a viable business?
[00:03:20] J.W. Wiseman: Well, what made me realize this was bigger than just me and somebody who was drinking a lot of alcohol was I made a batch of a prototype of Curious No. 1 and took it to the opening party at a hotel we owned in Rockaway Beach here in New York City. And I just put up a huge, huge jug of Curious Elixirs No. 1. It didn't say that it was non-alcoholic or alcoholic. It just said Curious Elixirs No. 1. And what we found was that everybody drank the hell out of that and weren't really touching the Mezcal. So that was surprising to me, that people would really enjoy something non-alcoholic and go back to it over and over again for a whole night of partying. And that's really what opened my eyes to it. And then when I started kind of asking friends, I was like, Hey, you know, you want to try this? And they're like, Oh, I'm training for a marathon. Sure. I'll have some of that. I'm not drinking right now. or somebody's pregnant, or somebody is just wanting to cut back like me, because I'm not a sober person. I'm just somebody who needed to make a massive shift from those 20 drinks in one night to maybe having three alcoholic drinks a month.
[00:04:22] Ray Latif: Yeah, well, moderation is the name of the game these days. It seems like nobody wants to do too much of one or the other. And I think, again, that's really applicable to modern consumers. Ten years ago, I don't know how many people might have seen that trend. Did you feel like you needed to wait to catch up to the trend, or did you feel like you were just happy to be patient until a broader audience understood what you were doing?
[00:04:49] J.W. Wiseman: Well, at the time, I was thinking to myself, I'm not sure if the world is ready for this, but I need to get started now. One thing that opened me up to it was being in the bar business and you see how many people come in and they're drinking hard. But then I started looking at some of the data and seeing that, wow, even back in 2015 when we launched, 75 million adult Americans don't drink alcohol at all. And another 90 million adult Americans were drinking two or fewer alcoholic drinks per week. So this giant pool of people who are only having soda or club soda and bitters. And I just got really damn bored of drinking bitters and soda. And that's really when I knew, it's like, okay, I've got the data. I've been tinkering in my kitchen. We got to try this out. And we know that this can work. It's just about finding the right audience.
[00:05:36] Ray Latif: And people who were looking for your product, but didn't even know they were looking for your product. Correct.
[00:05:41] J.W. Wiseman: Yeah. And that's why we launched on Kickstarter, because we were like, we need to find our people first. We need to find the people who this deeply resonates with. And that became our first 700 customers is from Kickstarter. When we started getting press and Refinery29 and the Wall Street Journal and stuff like that, we're like, oh, OK, there's there's something here. We need to go faster on this. At the time, I was running marketing for Daily Harvest, this, you know, smoothies and whatnot. And I knew that the wellness curve was bending more toward more people being healthier in their diets and not wanting a lot of sugar. So I kind of took cues from the whole 30 movement and stuff like that and be like, OK, we're going to do no added sugar. We're going to clean ingredients. We're going to make something that's really fucking delicious and people are going to find it and they're going to love it.
[00:06:27] Ray Latif: The 700 people that were part of your initial tribe, what made them that really impactful group for you to be able to say, this is how we're going to market to new customers. This is how we're going to innovate. This is how we're going to grow. What did you learn from those folks? And again, what were the common traits among them that gave you confidence that you could build from say 700 to 700,000?
