[00:00:10] Ray Latif: Hey folks, I'm Ray Latif and you're tuning into the number one podcast for the food and beverage industry, Taste Radio. In this episode, we feature an interview with Brett Berish, the co-founder of Sovereign Brands, an international wine and spirit company known for developing innovative and fast growing brands, including Luc Bellaire and Bamboo. Just a reminder, if you like what you hear on Taste Radio, please share the podcast with friends and colleagues. And of course, we'd love it if you could review us on the Apple Podcasts app or your listening platform of choice. He's one of the most successful brand creators in the wine and spirits industry, but until recently, Brett Berish was happy to avoid the limelight. 22 years ago, Brett, whose family has long ties to the spirits business, launched Sovereign Brands, a brand development company that's responsible for the massively successful super-premium champagne brand Ace of Spades, along with premium cognac brand Douce. Hip-hop icon Jay-Z acquired the former in 2014 and also acquired a stake in Douce, which is now co-owned by rum giant Bacardi. The company's reputation for creating massive hits continued with Luc Bellaire, a line of French sparkling wines that, according to measured sales data, is the fastest-growing premium sparkling wine brand in the U.S. and the fastest-growing French sparkling wine in the world. Sovereign Brands also the owner of Bambu, a critically acclaimed craft rum from the Barbados and the best-selling brand in the U.S. premium rum category, as well as McQueen and The Violet Fog, a small-batch gin from Brazil. Despite remarkable success, Brett will explain that his most valuable lessons came from failure. Reflecting upon the most challenging times during his career has motivated him to become a more visible presence in the spirits industry with an aim of mentoring and advising young entrepreneurs about what it takes to persevere amid constant setbacks and struggles. In the following interview, Brett chronicled his journey as an entrepreneur, including what he learned from his failed vodka brand, how innovation and category fit into his philosophy as a brand creator, how he aligned with hip-hop artists, including Rick Ross, to promote and grow Sovereign Brands, and why he recently decided to partner with one of the largest wine and spirits companies in the world. Hey folks, it's Ray with Taste Radio. Right now, I'm very excited to be sitting down with Brett Berish, who's one of the co-founders of Sovereign Brands. Brett, how are ya?
[00:02:41] Brett Berish: Fantastic, Ray. Thanks for having me on Taste Radio.
[00:02:44] Ray Latif: Yeah, thanks so much for joining us. I always dress up for these things, but typically I'm wearing a button-down blue shirt and a hat, and I see you're wearing a hat right now. You're jealous of me. Yeah, I feel like I'd feel more comfortable if I was just wearing my normal attire. Yeah, is that your normal attire? Is that what you normally wear during the day?
[00:03:01] Brett Berish: Yes, I basically years ago, I just gave in, I need to feel good. Does that make sense? Yeah. I mean, were you a suit and tie guide? It's been a long, long, long time. So I gave into my my other side. And this is me.
[00:03:17] Ray Latif: This is the me I always wanted to be. That's good. That's good. You know, if you can't be you, what are you trying to do? Exactly. In your background, you have many beautiful bottles. I'm assuming all of them are Sovereign Brands or Sovereign Brands owned.
[00:03:34] Brett Berish: Today, my portfolio is four brands that we manage and own and run. So four brands today.
[00:03:42] Ray Latif: Nice. And, uh, you have created more than four brands, some very notable ones, some very high profile acquirers. We'll get to that in a moment, but you know, let's talk about your, how you cut your teeth in this business, because even though you have a family lineage in the beverage alcohol business, you were kind of a late bloomer in getting into it.
[00:04:05] Brett Berish: My dad was in the business for 45 years, was at the same company his whole life. My mom's family was a distributor in Madison, Wisconsin. My brothers and I grew up in a family that my dad has no hobbies, I have no hobbies. My dad only talked about liquor at the dinner table. That's all we ever knew. And I feel like we were just born into it. But in a unique way where I like to say, I never worked in the industry, And I tend to look at things from an outsider's perspective, and I think it's a good thing. So I always look at it as I understand enough. And sometimes when you're too close to something, you don't see the opportunity.
[00:04:44] Ray Latif: Yeah, I hear that. And I think, you know, if you're thinking about getting into a profession or getting into a career, you have to be really excited about it sometimes. And probably the monotony of hearing about the liquor business or beverage alcohol night after night after night, you're like, maybe I want to do something else. But eventually you did come to it.
