The not-so-glamorous side of brand-building

George Bernard Shaw said, "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

I say this all the time, but building a brand from scratch takes more time and money than you could ever imagine, and tenacity bordering on lunacy. We have investors and better access to capital now, but during the first few years of building Swig + Swallow (V1 of Cheeky Cocktails ), I had no access to debt and no savings to invest so I financed the business by working other jobs. I retained barely enough to live on and pumped the rest into the company to fund overhead and inventory, and in five-ish years of running Swig, I paid myself a total of $1000.

Looking back, I sometimes wonder if it had to be as hard or slow as it was. Limited access to capital was a hindrance, but most importantly, I was a first-time entrepreneur with zero business experience, and I learned everything I know "on the job."

Cheeky's mission is to make shelf-stable versions of fresh ingredients found behind bars so anyone can make craft cocktails without all the work, and while there are other mixers out there, it is a new take on the category. True innovation takes time, and behavior change typically doesn't happen overnight.?

I recently heard another quote that said, "the faster a business grows, the faster it will fail." There are always exceptions, but I think this is mostly true. Just as nature and nurture affect human development, a business has a personality and a way of interacting with the world around it that is impossible to conjure up from thin air- consumers can tell something isn't right. Three racoons in a trench coat can masquerade as a person for a period of time, but eventually they'll be found out and the charade exposed.

I've always wanted to create a product that solves a real problem and makes people feel like incredible hosts, and looking back at the past eight years I've spent on the idea, we're doing just that. I have no regrets about the time and the insane amount of work required to get where we are- we've built incredible relationships and have endless stories to share, both good and bad. Eight years into my entrepreneurial journey, it feels like we're just getting started, and I couldn't be more energized.

People say that unless you are obsessed and passionate about your business, it will fail before it benefits you. THIS IS THE TRUTH!! Things are much easier now than they used to be, but without thousands of hours of toil and trouble, we wouldn't be where we are today.?

I took Swig + Swallow apart and relaunched it as Cheeky three years ago, and today we're in 350+ accounts in 44 states + DC, Canada, Australia, France, and the UK. By many measures, this seems like a tiny footprint, but we have some massive irons in the fire, and our sales and distribution are a lagging indicator of the interest we're seeing, so there's a lot to look forward to.

I suppose I'm sharing all of this a) To document the journey and remind myself of how far we've come, and b) To provide an additional data point for any entrepreneurs at the beginning of their journey or to those who have been in it for a while and need a reminder that they aren't alone in the crazy ??

The above images are from our insane first few years as Swig + Swallow. I'm numbering the photos for easy identification.

Image Key

1) This image is from V3 or 4 of Swig + Swallow. V1 was cocktail batching and delivery, and eventually it morphed from selling mixers in milk jugs to this square bottle. I think I was still on my own at this point, making all the syrups (at home!) in my Breville juicer (pictured). I used to negotiate with the produce guy at the Key Foods on Knickerbocker in Bushwick for cases of citrus...eventually we graduated to Restaurant Depot, then Baldor, then ordering pallets direct rather than through a distributor.

2) My ex-business partner Gates and I didn't have use of a pallet jack until 2016 or 2017, but we scaled up our juicers around the same time, and the juicer pictured is the most inefficient juicer ever, so I'm placing this at mid-2016. I think one of our electric juicers had broken, so I brought this Ra-Chand in just in case the other one broke. If you're a low-volume restaurant, this is a GREAT option, but given that it juices a half a citrus at a time, not great for commercial juicing;) *Worth noting, you also have to sanitize and cut the fruit by hand before using a Ra-Chand, so you can imagine how long it takes to process a pallet of citrus like this.

3) April 1st, 2016, we got our first refrigerated shelf in Brooklyn Foodworks and we were ecstatic! No more lugging every tool and raw material to the commercial kitchen the morning of production and transporting to another warehouse for storage after the shift. It's incredible to me that we did this for SO long and had the tenacity to see it through with serious cash constraints. I think a refrigerated shelf was $45/week or so, and we didn't invest in it earlier because of cost, so you get a sense of where we were financially at the time.

4) For 3-4 years we produced our mixers in Brooklyn and transported them on ice 2.5 hours (each way!) to an HPP facility. This is an image from one of many of these trips. We'd drive it in my car or rent vans, depending on the size of the run. Eventually they no longer allowed us to wait for our HPP runs to finish, and required that we return the following day for pickup. This doubled the length of the trip, our transportation costs, etc.

5) Our first pallet of bottles (ever) arrived in 2016! Prior, we had only ordered tiny quantities via parcel delivery.

6) Hand-labeling on my hand-made labeler. Labels were the bane of my existence for YEARS, and this was a bad, (but not the worst) of the options ??

7) We raised $10k for our Kickstarter, and half of it went to buy this Zumex juicer- this changed our lives (and we still have it at the warehouse!)

8) Yet another example of our endless labeling issues. We discovered that applying a shrink sleeve label was slightly faster than hand labeling, but the ink in the first batch of shrink sleeves wasn't water resistant, and every bottle we ran was catastrophically damaged. I believe this was the same label order that was two millimeters too tall, and we had to hand cut them down to fit on the bottles????