[00:06:50] J.W. Wiseman: Right. Well, some of the common traits would be the other brands that they buy. This is the number one indicator for us. It's even how, like, some politicians might have gotten elected. You know what I'm saying? Sure. People look at what brands they buy, and then you start to find the other psychographics behind them. For us, it was people that were interested in Whole30. It was people that were interested in Lululemon. It was people that had kind of these wellness cues. sprinkled throughout their lives. And so that's really how we went after it. We were like, these are going to be people that are interested in maybe not being sober, but just in having a healthier life. But they still want something delicious. That's the commonality. And we found that all of these people just felt like they were being left behind. There was literally nothing. It's like water in the desert when we first started Curious Elixirs. And we decided to do something which is a little bit radical, which is go direct-to-consumer first when most people go retail first. And that's really coming out of the Warren Buffett school of thought, which is see what the rest of the world is doing and do the opposite. Everybody was going deep into agave brands, you know? And we're like, okay, we're gonna go and build a non-alcoholic brand that feels like nightlife, that can appeal to both men and women, that has design and ingredients put first. We also put in something that had never been done before, which is infusing it with herbs and adaptogens. That hadn't really been done before. It has been done traditionally in cultures throughout the world, but putting it into a cocktail context? Never been done. So we figured, what if we could make something that's really delicious, that happens to be non-alcoholic, and what if that could make your body feel great instead of feeling shitty the next day? That's the key insight.
[00:08:24] Ray Latif: Yeah. When you were pulling information from this group, was it via surveys? Was it focus groups? How are you talking to them and how are they communicating back to you?
[00:08:34] J.W. Wiseman: Definitely surveys, definitely direct. I've Brad Avery one of the reviews that have come in on our Shopify site over 11 years. You have to take every bit of feedback seriously, even if it doesn't make sense to you. Because everybody's experience is valid, but you have to see when those experiences get repeated, say like 10 to 12 times, then you know that's something to pay attention to. If you have one person who has an unbelievable experience, that's great. But if you have 12 of them that have an unbelievable experience, That makes all the difference. To pay attention to, at least.
[00:09:05] Ray Latif: And what if 12 people say, I don't like this aspect of the brand? Do you start changing it immediately or do you really have to evaluate how that feedback fits into your overall strategy?
[00:09:16] J.W. Wiseman: Have you ever heard the Daft Punk song, Harder, Faster, Better, Stronger? Of course. Sure. Our work is never over, Ray. Our work is never over. And we're never done formulating. Like this pomegranate Negroni Spagliato that you're drinking right now, Curious, number one. I've been through 97 different versions of this, roughly.
[00:09:35] Ray Latif: So it's not necessarily number one. It's number one asterisk.
[00:09:38] J.W. Wiseman: Yeah, 1.97 is the version. Because we want everybody to have the best possible experience. And if we keep refining and refining and refining, constant improvement, almost like Toyota's production line, nobody's going to be able to touch us from a quality perspective. And quality is what's going to ultimately drive velocity. Yes, branding and money and all of those things, awareness, you have to have those too. But if you don't have the quality first, it's going to be fly by night.
[00:10:03] Ray Latif: Quality also elicits loyalty. And I imagine that 700 became 800, 900, 1,000, 10,000. But it's all done direct to consumer and common sense or just general rules of business in the beverage industry would say that you can't scale in glass via direct to consumer. But that's exactly what you guys did.
[00:10:27] J.W. Wiseman: Right.
[00:10:27] Ray Latif: How?
[00:10:28] J.W. Wiseman: Well, part of it was choosing our packaging design very carefully. I wanted to have stubby bottles that would be more robust when you're shipping them via UPS all over the country. And we worked really hard with our corrugated manufacturers. Our damage in the early years was probably like 3% of boxes getting damages. Now it's about a half percent or less. And so that refinement with our corrugated partners really made a big difference overall. Also, you have to take care of the people who, when they do have a problem, you got to send them another box. But if you take care of it upfront so that you're not getting much breakage, then you don't have as much customer service costs or fulfilling again. So that was a big part of it. But I think the biggest thing that enabled us to scale is no digital marketing inside and out. And that's really the critical skill. Like that's where I came from. That's a lot of my background in addition to being in the bar industry was getting customers to convert online and then telling their friends about it.
[00:11:22] Ray Latif: I want to talk about the shipping aspect beyond breakage, because it's heavy to ship glass.
[00:11:28] J.W. Wiseman: Yes.
[00:11:29] Ray Latif: Certainly there are other brands in food and also in beverage that have to ship in glass. If you think about wine in particular, pasta sauces maybe, but heavy beverages in glass always seems like it's going to be that those costs are going to land on the consumer. How did you manage shipping costs so that the consumer wouldn't be paying through the nose for your products?