[00:05:01] Brett Berish: Ray, for me, it was just the opposite. I loved it. I had an idea in a minute. I had so many ideas. I think I wanted to do, my dad will say it, that I wanted to do 100% agave before that was a thing. And I was back in grade school and I had an idea, just the opposite. My dad didn't want us to be in this business. He thought there were things that are easier out there. He wanted us to do something in finance, which I actually did. He didn't want us to do brands, to touch anything. He liked the idea of focusing on things that had nothing to do with tangible assets, just had to do with financial. But I loved it. I always loved it.
[00:05:41] Ray Latif: You were thinking about 100% agave tequila when you were in grade school? Correct. Why?
[00:05:47] Brett Berish: I swear I had ideas. I thought there was room for this is actually Patron is probably maybe not grade school, probably high school. Patron is probably 30 years old. And I don't know, I just, I saw opportunities. I saw unique things, try to tell unique stories. And I thought I was into tequila. I remember going to Mexico. I had older brothers. They would drink all the time. And I thought a hundred percent agave is a cool angle. Like this idea of a hundred percent agave, which wasn't a thing, you know, 30 plus years ago, that wasn't the thing. So, but I remember all that. My dad just shot down every idea I ever had.
[00:06:24] Ray Latif: That's really interesting because I think most people today would think, oh, all tequila is 100% agave. But back then it wasn't. What was the other component to it?
[00:06:33] Brett Berish: It wasn't 100%. You'd mix in. You'd mix in. And there's still brands. There's tons of brands in Mexico that are wonderful that are not 100% agave. But you'd mix it. It wasn't 100%. This is with grain alcohol? Yeah. Or just not the same process. You're not making it the same way. But I think like any premium product, you need that hook or that angle to tell a different story. And it makes a better product. But I got in it late, as you said. I was in my 30s, lost. I tell people all the time, I completely lost, didn't know what I wanted to do. I was the kid who had a billion ideas and never focused on one, therefore never did anything. And it wasn't until I just, I remember I have a couple of moments in my life that changed me. One was just saying, screw it, enough. I'm going to do this. I'm going to launch a liquor company, Sovereign Brands. And I went and just did it. And I just stopped focusing. And I was always afraid, Ray, of if I focus on one thing, maybe I'd miss out on opportunities or I wouldn't have any more ideas. And that's just the opposite. Not only do I have more ideas, but I get to do what I like. So you can do both.
[00:07:42] Ray Latif: It's awesome. Sovereign feels like an interesting name choice for your company. And I wonder how much of it speaks to the independence that you were trying to find in the business.
[00:07:54] Brett Berish: Yeah, my mom actually named it. My grandfather had a company called Sovereign, Sovereign Coffee. And I didn't even know what the hell sovereign meant. And she says, why don't you call it Sovereign Brands I looked it up and sure enough, this is it. You know, it's Sovereign Brands to be on your own. It's your own island. You're doing your own thing, a sovereign nation. And to me, I need to be inspired. So little things like that are inspiring. Like there's a feeling you want to give or an inspiration you want to give. And brands are like that for me, too. There's the story they tell, the name they have. Everything is an inspiration. So Sovereign Brands one of the inspirations for me. It's like my team and I and our company and we're 130 now are on our own. We're doing our own thing. If I think back what we're doing today is no different than we started 21 years ago which is I wanted to do new brands. I want to develop new products. I think and I always say this new products in in any industry. But let's be specific to ours is the lifeblood of an industry. You know, it creates excitement, it creates new users to a category. Look what it's doing for, you know, hard sell, sir. To me, it's inspiring. It's the hardest part to do it because you're developing something from scratch. You're not taking a legacy brand and trying to do something. It's everything that I wanted to accomplish. The difference for me was, Ray, in a perfect world, I'd love to own all my brands and I would have owned all my brands. I just didn't have the capital. So to me, it's been everything I've done is kind of a stepping stone to get to this point of having multiple brands and now hopefully to have even more brands. But it's just, you know, everyone's got their path to get there. Mine was I got to take little steps to get there, to get where I am today.
[00:09:47] Ray Latif: Your first step was in the vodka business. You launched a brand called Three Vodka. First of all, why three? And then second of all, what inspired you to get into vodka?
