Latest / Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast) / Part 1: I’m developing a non alc wine brand (and it has no name!)

Transcript

Part 1: I’m developing a non alc wine brand (and it has no name!) · Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast)

• 0:00
  Hey everyone, it's me here, Dune, your host and Hype Girl. We've got another solo episode for you today and it's the start of my journey in publicly building this CPG brand that I started six months ago. It's short and sweet and I'd really love to hear from you about what topics you want covered from this moving forward. So let me know, slide into my inbox at Dune Roisin on Twitter, Instagram or LinkedIn. That's D-O-O-N-E-R-O-I-S-I-N.
• 0:27
  Let's get stuck into it. This is me for Female Startup Club. Hey everyone, it's Dune, your host and hype girl. And this is our new weekly segment where I pop into your ears and chat a little bit about where I'm at in the journey of this super cool thing that I started doing and also give you a few nifty things that you can keep in your back pocket.
• 0:49
  The last episode, as you know, was pretty scary for me, but I'm sure it's going to get easier over time. So please bear with me while I get into my groove. But before we jump into the main topic for this episode, which is about the CPG brand that I've been developing, let's first quickly talk about the hype club.
• 1:08
  So the Hype Club launched on Monday and today is actually the Friday before. So technically we are three sleeps away before the launch. And with that in mind, I obviously can't say for sure how it's going, but based on how many people are on the wait list as of today, I'm feeling pretty confident that it's going well. Yeah.
• 1:28
  But by the time you listen to this episode, the Hype Club will have launched and will be in full swing. So if you haven't signed up, the doors are open for our founding members and it's limited to 50 spots only. If you're a woman and you're building a CPG or a D2C or an e-commerce brand, this community has been built with you in mind.
• 1:49
  We just confirmed our first modern mentor, and that's Kaylee Bratt, the founder of Sustow. She's the woman who invented the world's first powdered shampoo, which you may have heard a few episodes ago. It was actually a few months ago, but if not, you should definitely check out that episode. Yeah.
• 2:07
  She is so amazing and she's going to be coming into the group to share her learnings, chat with you, help you wherever you are in your journey, regardless of the industry. So some of the things that she's going to be able to help founders with is that early stage of brand development and figuring out who you are, what to consider during the process of product development, and especially if you're inventing something in an entirely new category. Yeah.
• 2:35
  how to market and approach an entirely new category, building a sustainable brand, and how to position and differentiate yourself from your competitors. So I'm super excited to have her as our first mentor, and we obviously have many more in the pipeline. So the doors are open for founding members, and it's capped. So I hope you get a spot, one of the first 50 spots that we have open.
• 3:00
  You know, we're in beta phase, so not everything is going to be perfect. Not everything is totally figured out yet. And that's why the founding member rate is heavily discounted at $39 per month. And that's going to change in a couple of weeks once we have ironed out any kinks and figured out, you know, the culture of the group.
• 3:21
  But yeah, let's move on to talk about the main topic of today. And it's about this thing that I'm doing and have been doing rather for the last five months on the side of FSC. But I want to start by telling you a story because a lot of the time, as I'm sure you know, we can all pinpoint the moment when that light bulb goes off and the idea is planted. So for me, it was the middle of January this year, 2021.
• 3:50
  To paint the picture, it was cold. We were in lockdown and it had felt like we'd been in lockdown literally forever. And I feel like actually maybe we had been in lockdown for kind of like the most part of the year. And it was gloomy. I was gloomy.
• 4:07
  Mental health wasn't great, if I'm honest. And on top of that, we were doing dry January, which is actually really hard when all you kind of want is just a cozy fire and a glass of red over a nice dinner. Because obviously it's freezing in January.
• 4:21
  And I should caveat that by saying that P.A. and I love to drink wine. And if you didn't hear the last episode, P.A. is my husband, Pierre Antoine, but we call him P.A. for short. And he's from Switzerland, which is where we are at the moment. And he's grown up around wine and he's always been super interested in the space, but didn't really see any gaps that made sense for him to build a brand or start something in.
• 4:45
  So anyway, we're walking along and we're dreaming up our dreams and, you know, chattering on about life as per usual. And we get to that topic that every couple talks about every day. Dinner. What the heck are we going to have for dinner? And, you know, that whole vibe you go through like, no, I don't feel like this. No, I don't feel like this. Anyway, we were going through that topic and...
• 5:06
  We were like, oh, this is so boring. Like usually it's a Friday night. We'd have a glass of wine. We'd have that ritual. But we're during dry January and we're trying to stay healthy. So what do we do?
• 5:18
  So PA starts saying like, maybe we could go and get some of those non-alcoholic spirits brands. And some of the key ones in the UK and probably in the world now are Seed Lips. I think they started with gin or maybe they still are just gin. I'm not sure. And Liars. And so I was like, you know...
• 5:37
  I don't really want a cocktail at home. Like that's not really my vibe. I don't think I've ever made a cocktail kind of like to have with dinner at home. It's more of a restaurant thing for me. I just really want a glass of red. I want a glass of non-alcoholic red. And he's like, great, let's go to the store and see what we can find. So we go to the store and we buy whatever we can get our hands on.
• 6:08
  you know, in the main kind of area. And it's like $4.99. I think we buy stuff around that price, circa $4.99. And it's really awful. It's really awful. We tip it all down the sink. We're super disappointed. And it kind of sets us on this journey of trying every bottle we can get our hands on. I think we ordered...
• 6:31
  let's say 50 bottles straight away, everything we could buy online and then, you know, whatever else since then. And it's safe to say that out of every single thing that we could buy in store and online, the offering is average, like less than average, I would say a lot less. It's cheap, it's nasty. And it doesn't speak to me as a millennial woman who likes the ritual, who likes to indulge and frankly, who just appreciates good design, packaging and a cool brand.