[00:11:52] J.W. Wiseman: When we first started, the customer was bearing all of the cost of the shipping. And we found that when we moved to a flat rate shipping cost, and where we're subsidizing a few dollars in the price of the beverage, that that conversion rate went up by almost a full point. It was a big, big shift. People are still willing to pay for shipping as long as you're going after the right consumer. If you're going for lowest possible cost consumers, like if you're going for a super low margin, low cost beverage, it's not going to work, right? You can't ship to everybody that way. But we just started that from day one. Like we're going to charge from shipping. We kind of explained to the customer, these are glass bottles coming in a box. It's going to be a little bit pricey, but we're going to cap it at $9 per box for you. Even though it costs like $14 to ship to you. So that was a big part of it. It's like, we've have to stick to this because it's the only way that we're going to be profitable. And we were profitable since year one, because frankly, we charge a premium price and you have to build that into your business from day one. It's a lot easier to charge more money upfront and lower your costs as your cogs get better than to charge under what it costs, just so that you can get the sale and lose money on it. That's a good way to go out of business. And I have no interest in that. Is that business 101?
[00:13:07] Ray Latif: Yeah. Top line growth has been the most important or one of the most important aspects of a business, especially from an investor standpoint. But being profitable from the get go doesn't happen very often. And I think In addition to being really frugal and focused on your costs, you also have to be convincing to that consumer to want to buy your product, to want to buy your product more than once. And the digital marketing aspect of what you're doing or what you knew and did well is something I think our listeners would want to hear about. Acquiring that consumer and the cost of acquiring that consumer can always be time-consuming, resource-consuming. How do you do it efficiently? How do you make sure that you're reaching that consumer in a way that's going to resonate with them, but also do it in a way that's cost-effective for your company?
[00:13:57] J.W. Wiseman: Well, I think it all starts with, why should someone buy your product? And One thing that I think a lot of people miss is it's not just about the quality. People are going to remember how your products make them feel much more than how they taste. When you're using herbs and adaptogens, we're able to make that argument to people like, Hey, this Curious No. 1 with rhodiola is going to help you unwind without alcohol. And it does. That's what people remember. And when you're trying to go out and acquire customers, Remember that it's about how you make them feel, not just how it tastes.
[00:14:32] Ray Latif: And not just the ingredients in there as well.
[00:14:34] J.W. Wiseman: Right.
[00:14:34] Ray Latif: A lot of people try to sell and educate about ingredients, but at the end of the day, it's really about what this product does for you. Yes. The function, for lack of a better word, is the real selling point, not necessarily the ingredient.
[00:14:48] J.W. Wiseman: Yes, absolutely. And I learned that from doing marketing on Daily Harvest and on other brands. When we tried to do acquisition campaigns that were focused around ingredients or farmers or supply chain, nobody gave a shit. What they care about is what does this do for me? You know, if I'm a middle-aged woman who's looking to drink less, am I going to feel younger because I drink this? And the answer is yes. If you are a dude who's going out and wants to work out really hard on your body, are you then going to go and have like 200 calorie beer? Are you going to have something that actually helps with your muscle recovery? That's why we launched Curious Zero, our Lion's Mane lager. It's going to make you feel like you're having something adult after you're going through your day. And that's something that's really, really important, I think, to literally any beverage out there. It's all about how you make people feel. OK, so the message is clear.
[00:15:35] Ray Latif: How about the platforms? Where were you marketing Curious Elixirs? Where were you talking about the brand? And how did you know you were talking to the right people?