[00:09:59] Brett Berish: It's such a good question because it takes me back. Nothing's changed, meaning I don't pick categories based on research. I don't look at stats. I don't follow trends. It's more about, do I think I can make a better product in the category that I'm interested in? And at the time, I thought I could do something better in the vodka category. It was a great product. I like to tell people, Brand doesn't exist today, but it's my most successful brand because it allowed me to do everything I'm doing today. I learned from it. I think that's the big mistake that people make is making mistakes is the biggest form of getting to success. The problem is. you don't give yourself time to get there and you move on to some new category of something else that you're not familiar with. So you just lost all that opportunity, you know. But 3 was a great brand. It was distilled from soy. It was the first of its kind. It had a unique story. The taste was better than everybody else's, I felt. The name came to me. I wanted to call it 3. 3 is the magic number. 3 has huge meaning. There were so many elements of 3 that made sense. It was also during the time, if you remember, When brands like Yellowtail came out and every single supplier in the world was naming their product after an animal with two names to it. So I just want to do things differently. I want to set my own tone.
[00:11:27] Ray Latif: It's a pretty unusual concept to distill, well, anything from soy. And I assume that was one of the pain points in getting the brand off the ground and introducing it to the industry and then hopefully convincing end consumers to buy the product.
[00:11:46] Brett Berish: Clearly anything that's new when it comes to product itself is hard because no one wants to do it differently. No one wants to change their distillation process. No one wants to find another grain. No one wants to distill it differently. And that's what we pride ourselves on. I'm good at problem solving. I'm good at trying to figure out a new way or a new idea. So that was solved. I think my bigger issue was And I tell people this all the time, you know, if you want to do something on your own, you've got to trust your instincts. And I think that was my mistake is I just started listening to everybody else's opinion and I didn't trust my own. I have a saying today, you know, and I tell my team all the time, if anybody's going to fuck it up, it's going to be me. I want that mentality. That's what I live by. Those first six years or five years, I didn't hold that. I didn't own that. So if you told me, you know, I have a brand Bel Air, this black bottle, this is now, it's about to become the number one premium wine or sparkling champagne in the United States. We sell more product than anybody else in the world, in the US. But when I launched this and showed it to the trade, they said, you're nuts. Don't do rosé. You're launching rosé first. You should do a brut. I didn't want to. I wanted to do rosé first. Don't put it in a black bottle. You can't see the liquid. Your price point, you can't compete with the likes of Moet and Vu. the guy 21 years ago would have changed everything. I would have not trust my instincts. I would have, I would have launched a brute. I would have put it in a different bottle. I would have changed my pricing. And that's, that's the hard part of any entrepreneur is you got to trust your instincts. You're I'm in this for a reason. I got to believe in what I'm doing. So that's the biggest, that was my biggest downfall is just not owning what I wanted to do. And I listened to too many people.
[00:13:38] Ray Latif: So if I'm hearing this correctly, you think that 3 Vodka would be a success if you stuck to your guns? Yeah, I think it'd be a huge success.
[00:13:46] Brett Berish: Because to me, all my brands, the one thing that they have in common is I do believe they taste better than other competitors. I think that's, I have to have that. I'm not a Diageo, I'm not Bacardi, I'm not Pernod. I don't have the money of those guys. And what I always come down to, I have to win on taste. If I went on taste, you'll come back. That's where it starts. That's where it ends. That's the end all the product tasted amazing. And on top of it, and then the other things you fill in the story was amazing, you know, distilled from soy and gluten-free and different than all the other products out there. I remember Maxim magazine called it the healthiest way to get shit faced. You know, we had so much story to it, but the execution, I didn't trust my instinct. I didn't trust what we should be doing. But I also learned. Learned things like, you know, how to build a brand in the U.S. context with 50 different markets and how to work with distributors and how to, you know, we should be leading. Just lots of little things that I, that to my core, you know, 21 years later, we're still doing. Nothing's changed.
[00:14:55] Ray Latif: It's exact same blueprint. Everything's the same. I think it might be surprising for folks to hear this, given that, you know, your dad was the CEO of Jim Beam Brands, a long history in the liquor business, and probably giving you some of the advice that you heard, I could be wrong, but someone who knows what it takes to be successful in the business, was he really influential in how the brand was initially developed and how it was, well, I guess how it was molded into what it became? It's a great question, Ray.
