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Nick Purdy Of Wild Heaven Beers On 5 Things You Need To Create a Successful Food or Beverage Brand

An Interview With Martita Mestey

Fight every day for quality. Institute a culture of permission to allow for critical analysis of processes. Test continually, and show your team that rejecting subpar product is not just ok but expected. A subset of quality: Consistency. Customers who find something they like will return to it if the experience remains the same. In our early days, we couldn’t absorb the financial hit of dumping a batch of beer that wasn’t perfect and, as a result, had some moments of customers letting us know that we should have!

As a part of our series called 5 Things You Need To Create a Successful Food or Beverage Brand”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Nick Purdy.

Nick Purdy spent 15 years as the Founding Publisher of award-winning pop culture media company Paste, called “America’s finest music magazine” by the Wall Street Journal, and a four-time National Magazine Award nominee. Purdy’s background is in marketing and media, including stints in advertising and consulting with Deloitte & Touche. Purdy founded media consultancy On The Square Media and has worked with various clients, including the Georgia Music Hall of Fame and NoiseTrade.com. Purdy has commented numerous times on CNN Headline News, the documentary Before the Music Dies, and other music-related TV projects. Today, Purdy focuses on the day-to-day operations of Wild Heaven Beers, a craft beer company he co-founded with brewmaster Eric Johnson 12 years ago. Through their decade-plus existence, they have created some of the most widely recognized beers highly regarded for taste, creativity, and branding. They have received global recognition and exposure for many beers on their roster, including Emergency Drinking Beer, Sunburst IPA, and Fauci Spring Ale.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory”?

My childhood was unremarkable! I grew up in the Atlanta area with two parents, a little sister, and a series of dogs. My passions were baseball and baseball cards. Later, music!

Can you share with us the story of the “ah ha” moment that led to the creation of the beverage brand you are leading?

I co-founded the music and entertainment publication Paste in 2002, and around 2008 realized that my passion for craft beer had a similar animating factor: the desire to get higher quality content and products out to mainstream consumers. The other part of the a-ha was realizing I’d rather sell beer than advertising and subscriptions as I entered my forties!

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

There were many, but one that sticks out is thinking I understood our business’s “cost” side. I really thought we’d captured everything in our business plan, having spoken to many folks with more experience. Unfortunately, it didn’t take long for reality to set in that we’d missed several things that would be monthly expenses — the most egregious one being simply that as a brewery, we use a lot of CO2 — like thousands of dollars of it per month. My ignorance of the industry was definitely a blind spot on some technical aspects.

What are the most common mistakes you have seen people make when they start a food or beverage line? What can be done to avoid those errors?

I’d say trend-chasing. Food and beverage is absolutely an active, constantly evolving space. Entering the industry based on what you’re seeing “now” is usually shortsighted. Instead, a business needs to have a crystal clear vision of what it can offer to the industry that isn’t already in significant supply. It takes creativity and accepting a big idea that isn’t “hey, this market is growing fast, let’s jump in!”

Lets imagine that someone reading this interview has an idea for a product that they would like to produce. What are the first few steps that you would recommend that they take?

Two types of validation of an idea or product are important. First, how easily are substitutes found in your market area? If the answer is “easily,” — then ask yourself specifically how yours can stand out and gain customers. Secondly, is your entry any good? Here you need to produce samples and have them evaluated by others that have no rooting interest in your success to ensure honest feedback. If they aren’t at the “wow!” level, it’s probably time to get back to the drawing board.

Many people have good ideas all the time. But some people seem to struggle in taking a good idea and translating it into an actual business. How would you encourage someone to overcome this hurdle?

This is, in my experience, often tied to personality and gifting. As an entrepreneur without any technical or artistic skills, I know I bring the energy and vision to get a creative idea off the ground and turn it into a business. My creative partners, the ones generating the actual products, generally would not likely have started the businesses. My encouragement is to find a good partner if the idea of doing all the work around actually launching a business (including fundraising) seems overwhelming.

There are many invention development consultants. Would you recommend that a person with a new idea hire such a consultant, or should they try to strike out on their own?

I have no experience in this area, but if a significant amount of the content your idea had to be purchased, I’d be skeptical of its value and, more importantly, of the value you are adding.

What are your thoughts about bootstrapping vs looking for venture capital? What is the best way to decide if you should do either one?

Fundraising is an area I’ve had success, though with limited professional financial training. Bootstrapping has value in terms of maintaining a personal vision and retention of equity, but it can often limit your potential. I’ve lived with undercapitalization, and it’s not ideal for long-term value generation. Venture capital is not common in the food and beverage startup space because the returns don’t tend to have the multiples VCs are looking for. This leaves you with two other options: debt and more of a friends-and-family type equity fundraising. We’ve done both. Having individual investors can bring a lot of value in terms of support and funding. Debt is good in that you retain equity, but obviously, you add the cash flow burden of servicing the debt (along with default risk). In the F&B space, private investors seem to be the simplest way to get an idea off the ground if self-funding is out of the question.

