gives it more appeal in the market place and keeps people coming back for more. We’re a small craft distillery; we’re not looking for hundreds of thousands of people to buy our product. We’re looking for a small, but loyal, portion of the market place. I want to sell everything I produce, so there has to be a uniqueness to the product that sets us apart. There can’t be anything boring about what you distill because the clientele is ready to try something that’s at least a little bit different, something new, something they haven’t been drinking for the last five, 10, 30, or even 50 years. It’s a niche market out there; that’s the nature of the craft distilling market place. “As craft distillers, if we sell through a privately-owned liquor store, we don’t have that restriction.” So much of it is about relationships. We don’t do a lot of advertising because, again, we don’t need tens or hundreds of thousands of customers. It’s mostly relationship-driven. For example, say we sell to a restaurant. The restaurant then sells our product to ten different clients or customers and out of those ten, two of them really like what they’re trying and they go on to buy a couple bottles. Or consider someone who goes to a privately-owned liquor store and they’re drawn to our product because they think it’s a good fit for their craft Caesar mix and they basically expose it to their clientele. They’re likely going to introduce it to at least 100 customers and out of those customers, 20 will buy a bottle. So you see, it’s all about relationships. In other words, I’m not selling to anyone directly but someone else is whether it is a person in a store, a person in a restaurant, a bar, or a pub. They’re really an agent of my brand. To stay at the sales level that we want to be in, we need those many sales agents who are embracing the brand. It’s not just a matter of developing those relationships, you have to grow them – you have to appreciate them.
For example, our distillery is waste free and environmen- tally sustainable. A key relationship in this respect for us is with Jerry a third-generation dairy farmer in nearby Delta that uses our spent mash to make milk, or to produce bio fuel that can be used on site by his farm or our distillery as well as create a secondary bi-product, an odorless fertilizer. When those new sales agents and those new customers embrace your brand, I bet they’re wondering the same thing that I am: Where did the name come from? JP: Not my idea. I was actually concerned it would have negative militaristic overtures while others in and outside of our family thought it was “cool” – whatever that is. Looking at a dictionary definition, among other things ‘Stealth’ means “Artfully sly” and “under the radar” which is precisely our business model. Not wanting to settle a difference of opinion arbitrarily, I decided on a course of action that we follow without fail to settle any significant branding disputes: we ask our pro- spective customers. The test we used for the name is three clip boards with five top brand name picks. These picks are made by family and associates and they would fight to the death for their pick. These three clip boards were placed in the front of three separate popular liquor stores at 5pm on a Friday. We wanted 50 vodka drinkers to answer the following question: If you were to decide on trying a new vodka brand on name alone from this list what name would you choose? All thee clip boards tracked identical prospective client responses and ‘Stealth’ won by an overwhelming majority. That’s a true story and the process has never failed us. The customer is always right!
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DECEMBER 2017 • SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS MAGAZINE
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