[00:15:31] Brett Berish: I think there's two sides to it. One from the product itself and the storytelling. My dad is amazing. The passion he has for this industry, the excitement you see it in his eyes, you just feel it. So that's in our brands. That's there. I think the difference, the biggest difference, and he would say the same thing is My dad running a company like Jim Beam, he can't do what I'm doing. And I can't do what he did. It's just not possible. Building a brand from a little tiny, you know, one person, two people, three people growing company is completely foreign to someone like that. And I think that's where you can't trust that 30-year executive who's been at the same company forever. You can't trust those comments because that doesn't exist at my level. Does that make sense?
[00:16:24] Ray Latif: It does, which leads me to another question, which I was going to get to later on in our conversation. But since you brought it up, Sovereign Brands recently entered into a partnership with Pernod Ricard. in which Pernod Ricard holds a minority stake in the company. Now, with that partnership, I assume you're going to have to be talking to those people who are 30-year executives in the business. And even though Pernod, I'm sure, will benefit Sovereign Brands terms of distribution, marketing, etc., it seems like a relationship that wouldn't have existed or that wasn't in your purview.
[00:17:00] Brett Berish: I look at it as trying to always look at things from the best of both worlds. To me, it's nothing's changing. They can't do what I do and I can't do what they do. It's just like my father. Nothing changes. However, if I can pull elements that can get us there faster or new brands or new initiatives where I can leverage what they're good at, then that's a positive. The way I always look at it is you can't put a square peg in a round hole. It doesn't work. But how do you maneuver it so that you can do it? And that's what my job is now, is how to take advantage of the relationship. The difference as well is this wasn't to me a transaction. Transaction is something that's it's born out of necessity or it's there's a cause and effect. To me, this was an organic relationship, and that's what I believe in and everything we do in my business, the way we we perform. This is an organic relationship that they see what we're doing. They get it. They understand it. They appreciate it. This was a courtship that took a long time, so there was no rush. This wasn't some end game here. So to me, then it becomes even more real. You know, it's you don't jump in marriage. Marriage takes time. That's what this is. So now I know I can get something out of this in a positive way for both sides. When I interview somebody, my brother does the same thing. We tell them everything negative about us. The positive is easy. I can sell anybody. I want you to know everything bad. I want you to know exactly what you're getting into. I know I want you to have no surprises, none. Like tell me the bad stuff because then when you get in bed with me, it's easy. It's easy. That's what I got. I know what the bad is. I know what the good could be. But I kind of, you know, I'd wise open. I know exactly what I'm getting. And I think what's what's different is that I say this from our perspective and give kudos to Pernod. You know, most people in who develop new brands, as you know, Ray, they have one brand. They sell it and they're done. Right. We're unusual because I think I'm on my sixth brand between Ace of Spades, Duce, Bel Air, Bamboo, McQueen and now Vione. I'm on my sixth brand. So we're building something unique and they get it. They get it. They see what we're doing. They see we're going to hit other categories. They see what's going on. And now can they add value? I'm sure I can.
[00:19:30] Ray Latif: I'm going to add value to them. Can they add value to me? You said Ace of Spades, which is arguably your most successful brand. It really shocked people into how you created a luxury champagne brand almost out of nowhere. Talk about, you know, where you drew inspiration for that, because at the time, you know, there were a couple brands that really represented that tier of champagne. And you came in and were like, really disrupted that category.
[00:20:00] Brett Berish: Ace is still an analogy for all the brands we do. So I mentioned Bel Air and the trade's reaction of, or, you know, don't do it this way, do it different, you know, it's, that doesn't make sense. It cuts to the core of everything we do. It's all the same. Ace was, how can you compete with Dom, Krug, and Cristal? It's not gonna work. Bamboo, you know, why are you focusing on premium rum? It's not a thing. We're now the number one premium rum in the United States. Bel Air, now enormous. It's all the same view. And I think maybe it's partly I have a chip on my shoulder. I look at it as there's a category I like. I'm consuming that product. How can I make it better? I think I can compete with those brands that exist already out there. If I can make it better, now surround it with a package and a look and a feel that makes sense for that brand. And it's birthed. I let it breathe. I'm so used to everyone saying no, that's the motivator. It's not going to work. But again, it does. And I think it's a compliment to our team and what we're trying to accomplish and how we go to market.