Can you share thoughts from your experience about how to file a patent, how to source good raw ingredients, how to source a good manufacturer, and how to find a retailer or distributor?

When finding suppliers of raw ingredients, you’re mapping several factors: cost, availability, quality, and freight costs (not incidental!). In our industry, there is a culture of being generous with information, and it’s usually a good idea to find out what others are doing. Your particular product strategy may require sourcing specialty ingredients that are unusual — in that case, it’s a matter of seeking out these suppliers and doing your cost/benefit analysis.

Finding a distribution partner is often a dance — the more powerful distributors tend to be able to dictate terms and be much more selective in choosing partners. In the world of alcohol, your distribution partner choice is generally very difficult to change, so meeting with as many potential partners as possible is worth the effort to find the best one to help achieve your goals. If your business allows for direct-to-retail, you have the additional burden of creating the infrastructure to service those accounts. Distributors do add that value for a cost. Whether you go through a distributor or not to get your products to retail, it’s your responsibility to build relationships with retailers as much as possible. The challenge is that each is different, and there’s no one simple way to optimize these relationships. Sales professionals are critical.

Here is the main question of our discussion. What are your “5 Things You Need To Create a Successful Beverage Brand” and why?

  1. Fight every day for quality. Institute a culture of permission to allow for critical analysis of processes. Test continually, and show your team that rejecting subpar product is not just ok but expected. A subset of quality: Consistency. Customers who find something they like will return to it if the experience remains the same. In our early days, we couldn’t absorb the financial hit of dumping a batch of beer that wasn’t perfect and, as a result, had some moments of customers letting us know that we should have!
  2. Create a mix of innovation and standards. In the food and beverage world, “new” is exciting and drives energy and engagement but is harder and more expensive to sustain. At the same time, standards executed at a high level provide a base to allow innovations not to carry the entire load. You need both. We release a new beer nearly every week to maintain the interest of fans, to learn new techniques, and to drive revenue from those looking for “what’s new” — but at the same time, our “big 3” beers, Emergency Drinking Beer, Sunburst IPA, and ATL Easy Ale are much bigger revenue drivers and the ones our customers go back to over and over.
  3. Be open to change. Sometimes a new idea can be “off-brand” but still be the right move. Our biggest success to date was with Emergency Drinking Beer. The design idea for the packaging was completely different than our brand’s vibe, but it was a once-in-a-lifetime label design, so we had to pivot and incorporate it, and we’re delighted we did.
  4. Know your “4 P’s of Marketing”. The tools we use may change, but paying attention to Product, Price, Place, and Promotion matters as much as it ever did. When all four marketing elements are working in concert, profit is the result (which is the primary goal for any business). Even if you are a “creative” or a “product person,” engagement with marketing is nothing to shy away from. What you sell, for how much, where you sell it, and how you’ll drive those sales are all separate problems — but it’s like a band: you need a guitar, bass, drums, and vocals to make the song work.
  5. Get out there! While chasing trends isn’t an ideal strategy, it’s vital to remain connected to your industry or vertical on two fronts. First, be where your customers are — the ones doing the consuming. Be one of them so you can detect shifts in preferences and potential areas of innovation. Secondly, engage with industry-specific sources of knowledge and best practices by attending conferences, reading, and building friendships that include sharing what you are learning. Be humble, ask a lot of questions and listen. I know our brewmaster, Eric Johnson, greatly enjoys his opportunities to interact with other talented brewers. There’s never an end to the good ideas that can be shared back and forth.

Can you share your ideas about how to create a product that people really love and are crazy about?

This is alchemy. I’m not sure anyone has a repeatable answer to this question. I know that for us, it’s usually a collaboration of people sharing a vision and positive energy that creates the space for ideas that can get our customers excited. Finding the right mix of talent to create an environment of positivity and possibility probably helps up your chances.

Ok. We are nearly done. Here are our final questions. How have you used your success to make the world a better place?

We certainly try. Our motto is “Serve Your Neighbor.” We do this by supporting local nonprofits, offering free meeting space to community development organizations, and creating a welcoming space in each taproom for family and friends to gather and celebrate the everyday joy of being alive.

You are an inspiration to a great many people. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.

I’d hope for a world where, as we consider all the important issues in front of us, we find a way to interact with and listen in good faith to those we might disagree with. We need to be more concerned with the best answers than being right.

Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.


Nick Purdy Of Wild Heaven Beers On 5 Things You Need To Create a Successful Food or Beverage Brand was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.