[00:15:44] J.W. Wiseman: Well, we started with Facebook, obviously, Instagram, you know, TikTok didn't even exist at this point. We wrote off Twitter completely, to be totally honest, because we knew that the conversion rates weren't there. Our people weren't there. Lots of browsers on Twitter, not as many buyers. The buyers were really coming from Facebook and Instagram and from the early press that we got. That's a lot of where those people came from and what enabled us to grow from those first 700 to now over 10 million elixirs sold. Amazing. Is Facebook still effective? Yes, Facebook is still effective. I will say that this year in 2026, for pretty much every brand we talked to, it's been a slog, but we don't spend a dollar unless we get $1.50 back. We just don't do it. So our budgets on meta have slowed a little bit this year, but we're still spending money there for sure. Still a profitable channel, but it's not as profitable as it was even two years ago.
[00:16:39] Ray Latif: You don't spend a dollar unless you can get $1.50 back.
[00:16:42] J.W. Wiseman: That's for our models. Some places, you know, when we first started, it was, we don't spend a dollar unless we get $1.30 back. But now with costs rising, we needed to adjust our return on ad spend target up to $1.50 to make sure that we're going to stay in the black. Cause every dollar we make goes back into this mission. Our mission is to transform how we drink socially and cash is oxygen to a business. If you don't have it, You're dead. Right. Got to have it.
[00:17:08] Ray Latif: Cashflow is really underrated in any aspect of CPG. It seems like everyone always wants to raise money, raise money, raise money, but then you have to give up something when you raise money, whether it's a piece of your business or control of your business. And have you had outside investors? We do not have any outside investors. And you've built to this point where if you could share revenue for Curious Investors? Every year we're doing eight figures of business. So we're over 10 million. Amazing. Amazing. Just going back to how you got the word out about Curious Elixirs, you mentioned press. Sometimes it's difficult to get press. I mean, in the industry, within our industry, there's a handful of publications that you can talk to and amplify what you're doing. BevNET, Taste Radio being one of them.
[00:17:49] J.W. Wiseman: Yeah.
[00:17:50] Ray Latif: For consumer, it might be a little more difficult. How do you get press or how did you approach consumer press such that you could attract attention from the writers and editors that could amplify what you were doing with Curious?
[00:18:06] J.W. Wiseman: Well, one thing I did was put on my calendar four days a week for an hour just outreach to different journalists and tastemakers. Okay. Four days a week, one hour a day. And this is something that, you know, it's kind of like going to the gym. Like if you start finding the people who you think they're going to resonate, like your story is going to resonate with, and you help them understand your story, then some of them are going to put it out there. So it's a little bit about just doing the work to find the right people and continuously pushing that story out there. Another one is you have to think about the story that you actually want to come out, write it down, and be like, don't bullshit yourself. Like, is this compelling? Is it not? And sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't, depend on the audience. But you have to put yourself out there continuously. You know, we're lucky now that we have awesome PR people that we work with. But in the early days, it was just a small merry band of people doing this, and we had to do it all ourselves. In the early days, you don't have to outsource everything. You know, some people like Jeff Bezos say, like, only focus on what makes your beer taste better. And that's great when you're established for a couple of years. But in the early days, you kind of have to juggle 25 balls at once. And you just have to know that you can't drop the glass ones and the rubber balls, you can let those drop sometimes. How long was it just you running the company? Oh, I mean, I've had help from the very beginning. I mean, in terms of food scientists, herbalists, marketing partners, things of that nature. But it was a small band of about four people from the beginning. How many people work for the company now? We're about 30 people now. Okay. Pretty significant. That's funny. It still feels like the second inning to me. Yeah? Yeah. Why? You know, we're 11 years into a 40 year mission. That's what it takes for generational change. And for Curious, you know, our mission is that 20 years from now, when I'm at my daughter's wedding, they're raising a glass of Curious champagne right next to the alcoholic champagne. That's the vision that we're looking at is where it's just, that's just normal. That's just normal so that you're not just saying like, Oh, we have a glass of Dom here and, and that's what we do for the toast. No, what we're looking for is something where alcohol and non-alcoholic premium options exist side by side. Everybody's happy. It's a very inclusive mission. That's what we're trying to build here. And so that's why it's important that we not vilify alcohol. I love alcohol. It's just that I loved it too much and I needed to reevaluate my relationship with it. And so that's why we started this and. Now it's pretty amazing to have dozens of people help us on this 40-year mission.
