An Interview With Martita Mestey
Hire a team that helps to fill your blind spots.
One of the most important components of scaling a business to success is surrounding yourself with a team of people that fill in the gaps of knowledge you might have. Regardless of whether this is your first time launching a brand or you’re a seasoned entrepreneur, a successful founder can always recognize where they need support from team members.
As a part of my series about successful beverage brands, I had the pleasure of interviewing Brad Neumann.
As a veteran Executive and Operator in the CPG space, Brad brings over a decade of experience having worked for some of the largest beverage brands in the world. After holding executive leadership roles at both Anheuser Busch and Red Bull North America, Brad tapped into his entrepreneurial spirit and has been a part of launching 5 beverage brands since 2017. Two of which he was a Founder/Partner and was involved with concept ideation to retail execution and scaled both to successful exits within the past 3.5 years. As the President of Saint James, Brad will be an integral component to our strategy development, day to day operations and overall trajectory as we scale in the national retail space.
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 share with us the story of the “ah ha” moment that led to the creation of Saint James Tea?
There wasn’t exactly an “ah ha” moment with Saint James, rather just months of market research and surveying the rest of the category. Tea is the second most consumed beverage in the world behind water so in terms of an addressable market we knew that tea made a lot of sense. It also helps when your partner (John Ferolito) co-founded the largest privately held iced tea company in the world (Arizona Iced Tea). We saw that the top 5–10 players in the space were all on shelf with 30–50g of sugar, no one had an organic option and no one was taking any steps towards promoting sustainability. The ‘Better For You’ trend within emerging brands is not slowing down so we knew we had an opportunity to create a healthy product that checked all the boxes for both retailers and consumers, and Saint James was born. The first iced tea that is low in sugar, low in calories, organic, all natural and sustainably packaged in tetra pak.
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?
Like most industries, the CPG category uses a lot of abbreviations and acronyms that are really only relative to its respective industry. When I was working at Anheuser Busch as a Sales Director, I heard a specific acronym from a global executive and decided to try to use it in my own presentation weeks later. Of course my understanding of what it stood for was completely wrong and I sounded like an idiot to my entire department. Moral of the story is when you’re learning something new, whether you’re an intern or an executive, don’t be afraid to ask questions that will set yourself up for success.
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?
One of the biggest mistakes I’ve noticed people make when launching a food or beverage brand is underestimating how important investing in marketing is. Developing brand recognition and consumer loyalty is key to success from day one. To avoid this oversight, but still being strategic with your marketing investments, I recommend building out a very clear target consumer ahead of launch. Once you have an idea of who you want to reach, it’s easier to work backwards in developing a robust strategy that reaches that person from all marketing touchpoints.
Let’s 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?
The first step is to perfect your product. Make sure it’s good, and not just in your opinion, but beta test it amongst friends and family. The next step is creating a business plan that serves as a strategic roadmap for what the future of your company looks like. This will serve as your rule book once the company launches and is important to always reference and allow your company to evolve from.
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?
People always struggle with the concept of when the ‘right time’ is to start a brand or business endeavor, but the cliche answer is there will never be a right time. If you think you have a good idea, the best thing you can do is start to execute. There will always be hurdles along the way, but that’s something any great entrepreneur will face at some point in their journey to building a business.
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?
Building a business is hard enough to begin with so don’t try to reinvent the wheel. Find people that have done it before and leverage their experience. Every Entrepreneur has battle scars and war stories, whatever you can do to stay on your path should be seen as an advantage. Seek out experienced people in your industry, friends, mentors, peers or consultants and be a sponge.
What are your thoughts about bootstrapping vs looking for venture capital? What is the best way to decide if you should do either one?
Start up financing and retail strategy are very similar to me. When launching a brand or consumer product, find a small test market, prove that there is a need in the market for your goods/service by showing consistent and growing sell-through and the retailers will come to you. Fundraising should be executed the same way. Bootstrap it at first, show a solid proof of concept, then the VC pitches and fund raising conversations will be so much easier. A successful albeit small launch story will give Capital holders what they need to safely invest in you and your company instead of just pitching an idea.
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?