[00:21:09] Ray Latif: I spoke to a very accomplished entrepreneur in the beverage industry once and he's well known for creating brands. And when I spoke with him, he talked about a little pad that he keeps by his bed and that he'll wake up in the middle of the night or very early in the morning and just scratch out all these ideas on his pad and then either take action on them or not. And I'm sure he's got hundreds of ideas every week. So not all of them are gonna turn into actual brands. What's your ideation process for new brands? Well, when it comes to the liquid, I drink it.
[00:21:46] Brett Berish: So I'm at a big scotch kick right now. Huge. I love scotch. So I'm into the category. I'm tasting things. I'm trying things. I'm looking at things. That's where it starts, from a liquid side. So I'm getting used to it. I'm getting comfortable. I'm doing it. When it comes to elements of branding, it's inspiration. I'll see something I like. I'll think of an idea I like. I call it a bottom-up brand builder. We get all our best ideas from people who are in the market, who are talking, share with me, give me ideas. It's not about whose idea it is, it's about executing the best ones. So to me, they come from anywhere. I could see a bottle, a shape I like, and let's start crafting a bottle out of it. I'll see a logo I like, let's think about what we could do with that. And it's putting together and creating a story around it.
[00:22:40] Ray Latif: Well, helping to tell that story, interestingly enough, has been the hip-hop community. And you've aligned, or Sovereign's aligned with many hip-hop artists to help sell, or at least to help market your products. You know, I don't know where that started or how you, I guess, developed a relationship with the hip hop community. And maybe you can talk a bit about it. You know, notably, I think one of the first ways that you guys were involved in the business, or at least with hip hop artists, is with Jay-Z. who acquired Ace of Spades and later on, Ducey Cognac as well. But you tell me, I mean, like, when did you start to realize that hip hop artists were interested in your brands and how did you leverage that relationship to expand awareness and interest in Sovereign Brands?
[00:23:30] Brett Berish: The best way to put it is getting back to this idea of being very organic. I don't have a plan, and sometimes not having a plan is a great plan, because I believe in letting brands breathe. So everything to me is, if I use Rick Ross, people know Rick Ross and Bel Air. I never knew Rick before Bel Air. I introduced the brand, he was probably a year or two into it. Someone introduced me to Rick because he loved Bel Air. He was consuming it. He's drinking it. He's all over it. Okay, let's get to know each other. Let's figure out what we can do together. Now we started working together. It's 10 years. That to me is the example of everything we do, but not just hip-hop. It could be in sports. It could be in with a TikTok artist. It could be with a comedian. It could be there's someone we work with right now who's, she's an influencer, she's a comedian, she's an actress. I love her. Her name is Pretty V. I met her through my interview series and just her passion and the way she thinks about things, we just started talking. So everything to me is organic. I don't, as I said, I don't look at, you know, who's hot and let's go work with them. That's not how I want to operate. At the end of the day, I'm not in the influencer business. I'm in the liquor business. I'm in the wine business. I want to create a better product. So ultimately, I need to sell that. That's what I'm selling. That's got to work. I can have the greatest influencer in the whole world, the biggest influencer, but the product's not good. Who cares? It's not how it works. It is different. To me, it's, you know, there's a saying, Ray, in our industry, right? You sell it on-premise to build it off-premise, right? So if I, my plan, like everyone else's plan with Bel Air was, okay, I'm going to go build it in the on-premise. I'm going to spend a year focusing on this and these accounts. We didn't have a plan. We've just let it breathe. It's been nine years. We're 99% retail in the United States. We still haven't started on-premise. I'm a million case brand and off premise. Had I done it the traditional way of thinking, this is how it's done, this is the only way you can do it, I'd be wrong. So Bamboo is the opposite. Bamboo is more of an on-premise brand. But I don't have a philosophy that says, this is how you do it, and that's it. I just kind of let it breathe, and I'll figure it out. What I think we're good at, Ray, is constantly pivoting. So I talk about it from a perspective of my first brand, and we make mistakes every day, but we pivot constantly. We're aware of the situation. Why didn't this work? Let's change it. Why didn't it change constantly? Change, pivot. You've got to try something different. Everything is different, and that's what we're good at. So it's pivoting, pivoting, pivoting. Every day we're doing that. Every day we're learning. Every day we're trying things. I think the difference was those first, I waited five years to make a change. Can't do that today. You can't do that, especially with a new brand. You know, I treat brands and people hear me say this in my company. They're like children. You know, I have six. Literally, I have six kids. They're all different. You know, my son's great at math and horrible at writing. My daughter's unbelievable artist, terrible at math. What do you do? You focus on what they're good at. and you backfill later in what they need help on. Every brand is different. It's the same thing. So I feel like we're managing little children and we need to build them up over time until they have confidence to go out on their own. That takes time. So do I think it's luck? I think it's just really freaking hard work. And we're good at hard work. We don't assume any one thing is going to make a difference. I got to do a thousand things well. Someone said this to me, Ray, and I think it's a good one. It's improv. like a comedian, comedians really good at, and I saw this on an episode of a show once where a comedian tells a joke and then gets a reaction from the audience. And then the next day tells the same joke, but change a little bit because they played off what they think the audience now wants to hear. And it's a little bit funnier. Then they go back the next day and it's a little bit different again, but it keeps getting better. That's what we're doing. We're learning, we're pivoting constantly and trying to, what's working, what's not working, change it. What's working, what's not working, change it. That's what we do every day.