[00:20:33] Ray Latif: Well, I think we're getting a little bit closer, at least on the beer front, right? Yeah. I think what's interesting to hear from you, JW, is that you have a vision as much as you have a business perspective. Is there one that's more important than the other? I mean, do you really have to have that passion for generational change when you're building a business? Or do you really need to be focused on the tactics that you need to be successful from day to day?
[00:21:00] J.W. Wiseman: It depends on the outcome that you're aiming at. If you're aiming for a five-year exit, maybe your mission isn't as important. Maybe it's all about tactics and strategy. And that's okay. For us, we're not necessarily looking for that exit. We're open to it, but it's not the core mission. We would only be open to it if it would achieve the mission. The mission has to be in harmony with the business, because they really have to coexist.
[00:21:28] Ray Latif: I'm curious if strategics want to hear that. Let's say Constellation came to you tomorrow and said, Hey, we want to invest in your brand or even better maybe.
[00:21:36] J.W. Wiseman: Yeah. They came to us years ago. And we're like, thank you so much. Pretty much every major strategic you can think of has approached us at one point, usually in the early years, you know, like years two, three, they're like, Hey, we really like what you're doing. And I'm like, thank you so much. Can we talk in five years when we're a little bit more established? Because we still have so much learning to do. We have a ton of learning to do about how to make retail work properly. And we're just at the beginning of that, frankly. We work with a few distributors, but we need more distributors. And we're doing that slowly, methodically, rather than going for crazy distribution scale right out of the gate because we don't have venture capital, private equity money. We're trying to take things slowly and realize that it's okay for us to grow like a tree with really strong roots. And that's kind of the philosophy since day one.
[00:22:23] Ray Latif: I think there are some parallels between speaking to investors about your perspective on the potential for this category and that of retailers as well. So I think retailers, number one, want to hear that your product is going to turn on shelf, that there's a reason that they're going to take another brand off and put yours in. It's just because your brand should be selling more. I don't think they want anything that's a 1 to 1 replacement. They want a 1 to 1.5 replacement or 1 to 2 replacement in terms of velocity. But what helps sell that perspective? Can you point to D to C sales? Can you point to the loyalty that you have among your current consumers? What's helping sell that retail story as much as it is the investor story potentially?
[00:23:06] J.W. Wiseman: It is the loyalty. It is the direct consumer. We have an army of several million people across the country that enjoy Curious getting it straight to their homes. And when they see that on shelf at specialty retailers, and increasingly at bigger retailers too, they're like, oh, right. I love this brand. I follow them on Instagram. And now that it's here, I'm going to try it. And some other people, they'll see it on shelf and they'll be like, oh man, I've been getting Curious No. 9, their rosé, subscribed to my house, but I'm going to try their red wine now because I see it on shelf at this fancy wine spot in Colorado. These are real stories that I've heard from people. And when they hear that and then they see it in real life, when you already have this genuine following across the country, it just makes it easier for them to say yes. And we do have a lot of data that we rely on to help with that. What specifically in that data gives the retailer buyer confidence? Some of it is just going to be like, oh, wow, they have 2000 direct-to-consumer customers. within a five mile radius of this store. Okay, great. Yeah. I have a high degree of likelihood that they're going to come and shop at my store and we'll even put an email and a social campaign behind that on a micro level, if we need to. That's something that we're definitely down to do is we want to help that retailer or that restaurant or that hotel make more money. That's a big part of our business too. Like as a former bar owner, a lot of people are drinking less when they go out. We're helping to replace that revenue at hotels and restaurants. That is massive. If you can bring an extra five to $10,000 to a restaurant per month, That's a whole nother employee or two. That makes a big difference to their bottom line. And I think for retailers, one of the things that we love doing is sampling because people love our products. They love drinking our elixirs, but they take a little bit of education. So we love putting people in store to have them try our stuff because it's a little different than something you've had before, right? There's nothing else on the market like this.
