Can Uncle Nearest co-founder Fawn Weaver get the capital she needs to expand her successful whiskey brand into an alcoholic beverages conglomerate?
In 2017 Fawn Weaver launched a premium American whiskey brand, Uncle Nearest. It became the fastest growing and most awarded whiskey brand in America, despite the challenges Weaver faced as a Black woman and outsider to the spirits industry, which is capital-intensive, highly regulated, competitive, and male-dominated.
BRIAN KENNY: Okay. All right, I’m going to ask you for the location after we’re done here today. It’s funny because I was thinking on, we have covered the beer industry, we’ve covered, we just did an episode on natural wine making, and now we’re into the spirits. So, we’re just trying to make sure that we cover all the different possibilities there. I’m going to ask you to start by just telling us what the central issue is in the case and what your cold call is to start the discussion.
BRIAN KENNY: Tell us a little bit about her journey before she found herself in the spirits industry. BRIAN KENNY: Yeah, and not afraid to do things that she hasn’t done before, like write a book, like become a published author, all those sorts of entrepreneurial things that she pursued in her time, and then launching Uncle Nearest. In the intro, I mentioned that it’s such a tightly controlled industry.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah, I think the case even mentions that she would try to get calls back, she would phone up the people at Jack Daniels that she needed to talk to and then she wouldn’t hear from them, but if her husband called, he would get a call, same day. BRIAN KENNY: Yeah, so the relationship between Jack Daniels and the family is strong, which is also helpful here. Do you think that the introduction of the brand and the story itself was able to have some sort of an impact on recognition of African Americans more broadly?
BRIAN KENNY: And sometimes even that extra bump in the price gives it that sense of premium quality so you feel like you’re getting a better product anyway.BRIAN KENNY: Yeah, yeah. How did she find people to help her create the unique flavor that she was looking for? I know the answer, but I thought in the case it was really interesting because I don’t feel like I could just walk into a distillery and figure out what to do, but that’s essentially what happened here.
HISE GIBSON: As we know, culture is everything and finding people who can do what I would call something that I learned in the military, there’s a principle that we leverage called “discipline initiative.” Quickly what discipline initiative is, is someone’s ability to react and make decisions and do things when the environment changes. When what you are ordered or told to do, you’re unable to do because the enemy forced you to do something different.
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