[00:27:58] Ray Latif: An entrepreneur once told me that if you're not failing all the time, you're not trying hard enough. I think the idea of failure, though, is something that's terrifying to a lot of people. Nobody wants to fail at anything, whether it be the smallest thing or the biggest thing. Are you comfortable with failure? Love it. I tell people all the time.
[00:28:19] Brett Berish: I don't know what it was, 12, 13, 14 years ago, I brought investors on, they wanted to wind up the company, they wanted to dissolve it because it wasn't working back in the three vodka days. And I remember calling my mother and telling her, you know, that this was going to happen. And she's, you know, she's crying and Brett, I'll sell my rings for you. I already had my, my bank accounts went by the IRS because I put all my money in the company and I stopped paying taxes. I had, I was being foreclosed on my house because I stopped paying my mortgage because it allowed me to put more money in the company. But I remember telling her I love what I'm doing. I love it. If I could just live, just live, just survive on enough volume to survive on what I'm doing, I'm happy. That moment is an inspiring moment because it's not about money and it's never been about money since then. It's about do I love what I'm doing? And am I honest about the situation I'm in? And the more honest I am, failing is a positive thing. And it's upside from there. So I love it. Every day I make mistakes. Every day I'm called out by my team or somebody saying, Brett, it's a bad idea. I love it. Tell me.
[00:29:29] Ray Latif: Did you end up asking for help from folks in the industry? Or how did you convince people, if you did ask for help, to believe in Sovereign Brands?
[00:29:41] Brett Berish: It's just the opposite, Ray. I think at that moment, I realized, stop freaking asking everybody else. Just go do it. Stop waiting for your father to help you. Stop waiting for your distributors to help you. Stop waiting for the trade. You got to just do it yourself. To me, that's what self-made means. You know, the idea that you got to make those decisions. You got to go put the hard work in. You got to go do it. It'll come. And other people will get on board later. They'll start helping you. But you've got to set the tone. You've got to make it happen. You have to. You've got to go do it. So that would be the mistake I think most people make is in making own decisions is, you know, what do you think of my idea? You're asking for help. What do you think I should be doing? Should I price it? Like, come on, make your own decisions. Go do it. Just go do it. That was the change for me. It's not asking.
[00:30:31] Ray Latif: It's just going to do it. going to do it and then adjusting as needed? For me, yes, 100%, 100%. You know, for someone, and this is a really phenomenal conversation, Brett, thank you so much for taking the time, but you know, I wonder for someone who is so confident in what they're doing and someone who has such a strong belief in himself, I imagine that it can be hard to convince you to change direction. And we talked about your staff and your team, who I would think that on some occasions have a different perspective than you on how to build the brand or how to extend the brand's reach. How do you get convinced? How do people convince you?
[00:31:16] Brett Berish: It's a good point. And I think the one thing I hope I'm good at, and I do all the time is telling my team to tell me when I'm wrong. Be opinionated, have conviction, have something you believe in, bring it to the table. I'm open to anything. You just got to bring it. And I do believe fundamentally that there's a better way. So maybe I may have an idea, but you may add to it. You don't I mean to me it's about having transparency transparency is life it's it's you know the more transparent I am and then if I can admit mistakes and I always do to my team and I'm wrong that's a positive thing because you're showing everybody boy he can he's he screws it up to. He screws it up. So I think giving transparency, you'll get it back. You'll get it back. People give their opinions. And then I'll disagree. You know, we're working on a new brand. And one of my guys brought up something that he thinks is an issue. I don't agree with him. But what's come from that is we now have a better idea. That's where it becomes fun. It's like, wow, look where we started, but look where we ended. You know, look at the change we made to get there. So you can listen, but you just got to pull apart the good stuff that's going to make it better. You know, I believe in that.
