Post by Elaine Parr

I posted about ‘Ready To Drink’ [#RTD] #cocktails over the weekend: https://lnkd.in/eWcaYxg3. MOTH Drinks - B Corp™ is one of my favs. The founders, 🍸 Rob Wallis and Samuel Hunt, came with cocktail-bar intent. A background in visual effects, not drinks, matters more than you think: MOTH is as much a design, an experience business as a liquid business. Built by the two friends, sold into high-end hospitality before the pandemic forced a rethink; the making of the brand. Covid did two things to RTDs: ▫️Accelerated at-home cocktailing, and ▫️Exposed how poor was the category. MOTH’s response was smart. Rebrand. Repack. Simplify. Move to [premium] can. Stay in classic serves. By 2021, Waitrose the range in 200 stores. By 2022, Tesco, Sainsbury’s too. Unusually fast validation in booze. MOTH’s founders said that hitting £1m in year 1, in Waitrose was when they knew it was real. The product architecture tells is not one-size-fits-all. Longer cocktails such as Mojito and Paloma come in 200ml cans at 10% ABV. Shorter serves, Negroni and Margarita, in 125ml at 14.9% ABV. The Old Fashioned: 100ml at 20% ABV. The pack mirrors the serve. The serve mirrors the ritual. The can delivers the cocktail truth. The product delivers the story. Prices also signal clear premium. And the liquid story matters too. MOTH partners with great brands and craft credentials. Tequila Enemigo; The Duppy Share - B Corp Rum; Southwestern Distillery (Tarquin’s Gin, Twin Fin Rum, Connie Glaze Vodka, Tinner Bros Whisky); Asterley Bros vermouth. Eactly the opposite of anonymous, syrup-heavy premixes of the old category. It says quality, convenience because we already did the hard work. Commercially, the business has moved beyond “interesting startup” to “serious scale-up”. The Grocer’s 2026 rankings put the brand at £25.9m sales, up 74.5% YOY. This is also a textbook example created by incumbents’ blind spots. RTDs carried the baggage of alcopops for years; large spirits groups were slow to lean in. Diageo’s historical hesitancy around RTDs was shaped by margin concerns and the mismatch with premium #spirits. That created room for brands like MOTH to occupy the higher ground while the majors still debated if the space was good enough. My view is simple. MOTH won because it did not behave like a premix brand. It behaved like a premium cocktail brand that happened to come in a can. Lessons: ▫️ #Premiumisation works best when the product truth is visible. MOTH matched pack size, ABV, recipe style to the cocktail itself, far more convincing than premium alone ▫️ #Retail scale is easier once the brand codes are clear. Waitrose first made sense. Tesco and Sainsbury’s later scaled already a coherent proposition ▫️Design can reframe a tired category. The can was not the innovation. The perception shift was ▫️Incumbent hesitation creates white space. If big suppliers think a category is too low-status or too low-margin, that exactly where a challenger can bite. Super smart.