[00:25:05] Speaker: Yeah.
[00:25:05] Ray Latif: I'll play devil's advocate for a sec. So if I were an investor who said, JW, I think you have an amazing company. I love what you're doing. I don't know if I'm fully on board with retail because you're doing so well with D2C. You told me earlier that 90% of your business is coming from D2C and you're profitable. And to look at where the business is right now, yes, there's potential for growth at retail, but you're doing so well doing what you're doing right now. There's potential for cannibalization of D2C sales. True.
[00:25:35] J.W. Wiseman: Why pursue this as much as you're attempting to pursue it? It's all in service of that mission. And there are plenty of people, you know, I think recent statistics are something like maybe around 20% of people will shop for groceries and drinks online. So that's a huge number of people that we're not serving. where we could be helping to achieve that mission over the next generation that we're not reaching online. More and more people are starting to shop online, but there's still a ton of people who just love going to their grocery store, and we need to serve them too.
[00:26:05] Ray Latif: Let's talk about grocery channels or retail channels. We're here at the Specialty Food Show. I imagine that Curious Elixirs would be killing it at any specialty retail store. And specialty and natural and conventional, they're all kind of blurring. You know, you think about a store like Wegmans, which is one of my favorite retailers. Love it. I can definitely see Curious Elixirs as being very appealing to any of their shoppers. But what about say the Target opportunity, the Walmart opportunity, Costco? Again, I think there's real potential for Curious at those stores, but in what order? How do you think about? channel strategy as it relates to your overall retail strategy?
[00:26:43] J.W. Wiseman: Sure. Well, we start at the top end of the market first, and that's why we went after restaurants and on-premise first. It's kind of taking a page out of Fever Tree's book, right? Yeah. It's like, go really hardcore into on-premise first, then start to get into hotels, start to get into specialty stores. And places where they have an educated, deeply nerdy, like workforce that really cares about every ingredient. That's the through line for the first parts of the chain of retailers that we're talking about. Then you start looking into more of like the natural stuff. And we're just at that point now where we're starting to approach places like Wegmans, where we're starting to approach some of these amazing stores. I went to school in Ithaca, New York, so Wegmans and Danny's favorite sub is very close to my heart, literally and figuratively. But we're just starting that now. And so, again, we love talking to people and we love learning from them. For places like Target or, you know, some of the bigger places, Target approached us maybe six or seven years ago, and we just said, guys, we're not ready yet. We're not ready yet. And we're not sure that from a macro level that people are ready for premium non-ALK yet. But they are now, you know, and they're getting there. And so now we're starting to see which retailers we're going to make custom variety packs for, which ones we're going to make custom formats just for them, make them something special based on their needs. But we need to learn from them too. You know, it's not just all about like what we've got going on. We need to hear what they've got going on and deeply listen.
[00:28:11] Ray Latif: I'm sure there's some concern that if Target approaches you once, that they may not approach you again. Now that you're ready for Target, are you knocking on their doors or are they still coming back to you?
[00:28:24] J.W. Wiseman: We are starting to have conversations with some of these bigger places. But again, it's like, we need to deeply listen to them when we're talking to them and get their feedback. And then we'll come back and build them something special.
[00:28:37] Ray Latif: I'll be honest, I love this Curious No. 1. It is delicious. I feel like at the end of an evening, I typically try to avoid drinking alcohol and certainly in the earlier part of the week, but I do want an adult beverage, an adult-ish beverage. And so I think the Curious No. 1 would definitely fit into my life on a pretty regular basis. I see that same potential with other brands as well. I mean, let's be honest, there's a lot of adult non-alcoholic cocktail brands out there. How much do you think about the competition? Does it affect you? Does it impact your strategy in any kind of way?
[00:29:12] J.W. Wiseman: It does. And I have to thank every single brand that has come out after us because they're helping to educate the whole market on the opportunity. We're one small scrappy band. without investors. We can do a lot, but when I see somebody like Athletic come out, and I had Bill on my podcast a few years ago, I don't think anybody's doing more than they are to help justify the existence of this category. And so I have to say thanks to them. But it also, when I see these competitors come out in the cocktail realm, I also see what's not going well. like red wine. I still not have found a good non-alcoholic red wine, so I had to create one. Preach. Preach, JW.
