Parents lamenting their student kids wasting time and money on boozing between lectures: take heed of the story behind MOTH ready-made cocktails. They could be devising a businessplan in their student digs, as Rob Wallis and Sam Hunt were.
The pair, both now 29, met as children, thenbecame flatmates at university in York. With relaxed parents who “sent us nice gins and vodkas in the post rather than jumpers, we’d spend evenings inviting people round and making cocktails,” says Wallis.
Hunt had the idea of bottling up their old fashioneds into a ready-to-drink concoction for sale, but on graduation they drifted into work: Wallis was a barista by day, bartender by night to pay off his overdraft; Hunt worked in lighting for the TV and film industry in Soho.
But booze hadn’t lost its appeal: in 2018 they quit their jobs, put in £10,000 of savings each, took out a £40,000 loan, and began endless recipe developments in the kitchens of their neighbouring Fulham flats for the launch of their glass bottled cocktails business, Buveur.
“It was very rudimentary to start. We did so much experimenting on cold brew coffee for our espresso martini, trying to push the boundary of how much flavour our filter machine could extract, that one day the filter blew up, spraying coffee all over the ceiling and walls.”
The pair had been contacting buyers for six months to no avail, so Wallis “made up a bunch of gift boxes and walked around all the London department stores in a day, dropping them off”. “At Selfridges, I was told that the buyer — a well-known figure in the industry, who’d discovered [non-alcoholic spirits brand] Seedlip — couldn’t be disturbed as he was in a meeting. Well, I barged into the meeting, handed him a box, and said, ‘I’m so sorry to disturb you — please can you drink these and call me?’”
The chutzpah worked, and the brand — now being manufactured at a small site in Seven Sisters — was bubbling away, with listings in Selfridges, Harrods and hotels including The Ritz becoming customers. Turnover hit £89,000 by 2020, but then came Covid.
“We lost our entire business overnight,” Wallis says. “And we realised we’d ended up where we weren’t intending to — making expensive cocktails to be served in high-end shops and restaurants.”
They rebranded to MOTH and pivoted to making affordable cocktails “as easy to drink as a can of beer”.
The country was sternly told to stay at home, so the pair launched investors’ rounds on Zoom: “It’s not easy to pitch a drinks business when you can’t share a drink: we’d spend hours in post office queues hoping the samples arrived before the Zooms, and worked with our gin supplier for three years before we actually met in person.”
They used British, independent spirit-makersto mix full-strength cocktails, and targeted supermarket buyers, as restaurantsand bars were closed. “We’d been emailing Waitrose buyer John Vine for years after meeting at their drinks show, and pitched to launch in 25 of their stores — but the buyer responded offering us 200 stores.”
For MOTH, which had raised £400,000 from angel investors for their rebrand, this meant “missing several rungs on the normal business ladder ”.
Still, MOTH’s can manufacturer didn’t have alabelling mechanism, “so the two of us we labelled the first 30,000 cans for Waitrose by hand, then packed them into cardboard boxes ourselves.”
The brand has since scaled up, raising some£7 million from investors including New Look founder Tom Singh and the Greater London Investment Fund.
By February 2021, MOTH had four cocktails —margarita, espresso martini, negroni and old-fashioned — on the shelves of 200 Waitrose shops. After a six-month exclusivity period, the brand launched in Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Morrisons; it’s now also served on BA’s Europeanflights, in minibars of the Hoxton hotels and The Landmark, and in Nobu restaurants, and is available on the shelves of 2700 shops.
MOTH is now raising series A backing for a US launch, starting in Florida. “Our first dream was to one day be sold in Waitrose — now we want to be the global cocktail brand that everyone knows.”
