July 12, 2010 / by J Smoke Wallin / Make A Comment / Filed under Brand Management, Distributors, New Products - Brands, News, Pelican Brands
I’m very pleased to announce our partnership with William Chase and his distillery… as laid out below, William has created an exciting brand platform and everyone at Pelican Brands is very excited to bring these hand crafted brands into the US. I look forward to tasting you on the Elderflower Liquor… you won’t believe it!
FOR RELEASE Monday, July 11, 2010
Chase Distillery Appoints Pelican Brands as Exclusive US Brand Manager for its Range of Artisan English Spirits and Liqueurs.
In partnership with Chase Distillery, Pelican Brands today confirmed its appointment as the exclusive brand manager for Chase’s super premium spirit portfolio in the U.S market with immediate effect.
Based in the heart of the Herefordshire countryside, Chase Distillery is an English artisan spirits company, founded by UK Entrepreneur William Chase in 2007 and a distiller of the “World’s Best Vodka”, as voted by the San Francisco World Spirits Competition 2010 – and indeed the only English potato vodka in the world.
Pelican Brands is the fastest growing full service brand platform in the global beverage industry, based in Carmel, IN, USA. This deal represents a further significant step in the development of Pelican’s portfolio.
“After two years of successful growth we are now being sold in some of the most prestigious of venues in the UK such as The Ivy, The Ritz and Harrods. We also secured the accolade of the “World’s Best Vodka” at the prestigious and globally renowned San Francisco World Spirits Competition, and we do now feel the time is right to enter the US market,” said Will Chase, Founder and CEO Chase Distillery. “Success in the US is the benchmark for all spirit brands and businesses like ours and as such it is a fiercely competitive market. It is critical that we enter the US with the right partner and we have been extremely impressed by Pelican Brands’ people, processes and ambitions.”
J. Smoke Wallin, Chairman & CEO of Pelican Brands, said, “We are building a very exciting and powerful portfolio of spirit brands and the opportunity to partner with the ‘World’s Best’ vodka was too good to miss. More important than the awards is the deep integrity and care with which Chase brands are made. I am delighted to be working with Will and his team and looking forward to future successes.”
Pelican Brands will launch Chase Distillery’s flagship brand Chase Vodka and Chase Elderflower Liqueur – which gains its genuine quality from the fact it is made with Chase Vodka – in key markets in the US in September with full national roll outs planned soon thereafter. Other exciting brands from the Chase portfolio will be launched in due course.
Chase Vodka - Voted #1 in the World
“Pelican sets much store on the integrity of its brands and brand partners, and so we are delighted to be working with Chase Distillery,” said Don C. Hammond, President of Pelican Brands. “We all know just how tough the vodka market is but there is always room for a brand made with genuine care and attention. Chase Vodka needs no hype – just taste it and you will know why its been voted the World’s Best. I am also excited to be bringing Chase’s premium liqueurs to the market: I know that our partners nationwide, be they distributors or retailers, will be just as enthused as we are when they discover what happens when you make liqueurs using only the finest ingredients and the World’s Best vodka as your base. No-one else is doing this. In fact the response to our initial presentations in key markets has been overwhelmingly positive, the like of which I have rarely if ever seen” Mr. Hammond, who began his career with P&G and Gallo and ran McCormick’s Spirit Division, continued “I look forward to presenting Chase brands to our distribution partners very soon.”
Media contact:
Caroline Clarke, T: +44 (0)121 262 4062, e:caroline@williamschase.co.uk, www.chasedistillery.co.uk
Notes to Editors
About Chase Distillery
Chase Distillery is located on owner William Chase’s farm in the heart of Herefordshire countryside, approximately 150 kilometres North West of London. The distillery is housed in a converted hop kiln barn amongst 400 acres of rolling fields of potatoes, apple orchards and Herefordshire cattle.
The genuine quality of Chase Distillery’s products comes from the home grown ingredients and artisan methods used to make them.