• 7:02
  And alas, the gap. We kind of have this moment, this aha moment of, well, we are uniquely positioned to create a more premium, better for you offering for a non-alc wine brand. And why not us? Why not us?
• 7:19
  So we basically get going on researching this project and researching the industry and the category and what's changing and what the shifts are in consumer behavior. And we decide that we're going to tackle it. We're going to be the people who bring this brand to life.
• 7:41
  And so I think I talked a little bit about this in the last episode, but I've been looking for that big brand building project over the last 12 months of doing these interviews with FSC and getting to meet all these brilliant women who were building CPG brands. And I've been wondering what was going to get me excited. And finally, we found it. And I think I also said this in the last episode, but I get so much joy out of female startup club. So...
• 8:09
  I'm totally going with the flow and I can see myself doing this for a really, really, really long time. But I have that desire, as I'm sure most of us entrepreneurs do, to build something, make a lot of money and have the freedom that comes with that. And to do that, I need to build an asset that's worth being acquired by someone else.
• 8:35
  So this series or mini series, whatever we're going to call it within the show, is going to be about me building this brand from the ground up, sharing the stuff that might be left out of other founders stories and basically just see what happens. Let's see where it goes. I'm very focused on building this in public. I'm taking the learnings I've had from the show and I'm going to be putting them into action, talking about it on the podcast and going on this new roller coaster.
• 9:05
  So I've been thinking a little bit about what the kind of topics are that we can talk about. And I'd also love to hear from you if you have specific things you want to know or if you have specific things you want me to deep dive into. Obviously, drop into my Instagram or my Twitter and let me know so I can build content specifically for you.
• 9:26
  But my general thoughts were we can talk about do you need a business partner? How do you find one? How did we find ours? How to divide the pie and figure out that equity split and what that means. Obviously, the piece around research and customers and insights and assumptions, the money stuff. Obviously, I love to talk about the money thing, how we're funding it right now and what our general plan is in the future.
• 9:57
  And then all the other stuff, like how we found our manufacturer, sampling, friends and family rounds, how to value your business, hires, legal stuff, blueprints, blah, anything. We can literally talk about anything. So we'd love to hear your thoughts. We'd love to know what's interesting for you. And...
• 10:15
  Yeah, basically that's it. So the CPG brand that I've been developing for the last five, six months, what are we now? We're at July. So yeah, six months is a non-alc wine company. We are very much focused on getting to a premium, better for you, non-alc red. That's the holy grail. But
• 10:37
  Before that, we're really going to be launching the non-alc sparkling, the non-alc rosé, and potentially the non-alc white because they are easier to develop. And here's the thing. I'm literally going through this right now. So I don't have the beauty of hindsight. This is just the reality for me and what I'm going through and my experience. So I'm literally just sharing as I go.
• 11:04
  And so the next question that you might be thinking is, yeah, yeah, yeah, all good. But like, what's it called? What's this new thing called? And that's the other thing. We do not have a name right now. We did have a name. We really loved the word Vivi, but we can't get the trademark or we're fairly sure we can't get the trademark because there's something similar in the U.S. called Vivi.
• 11:25
  Vivi, but it's spelt differently and it's in the beverage category. So, you know, that's a whole other thing. And we're back to the drawing board. So at the moment, we're just referring it to the non-alc wine brand. And probably in the next week or two, I should have a name sorted and we can put the face to the name or the name to the face, whatever that saying is, and start putting it out into the world. So that's a super short
• 11:52
  overview of what's to come on these weekly mini segment series things. And definitely feel free to drop into my inbox if you want to ask for a specific topic for me to cover, because I want to be super transparent about all the things.
• 12:10
  Last few things before we wrap up this episode. Some cool things I just saw this morning I wanted to mention. TikTok has just launched their TikTok resumes and brands can essentially now advertise for content creators on this platform. I think it actually is called TikTokResumes.com and then there's the hashtag TikTokResumes.com.
• 12:28
  resumes. So I was having a bit of a browse. I found some cool creators and reached out about whether they might be interested in coming onto Female Startup Club or the non-alc wine brand and working to build up our TikTok there, which is really, really cool.
• 12:44
  And the other thing is that Instagram have come out and saying that they're not a photo sharing app anymore and the focus is all going to be on video. So with that in mind, I think it's just critical for brand builders like us to get with the times and go full ham on the video stuff, either on TikTok or Reels or whatever. But I think we're seeing a really big shift away from static, you know, perfect polished pictures. And we're moving towards...
• 13:12
  raw, cool videos. And last of all, if you got something out of this episode, please do share it on social media and shout about it to the people in your network. Word of mouth is how this stuff gets around and helps us find new ears. You guys are the best. Thank you for listening and see you next week.
• 13:53
  Hey, it's June here. Thanks for listening to this amazing episode of the Female Startup Club podcast. If you're a fan of the show and want even more of the good stuff, I'd recommend checking out femalestartupclub.com where you can subscribe to our free newsletter. We send it out weekly covering female founder business news, insights and learnings in D2C, and interesting business resources.
• 14:17
  And if you're a founder building an e-commerce brand, you can join our private network of entrepreneurs called Hype Club at femalestartupclub.com forward slash Hype Club. We have guests from the show joining us for intimate Ask Me Anythings, expert workshops, and a group of totally amazing, like-minded women building the future of D2C brands.
• 14:40
  As always, please do subscribe, rate and review the show and post your favorite episodes to Instagram stories. I am beyond grateful when you do that.