Well. Who in the world could've foreseen that some cosmopolitan hipsters in the end couldn't pick brands at Americans actually want to buy...?
I'm calling it now. The Distill Ventures implosion has finally shown that that emperor's new clothes model of metropolitan hipsters picking brands based only on some American domestic insider identity competition? That's not a'gonna work. I've been talking to my distributor RNDC for two years now, trying to warm them to the idea that they should be the ones that have these accelerators. You know who knows what's going to work in the pipeline? A distributor. Any of us brand people who have spent a lot of time talking to distributors knows that the distributor picks up based on really specific criteria, and at the top of that triage is: does it work in the marketplace pipeline? I've remember when Distill Ventures picked up this Japanese whisky, and while I am one of America's biggest proponents of Japanese whisky, I knew it's not going to sell. Americans don't buy Japanese whisky in a measure that spirit start up needs to grow to keep their place in the portfolio. Europeans do, but Distill Ventures, even though fronted by a European conglomerate doesn't pick up stuff to sell in Europe. Much of their press is/was about the American market. So it's really the distributors that need to be funding companies or hosting accelerators/incubators. They know exactly what works for them, and they're the ones who have to decide if they're going to put their own muscle, their own processes, their own networks and people behind a product. And we all know that when they try ... they succeed. So really, there's only two people I would trust to pick the winners. 1. One of the big distributors 2. People that already have a history of success in creating, growing and selling brands. Everyone else is just a dilettante being paid a lot of money in one of America's large metropolitan centers feeling pretty chuffed with themselves at expensive dinners or bars, but we see how that's worked out. Last thing I'll say – what informed me to start Industry Spirits as a well brand and not even a mid-level brand was a story about a guy in Maine who started the first flavored vodka company. Yesrs and years ago, he sold it for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars as people were laughing at him. He then while they were still laughing started another brand and sold that one, doing the same thing just for a different name for another couple hundreds of millions of dollars. Those cosmopolitan hipster money people would not have bet on him. But that is obviously the market. You can be cool, you can be socially inspiring (which I support), or, you can make a shit load of money. They don't always work together hand in glove. Make a choice, because the prompt for ChatGPT image was, "make an image of inspiring strong women standing in front of a warehouse". Because that's in the end is where it matters.