William Chase’s journey into making vodka began in 2004 when he discovered potato vodka and how different it is from the usual grain variety and he was convinced he could do better because he could grow, mash and distil his own potatoes on his farm to create a genuine quality product with true pedigree and provenance. After selling his multinational crisp business, Tyrrells, he sourced the very best handcrafted equipment consisting of a large copper pot still and a one of a kind 70 foot rectification column (the tallest one in Europe) and built his own distillery by converting an old hop kiln barn on his farm.
The distillation process Chase uses is very traditional in its approach and one which early 1900s vodka distillers would be familiar with. The process is rather laborious but allows for total control of the quality of the products. All products are bottled & labelled by hand at the distillery.
The first bottle of Chase English Potato Vodka was launched on April Fools’ Day 2008 and took two years in the making. It was the first and still remains the only English potato vodka in the world. It’s made from potatoes grown on William’s farm in Herefordshire – varieties Lady Claire and Lady Rosetta. It takes 16 tonnes of potatoes to make 1000 litres of pure spirit (96%ABV). The distillery can even tell you which potato field your bottle of vodka comes from. They also encourage a sense of eco-spirit by using the waste potatoes and peelings to help feed their Herefordshire cattle and the stillage to help irrigate the fields. Each bottle has less than one drink mile because the potatoes and grown, mashed and distilled on site. The distillery has the capacity to make 3,500 bottles a week.
Chase potato Vodka has a smooth and creamy taste. It is designed to be drunk neat, usually straight from the freezer, but it can be drunk at room temperature to enable you to taste all of the subtle aromas. Their award winning Chase Elderflower liqueur is made with Chase Vodka giving it a genuine luxurious quality and velvety finish.
Chase Distillery is very much a family run business consisting of a handful of staff, two of which are William’s sons; James and Harry.
For more information about Chase Vodka, the Distillery and William Chase
Please visit www.chasedistillery.co.uk | Become a fan on Facebook: search for ‘Chase Vodka’ to find their page: www.facebook.com | And follow Chase Vodka on Twitter: www.twitter.com/chasevodka
About William Chase
William Chase, with his origins as a potato farmer, set up a successful premium potato supply business to retail multiples. In 2001 he established a premium potato chip business called Tyrrells Potato Chips, and quickly capitalised on its artisan nature to become one of the largest suppliers of premium potato chips in the UK. He sold the majority of the shares in Tyrrells Potato Chips in 2008, a deal which very much captured the imagination of the UK national press. He has since focused on Chase Distillery, which has firm aspirations to become one of the leading global niche premium spirit brands.
About Pelican Brands
Pelican Brands was formed to nurture and build brands in the global beverage alcohol space. Pelican Brands’ team and partners have extensive experience in the global beverage and consumer packaged goods industries. www.pelican-brands.com Pelican Brands is headquartered in Carmel, IN and offices in the United Kingdom with a sales team covering the U.S. market.
April 12, 2010 / by J Smoke Wallin / Make A Comment / Filed under Brand Management, Distributors, E-commerce, News, Pelican Brands
I’m posting the Kane’s article from Fall 2009 tracking some of my activities and discussing the launch of Pelican Brands… now that we have begun adding a strong platform of brands, I thought it was relevant to share this as we articulated our strategy well here.
Kane’s Beverage News Daily
Volume 5, No. 184 The National Beverage Daily™ Monday, October 26, 2009
In Today’s Issue:
- Meet Smoke Wallin: Former Amway Salesman Thinks This is a Great Time to Get U.S. Rights to Singha Beer, Expects to Grow Its Sales Five or Six Fold
- Only 4 States Had Increased Beer Shipments in September
- How Europeans Drink Differs from Country to Country
- F.Y.I. — Voters Trust Republicans More Than Dems on 10 Key Issues: Rasmussen
Meet Smoke Wallin: Former Amway Salesman Thinks This is a Great Time
To Get U.S. Rights to Singha Beer, Expects to Grow Its Sales Five or Six Fold
Why in the world would anyone launch a new company in this economy? Even more to the point, why would anyone take a small, ethnic beer and confidently expect to grow its sales five or six fold in just a few years?