[00:32:38] Ray Latif: Is your team comprised of folks who have experience in the spirits business, or are you always looking for folks who have experience from other industries?
[00:32:45] Brett Berish: It's a good question. It doesn't matter from the sales side. They're in the business. Ideally, you want I want people that are familiar with the industry, but they can come from the beer side. They can come from the non alcohol side. We like that on the marketing side. I want people that have great skill sets. that add value. I learned early on, one of the best things I ever learned in my first job was hire people smarter than you. Scott, who's been with me forever, is an unbelievable wordsmith, writer. Oh, he kills it. You know, that adds value. So we try to find people that add a different element that we're missing. Because we're not doing things that, you know, typical, I heard somebody from Diageo, you know, we're not doing it the same way as them. But as long as they understand the fundamentals of what we're doing, then, you know, I always say take, I'll take two steps towards you, you take two steps towards me, you know, we'll get in the middle.
[00:33:40] Ray Latif: That's I mean, that's a really good way of looking at it, especially for people who have an experience or a career background that is very different than yours. I assume there's a lot of folks because you have a very unique career background and work experience. That being said, I think there's a next stage of your career that I envision. There's a next part of your journey that we haven't seen yet. And I just feel it. I don't know it. I just kind of feel it. And I almost feel like you're on the cusp of it right now. Am I right?
[00:34:07] Brett Berish: I don't know. I love what I do. I love our industry. I love my team. If I have no more ideas, it'll end. Fortunately, I've got more ideas that I want to accomplish. So I get more excited about the stuff that doesn't exist today that I know is coming and the stuff that exists. So it gives me a longer term view. That makes sense. I don't have a grand plan.
[00:34:30] Ray Latif: Yeah, well, I mean, I guess the way I was thinking of it is, you know, you've accomplished so much with these independent brands that it almost feels like you've created a mold for how to incubate innovative ideas. Are you looking at opportunities to help smaller emerging brands incubate? Would love it.
[00:34:49] Brett Berish: Would love to do. It's why I'm trying to get myself more out there. Would love to work with other people's small brands and make them bigger. Would love to do things and call it not in wine or spirits, but other consumer brands would love to do. We've talked about doing it, whether it's food, whether it's beverage. Would love to do it. But it's it gets back to that idea when I said earlier, you know, if you're good at one thing, other opportunities will come. So I want to continue to focus on my one thing and these other things will come, hopefully.
[00:35:23] Ray Latif: That's a really, really good way of putting it. Brett, you know, I didn't know too, too much about you. Obviously I knew your brands and I didn't know too much about Sovereign Brands I've learned so much just over the past hour. And I'm really glad that I have because you have such an incredible story. And I think once again, folks at a glance might say, oh, well, you know, he's successful because of this, or he's successful because of this, or he's lucky, or he's that, so on and so forth. And I, you know, even though there's sort of an amorphous quality to, you know, how you build brands, it's one that I think we can take points from and say, He's done this right. He's done this right.
[00:36:03] Brett Berish: When I was a kid, I wish there was somebody like me for me. You know, I like hearing people's horror stories of getting there. I don't want to hear about their success. I want to hear about all the shit that they went through that just sucked. Because I can relate to that because then it feels more real. My first six, seven years absolutely just bit. It was the worst. It was horror. Trusting people, believing in other people, waiting for other things. It's also, you know, half of it's my fault. I need to hear that stuff. It's motivating. It's why I'm, what got me to where I am. And I'm, I still own all that and it helps me going forward.
[00:36:40] Ray Latif: Brett, thank you so much again for taking the time to speak. So enlightening and so informative, and I'm really looking forward to sharing with our audience.
[00:36:48] Brett Berish: Thank you.
[00:36:49] Ray Latif: Thanks, everybody. That brings us to the end of this episode of Taste Radio. Thank you so much for listening, and thanks to our guest, Brett Berish. As always, for questions, comments, ideas for future podcasts, please send us an email to ask at Taste Radio. On behalf of the entire Taste Radio team, thank you for listening, and we'll talk to you next time.