[00:29:56] Ray Latif: I take that back. I don't want to sound like there's no good red wine out there. I just feel like it's—a lot of it, a lot of it has been lacking.
[00:30:04] J.W. Wiseman: Yes, particularly in mouthfeel and in dryness and tannins, that kind of complexity. And that's why I spent two years working on our first Curious Red. It's a Syrah, it's a medium-bodied wine, and we didn't make wine and then strip out alcohol. What we do with all of our drinks is we layer flavors on top of each other until it's delicious and complex and has a beginning, middle, and an end. And for Curious Red, it took 24 ingredients to get to the complexity of a typical Syrah, of a typical premium red wine. And so that took a long time. That took, I think it was 88 versions. I mean, it was a lot of versions to get there, but it was really, really critical to me that it felt in your mouth like a red wine where you swirl it around and you can almost chew on it a little bit. And we were able to get that medium body. The thing that's going to be, I think, challenging over the next few years is like, could we get it all the way to full body to Cabernet Sauvignon? Maybe. But it took us two years to get the Syrah right. So jury's still out on that.
[00:31:07] Ray Latif: Yeah. Well, we touched on this earlier when we were talking about Target and opportunity versus focus. The opportunity that you have to create a stellar non-alcoholic red wine versus the opportunity to continue to scale with your cocktails. How do you balance opportunity and focus?
[00:31:26] J.W. Wiseman: Well, by having some guardrails in place. You know, our guardrail is we release one new flavor a year. Of? One new flavor of anything. Of anything. Yeah. So we've released 11 flavors in 11 years. So that way we know that Okay, we're going to be able to focus on refining each of our existing flavors and launch one new one every year. That way we don't get too bogged down in launching huge seasonal endeavors and stuff like that. Now, maybe 10 years from now, we'll be doing that. But right now we're still establishing our core. You know, I have one more flavor to round out our first dozen. And beyond that, it's just going to continually be constant refinement. That's the guardrail that we have in place so that we're not diluting our focus with too many side quests.
[00:32:10] Ray Latif: Yeah. And I'm sure it's really fun as an entrepreneur to continue tinkering with and making new flavors and making new products all the time. So fun. Yeah. But at a certain point, you've got to get to a point where you're like, we've got to stay on track. Otherwise that vision that you were talking about may hit some stumbles and you may trip over some rocks that you don't want to trip over. And I'm sure you've run into a lot of problems over the past.
[00:32:33] J.W. Wiseman: So many rocks we've tripped over.
[00:32:35] Ray Latif: Yeah. So for the past 13 years, what's been the most problematic part of the business? What's been the hardest challenge that you've had to overcome?
[00:32:45] J.W. Wiseman: The hardest challenge that we've had to overcome, I think, is convincing people who have made their living on alcohol that this will not cannibalize their alcohol sales. And that's something that we continuously do with people in the bar industry. Because a lot of times, especially with people drinking less alcohol, some of them will be like, oh, these non-alcoholic assholes, like they're coming and stealing everything. And we're like, no, we're here to help you make more money just because people's behaviors are changing. Yeah. And when they're changing, that's when you have to adapt and innovate. So that's the biggest obstacle that we continually come into is people with preconceived notions of, like my own partners in the whiskey bar were like, maybe I just don't get it, but I make my money off booze. And, you know, to their credit, they said, yeah, maybe I just don't get it. And I was like, no pressure, guys. There's plenty of other places where we're going to go and sell into. And that's something that we find over and over again. But there's been plenty of other obstacles, you know, along the way, whether it's an elderberry shortage during COVID or freight going through the roof at that time. There's plenty of other ones for sure.