That’s exactly what J. Smoke Wallin is doing. And he’ll tell you this is a great time to do it.
Wallin has been around the alcohol beverage industry long enough that nearly everybody knows of him.
But if you don’t know he grew up on Longboat Key, the nicest place in all Sarasota to live, or if you don’t know that while in the seventh grade he won second prize in a science competition for a writing a computer program in BASIC on a Commodore 64 that took the user through a series of questions about the solar system and then scored them on a test, well, you just don’t know Smoke Wallin.
And you won’t understand why he thinks his new company, Pelican Brands, a national sales and marketing company set up to manage beverage brands throughout the U.S. and Europe, will do well.
First Client: Singha, Thailand’s No. 1 Beer Export
Pelican’s first client: Singha, the No. 1 exported beer from Thailand. Wallin thinks he can grow Singha’s sales to five or six times their present level. And that technology will let one person do what it used to require five people to accomplish.
“The appointment of Pelican Brands represents a very important step for Singha in the U.S. market. We expect Pelican Brands to have an immediate impact on our brand distribution and to position Singha as a leading growth import for the coming years,” said Theera Vongpatanasin, Managing Director of Boon Rawd Trading International.
Says Wallin, “Singha is an incredible brand which deserves focused attention from distributors, retailers and national accounts. It has all the right characteristics which, when properly promoted, will drive excitement and ultimately, consumer demand, in the better beer market.”
Adds Mark Smith, Pelican Brands vp-marketing, a marketing veteran of the global beer industry: “Singha is an incredible beer — both its flavor profile and rich traditions capture the exotic and beautiful country of Thailand. This makes it well positioned to appeal broadly to the U.S. consumer well beyond the Thai channel. The growth of Asian fusion restaurants across the U.S. creates a compelling platform for the expansion of Singha.”
Peddling Amway
Wallin’s first entrepreneurial venture was far from alcohol beverages. While a youth on Longboat Key he and his brother, Clay, who’s now at Vintank a Wine Industry Strategic Consultancy, sold Amway products.
“I learned that Clay is a better street sales person than me as he basically cornered the market in our neighborhood,” says Wallin. “I was always better at looking at the bigger picture,” he adds.
Soaps and detergents lost their appeal by the time he went to Cornell University where he shuffled between the university’s famed School of Hotel Administration, engineering and the School of Agriculture & Life Sciences with a degree in Agricultural Economics.
While studying hospitality management, he worked during summers at Longboat Key’s famed Colony Beach & Tennis Resort, the Tropicana in Atlantic City and did an nine-month internship at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Boston while also taking classes at Harvard before returning to Cornell.
When he got out of college, he was torn between working in the hospitality industry and the consumer packaged goods industry.
Resetting Wine Sales
As luck would have it, he was dating Karen LaCrosse, daughter of Jim LaCrosse, owner of National Wine & Spirits in Indianapolis. That may have helped him land a job with Joseph E. Seagram & Sons as a retail account manager. He spent the summer driving around Indiana in vans, putting up posters for various Seagram products.
That led to two job offers: one from Seagram and another from National Wine to be a salesman selling wine to groceries. Wine wasn’t big in those days. Wine sections were shrinking and the business – or at least the grocery segment – was controlled by E&J Gallo Winery.
Gallo had convinced grocers to set their shelves by brand, which helped Gallo. But with wine sales slipping, Wallin argued grocers would get better results if they set their shelves by varietal rather than by brand. “I reset my entire territory from a brand set to a varietal set in a year,” he recalled.
It was the first of a series of entrepreneurial moves Wallin made while at National Wine.