LinkedIn and a good Google search will go a long way. When you are starting from scratch — Google the top five vendors in each segment of what you’re looking for. Most of the time, they will include brands they currently service or work with, then you find a way whether it be LinkedIn or cold calling to get in touch with those brands and ask for their honest feedback. This is a tight knit and small industry, for the most part people will always try to help other brands where they can and this is a great way to get some key learning before ultimately making a mistake and signing with the wrong vendor.
Here is the main question of our discussion. What are your “5 Things You Need To Create a Successful Food or Beverage Brand” and why?
- Build a strong brand identity.
The food and beverage market is becoming a very crowded space with so many new product offerings and brands launching everyday. That being said, it’s so important to create a strong brand identity that customers want to associate themselves with. Founders and brands often talk about wanting to be a ‘lifestyle’ brand which is a term that can be interpreted many different ways and tends to be overused. The important thing when building a successful brand is having a strong sense of who your target consumer is and working backwards to develop a brand identity that is something they want to be associated with and feels like an extension of themselves in a product.
2. Create a product that offers something unique to consumers.
The product you want to sell has to offer something different than what’s currently available for consumers to buy. For instance, at Saint James Tea our product differentiators are transparent ingredients, sustainable packaging, and great taste. After looking at the RTD iced tea space we recognized that there wasn’t a product offering all of those things for consumers to purchase. One of the biggest mistakes I’ve seen brands make when launching is jumping into an already crowded space with nothing that’s really distinguishing themselves and the mentality that they will just make something better. Consumers will stick with what they know and it’s your job as a brand and founder to convince them otherwise, so you need a strong “why” behind the brand.
3. Hire a team that helps to fill your blind spots.
One of the most important components of scaling a business to success is surrounding yourself with a team of people that fill in the gaps of knowledge you might have. Regardless of whether this is your first time launching a brand or you’re a seasoned entrepreneur, a successful founder can always recognize where they need support from team members.
4. Develop consumer loyalty.
This is possibly one of the most intuitive suggestions in regards to how to succeed as a business, but it is imperative to the longevity of a brand. Many marketers and founders spin their wheels on driving that first point of purchase and reaching new consumers which usually makes them forget about creating systems of loyalty for consumers. While there are many ways that brands can go about building consumer loyalty — the easiest way is going back to that target consumer and once again identifying how you can build a brand and company that they want to associate themselves with.
5. Have a strategic retail plan.
While the landscape for selling food & beverage products has completely evolved with the growth of DTC and companies like Amazon, the importance of retailer relationships can never be underestimated. Gaining distribution in key retailers and developing partnerships with those accounts to ensure that your product is more than just another drink on the shelf is such an important sales driver. At Saint James we have the opportunity to work with such incredible retail partners, including Erewhon and Walmart, who have been instrumental in the brand’s success.
Can you share your ideas about how to create a product that people really love and are ‘crazy about’?
If you feel like there is a product that’s missing in your life and there is nothing else like it on the market that’s a great place to start. The next step is creating something that is going to stand out on the shelves in all aspects — packaging, quality, taste, and presence. The food & beverage market continues to become a very crowded space so it’s important to create a product that is intentional and adds value to a consumer’s life. Using this as a basic formula for building a brand and product is fundamental in developing consumer loyalty.
Ok. We are nearly done. Here are our final questions. How have you used your success to make the world a better place?
One of the many components of Saint James that I am most proud of is our commitment to sustainability. We use Tetra Paks created with low carbon materials and made of 70% paper from responsibly managed forests for each of our teas. Protecting our environment is of the utmost importance to our brand’s initiative, so I’m proud to say we are active in ensuring our products leave a reduced environmental impact.
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.
As a business leader, there are so many ways to inspire change but with Saint James, my focus has been minimizing our environmental impact, as touched on above, and making a better-for-you drink option that is more accessible to the masses. We use clean, all-natural ingredients and low sugar to ensure our product is a healthy choice in the space. And we have a commitment to transparency with our nutrition labels and packaging, in hopes that this inspires other brands to do the same. There really shouldn’t be another option in today’s day and age. We feel strongly that people should know what they are putting in their bodies and we want to be the drink that people can feel confident reaching for. We also strive to partner with larger retailers, such as Walmart, to help reach wider audiences.
Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.
Brad Neumann Of Saint James Tea 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.