[00:33:52] Ray Latif: It's interesting that the bar and folks in the alcohol business. So I was at a bar last night and I ordered a Negroni and I ordered a non-alcoholic cocktail for my guest. And the Negroni was $19. The non-alcoholic cocktail was $18. And both were fantastic. Nice. But I imagine the margin was probably a little bit better on the non-alc.
[00:34:14] J.W. Wiseman: You'd be surprised. Yeah? Yeah. I mean, we design all of our drinks to make that same 75% margin for any bar, restaurant or hotel. Okay. Because I came from that business and I'm like, this is what they need to make money. So we have to design everything to fit their needs, not just ours, but theirs.
[00:34:31] Ray Latif: But at the end of the day, both drinks tasted amazing. And I think that's really where it starts. And ends is if you have a product that tastes really good, objectively tastes amazing, that is a non-negotiable. That is what they call table stakes in our industry. Yes. How do you really know though, when you have something that's going to hit? Because it may taste great to you. You may have focus groups and you may have people within your tribe, your loyal consumers that say, this is awesome. But how do you know if it's going to actually take your brand to where it needs to go to broaden the audience, to really achieve, again, that big, hairy, audacious goal that you have for yourself?
[00:35:08] J.W. Wiseman: I think it's better to have a super passionate but slightly smaller group of consumers that love you than it is to have everybody kind of like you. So we focus on going deep with our most passionate people. And the same thing goes with our restaurant and hotel partners. There's an amazing hotel in Mountain View, California called the Ameswell, and they were a very early adopter of Curious Elixirs. And they're selling dozens of cases a month because they merchandise it on their menu the right way, and because they have more and more people that are coming to them wanting to have something non-alcoholic. So part of it is making sure that you have the right displays, the right merchandising, and making sure that the whole staff knows what you do. And a lot of that is just the blocking and tackling of doing tastings and educating people. so that you can have that super passionate group of people that are going to be an extension of your marketing team. That's how we think about our retailers and our partners. They're an extension of our team. Our job is to help them make money and to help us get out there. And as long as the value chain is aligned, it works beautifully. But there's a lot of grind that goes into that. And you get these retail partners on board and get them excited about your brand, how? A lot of it comes through digital marketing, but also through like brand ambassadors in market. We also sell in places like FAIR, you know, and AirGoods. And then we also have our first few distributors in a few of our select markets, where we're kind of still in the learning phase there, and then applying those lessons to the new markets that we bring on.
[00:36:40] Ray Latif: Well, I was hoping you would say, we give them those really cool jackets that I'm wearing that are sort of members-only-ish. But sequined. But sequined, exactly. Well, you know, J.W., I loved when you talked about being loved and beloved by a small group or smaller group of customers than being kind of loved by a large group. And I think that's a great way to wrap our conversation. There are so many founders that come into this business and they always see the big brands or the small entrepreneurial brands make it big. You think about the poppies of the world, lesser evil, hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars sold. And at the end of the day, they all started out being something and being that awesome thing to a smaller group of people before they took that next step. And I think that's where you are, but I really see a huge future for Curious. And I'm really excited for that future. So thank you so much for being on Taste Radio with me today, because I feel like we're going to look back on this conversation a number of years and say, Hey, we got them when they were kind of small. Thank you so much for having me, Ray. That brings us to the end of this episode of Taste Radio. Thank you so much for listening. Taste Radio is a production of BevNET.com Incorporated. Our audio engineer for Taste Radio is Joe Cracci. Our technical director is Joshua Pratt, and our video editor is Ryan Galang. Our social marketing manager is Amanda Smerlinski, and our designer is Amanda Huang. Just a reminder, if you like what you hear on Taste Radio, please share the podcast with friends and colleagues. And of course, we would love it if you could review us on the Apple Podcasts app or your listening platform of choice. Check us out on Instagram. Our handle is bevnettasteradio. As always, for questions, comments, ideas for future podcasts, please send us an email to ask at Taste Radio.com. On behalf of the entire Taste Radio team, thank you for listening. And we'll talk to you next time.
[00:38:43] Speaker 1: you