$10 Million Sales from $1.5 Million
LaCrosse won the right to distribute Perrier and a couple of mixers. National was using a brand management strategy, one of the few wine and spirits wholesalers to do so back then. “I had the opportunity to be the first brand manager for the nonalcohol division,” he recalled. He added a number of other products, including Clearly Canadian waters, created a home and office delivery company and took the unit to $10 million in sales from $1.5 million. It was sold to Nestle after 10 years.
Wallin went to Vanderbilt University for an MBA. Meanwhile, back in Indianapolis, LaCrosse had acquired Union Beverage Co., gaining entry into the Chicago market.
“My second year of business school, I was actively managing the category management efforts and MIS group at Union Beverage from school.” Many weekends classes would end on Thursday, and he’d fly to Chicago, where he would work on revamping Union’s technology before heading back to Nashville Sunday night.
National Wine acquired Federated Industries in 1993, two years after acquiring Union Beverage. It had become clear to LaCrosse that the wine and spirits distribution industry was entering a period of consolidation – first at the state level, then regionally and ultimately nationally.
Jumping Right In
Coming out of Vanderbilt’s Owens School of Management, Wallin was considering two job opportunities: One with Boston Consulting Group (BCG’s founder, Bruce Henderson, was a professor at Vanderbilt at the time) and the other with National, where he would head NWS’s Corporate Group and deal with the Federated acquisition.
“BCS was very appealing to me because of the level of intellect among the team and the type of business issues they worked on,” Wallin recalled. But he had the opportunity to “jump right in and deal with a several hundred million dollar acquisition of Federated.”
Over cocktails in Chicago, he discussed his dilemma with Phillip Kotler, a well-known marketing professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. He knew Kotler because of his work with Union. Should he be a consultant with Boston Consulting or jump right back into National Wine?
“Smoke, a lot of guys with five to eight years at BCG would love the opportunity to do what you’re able to do now,” Kotler said.
Backing a Startup
Meanwhile, National was backing Joe Fisch, who was starting U.S. Beverage in Connecticut. “Joe had a clear vision of what he wanted to do with USB that was quite similar to what he had done at the Seagram Beverage Co. National was the capital behind this effort, and I led that investment.
“We worked with Joe to set up the back of house, systems and financial infrastructure in place. We placed two of my corporate team members – who were also classmates from business school – into USB to manage this aspect,” Wallin recalled.
Critically for his future, Wallin spent a lot of time with Fisch, going to Europe when USB got the rights to Staropramen and Tennents and, later, Hooper’s Hooch from Bass Brewers.
Eventually Wallin became chief financial officer of National Wine. When Michigan privatized its state liquor wholesale operation, Wallin was able to put together the deal that led to NWS Michigan, which today ships about $400 million of product a year.
Talking to Wall Street
National had been using its bank lines of credit to expand its business, and in 1999 it hit the limit. Wallin worked with Donaldson Lufkin & Jenrette, a Wall Street investment banker, to put together a bond offering that raised $110 million. The banks were paid back, and National had cash that it could use to buy some more distributorships.
But Jim LaCrosse decided he wasn’t interested in expanding, Wallin said.
“I was always about building things,” Wallin said. Disappointed, Wallin stayed involved with National Wine, and continued to rise in the Wine & Spirits Wholesalers Association becoming president in 2002-2003 and chairman of the board in 2003-2004.
But his next move had its roots in that seventh-grade science project in Longboat Key. Wallin raised $60 million from various investors, including National Wine and created eSkye Solutions, which became the leading provider of wine and spirits software and Web-based solutions for the beverage industry.
After the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, he was able to buy several companies that made software for wineries. Some 250 wineries were using eSkye’s software to run their business.
In 2007, he sold the software business to Constellation Software Inc., Toronto, Canada. But he kept eSkye and the National Account Price Manager software. It turned out to be a smart move: National Account Price Manager handles all the pricing and product synchronization between six of the largest brand owners in beer, wine and spirits, their distributors and Wal-Mart.
Meanwhile, eSkye is working to expand its footprint to on-premise so suppliers can manage pricing for accounts like Darden Restaurants, Brinker and Outback.
Becoming a Supplier
Meanwhile, that hankering to be involved in consumer packaged goods, which Wallin put aside after graduating from college, kept gnawing at Wallin. He conceived “a different kind of platform – a sales and marketing company that understood wholesale distribution, that would be good for brand owners and wholesalers.”
What Wallin wanted was to pick up some smaller brands from major spirits companies – brands that were too small for top tier suppliers but which could be profitably grown by smart management.
“We bought Red Eye Bloody Mary Mix opportunistically. But before we could do the next couple of deals, the financial system melted down,” Wallin recalls.
Meanwhile, Wallin was consulting with several suppliers, including Boon Rawd Brewery. A family business, Boon Rawd was the first Thai-owned brewery in Thailand, and it had a solid niche in Thai restaurants in the U.S. Boon Rawd’s owners wanted to expand beyond that niche to get into national accounts in the U.S.
‘Great Beer from Exotic Location’
“I told them, ‘Your beer is a great beer from an exotic location’,: Wallin said. And he thought expanding beyond Thai restaurants should be doable. “After all, you don’t go to a Dutch restaurant to drink Heineken in the U.S.,” he said.
One reason for his optimism: Thai food, and Thai-influenced food, is popular in the U.S. “We feel strongly we can grow Singha’s business to five or six times their base,” Wallin told us
Wallins is announcing the creation of Pelican Brands this morning. Pelican is using independent brokers – including Anheuser-Busch and MillerCoors houses. It has 60 brokers and is in all 50 states.
Meanwhile, Pelican’s sales team, led by Don Hammond, president, is calling on national accounts. Hammond began his career with Procter & Gamble and Gallo, and ran several major beer wholesalers. Already Pelican has secured placements in 446 accounts, including 26 cruise ships operated by Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines as well as Mongolian Beef, Ghengis Grill, Studio Movie Grip and World of Wings restaurants.
Pelican is focused on building Singha as quickly as possible. In addition to Wallin and Hammond, the team includes Stan Mace, director of sales, who helped build Bavaria, and Carlos Barone, director of national accounts, who worked with Wallin at eSkye. “We’re looking to fill in the team as we go along,” Wallin said.
Self-Funding a Start-Up
Where eSkye involved significant outside capital, Pelican is completely self-funded. “I’m being very cautious about adding overhead. I believe by using smart technology we can do with one person what would have taken five people only a few years ago,” Wallin said.
For example, when visiting a distributor, Pelican’s staff knows the 50 top accounts in the territory. This lets Pelican sales people be very focused, rather than going in randomly.
Wallin noted that his first 14 years were spent on the distributor side of the business. “I know these people very well, and relationships matter a lot. But it’s much more powerful if you’re informed by technology.
“Technology makes it easier to do business. As an industry, we’re still way behind other industries.”
Today it’s all about Singha, which Wallin describes as “a great family company with a great brand. It’s not like we’re dealing with a startup. You’ve got to be able to support the brand,” he says, “and we’ve got that resource in hand.”
Wallin and Karen were divorced a few years ago. Wallin’s new wife, Anitra, owned Michael’s of Cherry Creek, a fine dining restaurant in Denver. She won a Wine Spectator Award for her wine list and “is a total wine/food person,” Wallin says. An accomplished singer/songwriter, she also runs Wallin’s Wine 2.0 (www.winetwo.net) events, including next month’s Wine 2.0 New York.
March 15, 2010 / by J Smoke Wallin / 1 Comment / Filed under 2010 Event, Distributors
I usually try to keep this focused on relevant issues I see in the industry that deserve being called out or discussed in some greater detail. Those of you who have read my posts will know that once in a while I will reflect on something or in this case, someone, who has made a big impact on me. This was a tough week. I was at Bar & Nightclub for their annual shindig in Vegas, where I met with business partners, potential customers and spoke on two panels about what brands might be next in the wine, spirits and beer business. I’ll post later on about this as I think it is a very good topic for discussion and attention.
DUSTIN DRAPKIN
I found out on Tuesday that Dustin Drapkin, a 23 year old rising star passed away while in Aspen at his family vacation home. See his obit in the NY Times here. This was more than shocking to me. Dustin had graduated undergrad from the U of Penn Wharton school last year. I met him through his father Donald Drapkin whom I met while raising money for a new liquor brand I was the consulting on and acting as CEO. Donald is the Vice Chair of Lazard and an incredibly accomplished individual. We met first at the Four Season’s restaurant in NY for lunch. During the course of our conversation we discussed our families and he told me about Dustin. Dustin was described to me as a very smart, free spirited individual who was looking for the right career path out of school, but was an unlikely fit in a standard corporate setting. I immediately became interested in meeting him as I was looking to put a small team together to launch the spirits brand.
Dustin and I met at the Cornell Club in NY for lunch. During the course of our first, 2nd and 3rd subsequent meetings at the Cornell Club, I was struck by Dustin’s raw enthusiasm for life and living. We hit it off and I gave him a provisional offer (pending funding of the company) prior to his graduation trip abroad over the summer. I have rarely seen anyone as enthusiastic about any new project as Dustin was to join my team. His energy was infectious. When the owners of the new brand abruptly pulled the plug on the project, one of the hardest conversations I’ve ever had was to let Dustin know we would not be moving forward last August. I told him that I could not predict when or exactly what, but down the road there would be opportunities for us to do things together. We agreed to stay in touch.
By November I was back in NY for Wine 2.0 and reached out to Dustin to see what he was up to. It turns out, he and some friends were using their music industry background to create the “world DJ league”… he was very excited about it and I told him I’d be happy to help in any way I could. Dustin and a friend attended Wine 2.0 NY and then the next day, we spent about 5 hours together discussing his new business, listening to my wife sing and another friend play piano and generally enjoying life.
Dustin Drapkin and Smoke Wallin
I agreed to join his board and to help mentor him as they progressed. Little did I know that was the last I’d see Dustin.
I did receive a call from Dustin in January telling me he had been accepted into the French Culinary Institute and that he was pursuing his dream to be a chef. I unfortunately, never had the chance to speak to him again. Dustin died way too young. His friends put a group together on Facebook “why I’ll always remember Dustin Drakin” which has some nice pictures and memories. My heart felt condolences go out to Donald and Bearnice and the whole Drapkin family.
RAY TYE
On Friday I received word that Ray Tye had passed away at 87. Ray was an incredible individual and someone whom I admired greatly coming up in the wine and spirits industry. Ray had almost “Pope-like” qualities and respect from everyone who knew him. There has been much written about his great philanthropy to needy kids and causes. His Boston Herald obit is here. Ray was one of Boston’s and frankly this country’s greatest philanthropists. I got to know Ray beginning in from afar in the late 1980s and then up close in the mid 1990s through the middle 2000s. As I was coming up in the leadership at the Wine and Spirits Wholesalers of America WSWA, Ray was always a steady and wise voice in the room who’s counsel I greatly benefited from. One other great thing about Ray was his son Micheal Tye. Micheal and I became friends through WSWA and he was a real forward thinking individual. While I know he and his father had a falling out at one point, they had reconciled and Michal had rejoined the family firm (United Liquors) prior to his untimely death, also from cancer.
WSWA past presidents, including Ray Tye (4th from left) and Smoke Wallin
A couple of shots of Ray from WSWA days…
I’m heading to Boston in the am for Ray’s service. Although I’m sure Ray and Dustin never met, I believe Ray would have instantly taken a liking to Dustin as I did. My wish is wherever they are, if it is possible, that they meet. One man who accomplished so much in a long and prosperous life. Another who in a short short span, showed so much promise. They both had a tremendous effect on those who were blessed to meet them. Rest in peace gentlemen.
My thoughts are with you both.
Ray and Eileen Tye in St. Lucia at WSWA exec retreat
