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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
How a global industry icon was created right here in Australia — with insights, stories and recipes from a co-founder of Four Pillars Gin
How did a small business from a regional Aussie town get voted the world’s best gin producer THREE times? Four Pillars Gin, a craft distillery in Victoria’s Yarra Valley, today is not only an Australian favourite but a global powerhouse. Co-founder Matt Jones shares the secrets behind building a brand that started as a small cult favourite and has become a world-leading success. Including stories, recipes and business lessons from a decade of gin-soaked archives, Lessons from Gin has the ingredients you need to grow your own business and brand.
Matt tells his side of the extraordinary Four Pillars story, sharing what he and the team learned in a decade that changed the distilling industry in Australia. Taking you on his journey as a creative brand strategist during the rise of social media, he reveals how Four Pillars became a benchmark for excellence and a beloved household name. You’ll discover how true innovators think creatively and strategically, with practical models for driving incredible growth in your own career and industry.
In Lessons from Gin, you’ll learn how to:
- Place creativity at the heart of your business
- Design a brand that tells a story
- Craft the kind of product excellence that wins fans and followers
- Create experiences that engage and build a community of loyal believers
- Develop a culture and lead a team of passionate people through a shared purpose and vision
- Build a sustainable business anchored in genuine values and bold ambition
Lessons from Gin gives Four Pillars fans real insight into how their favourite gin conquered the world. It is a must-read for entrepreneurs, business owners, marketers, and leaders in any industry who want to craft a brand that people love to want.
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Seitenzahl: 336
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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Table of Contents
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PROLOGUE
PART ONE: Thinking
ONE In the beginning, there was a decision
TWO Okay, so we’re doing this. But doing what, exactly?
THREE Riding the fourth gin wave
A quick recap
FOUR Starting as you mean to go on — every decision matters most
FIVE It’s never too early to think about your why
SIX Growth theory, relationshipsand money
PART TWO: Crafting
SEVEN Rare Dry Gin and the crafting of the Four Pillars brand
EIGHT The first three months
NINE Overnight emails, opportunism and staying on strategy
TEN From gin to gins … and ‘Made From Gin’
ELEVEN Experiments that worked
PART THREE: Sharing
TWELVE Launch as you mean to go on
THIRTEEN Collaborative to the core
FOURTEEN A gin-fuelled content rocket
FIFTEEN Home is where the gin is
Our four experience pillars
Our target audiences
Our brand design
1. Built-in brilliance
2. People, culture and hospitality
3. Paddles and booklets
4. Maker Sessions
SIXTEEN Faith in the power of experiences (and word of mouth)
SEVENTEEN A people-powered gin family
PART FOUR: Growing
EIGHTEEN Balancing acts
NINETEEN Leading through growth
TWENTY The best in the world … pivoting and staying the course
1. Communication
2. Pivot with purpose
3. Staying the course
4. Culture and community
TWENTY-ONE Questioning everything
TWENTY-TWO Ten years down, another decade ahead of us
1. Future-proof our ability to produce world-class gin at scale
2. Expand capacity to host groups of all different shapes and sizes
3. Create a dedicated retail store for our Distillery
4. Starting with sustainability
A new era
A FINAL WORD
PS: A USEFUL READING LIST
A weekly habit
A couple of useful strategy friends
An all-round guru
A brilliant book on thinking
My first brand crush
Marketing as behaviour change
The godfather of ‘nudge’ theory
A tale of success against the odds
Podcasts to inspire your thinking
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
INDEX
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
About the Author
Prologue
Begin Reading
A Final Word
PS: A Useful Reading List
Acknowledgements
Index
End User License Agreement
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‘Matt is a world-class strategist with a wonderful ability to explain how organisations can build and leverage the power of branding to thrive in competitive markets. He is a truly consummate storyteller, and in Four Pillars, he has a great story to tell. Regardless of whether you are new to branding or a seasoned marketer, you should read this book.’
Don O’Sullivan PhD, Professor of Marketing, Melbourne Business School
‘Matt gets brands, understands the challenges businesses face and seems to get a genuine kick out of seeing others succeed.’
Ellie Vince, CMO, Brown Family Wine Group
‘Meeting Matt is like marketing therapy. I walk out feeling more supercharged than ever.’
Ashik Ahmed, co-founder, Deputy
‘Matt gets ‘it’ before most people even know there is an ‘it’ to get.’
Alexandra Burt, proprietor, Voyager Estate
‘Outrageously articulate, splendidly creative and profoundly pragmatic.’
Colin Pidd, founding partner, ByMany
‘A masterful, authentic storyteller.’
Victoria Angove, managing director, Angove Family Winemakers
‘With his characteristic wit and incisive wisdom, Matt has distilled what it takes to create a brand that is truly remarkable. If you’re looking for clear advice and practical insight on how to scale a business or idea, look no further than Lessons from Gin.’
Michael McQueen, international bestselling author and change strategist
First published 2025 by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd
© John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd 2025
All rights reserved, including rights for text and data mining and training of artificial intelligence technologies or similar technologies. Except as permitted under the Australian Copyright Act 1968 (for example, a fair dealing for the purposes of study, research, criticism or review) no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise. Advice on how to obtain permission to reuse material from this title is available at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.
The right of Matt Jones to be identified as the author of Lessons from Gin has been asserted in accordance with law.
ISBN: 978-1-394-26837-5
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Cover images: © h.yegho/Shutterstock, © 19 STUDIO/Shutterstock, © Victoria Sergeeva/Shutterstock, © janniwet/Shutterstock
Cover design by Alex Ross Creative
Inside cover photo: © Benito Martin (Sam I Am)
Part I-III opener photos: © Anson Smart
Part IV opener photo: © Mike Emmet
Internal cocktail illustrations: © Octyabr/Adobe Stock
Business icons: © iiierlok_xolms/Adobe Stock
LEGO brick illustration: © sebastian / Adobe Stock
For Rebecca, who made all this possible. And for Harper and Jack, who shared a large part of their childhoods with their parents’ determination to build something that mattered.
For John, the mentor I’m lucky enough to call my father. And for Eileen, who taught me to value every word (even if I still use too many).
For Cam, Leah, Sally and Stu. The greatest quartet of partners Bec and I could have dreamt of.
For everyone who has ever worked a day or a decade at Four Pillars, and everyone who has ever sold or bought a bottle of the good stuff. Without you, none of these lessons would have been learned.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Matt Jones has enjoyed an eclectic career woven together by the common themes of creative strategy, storytelling, design, experiences and human behaviour.
Matt describes himself as a serial failure and an accidental entrepreneur, having moved from being a government economist to a political strategist to a global brand experience leader before going on to be co-founder of Australia’s most loved and successful gin business, Four Pillars Gin.
An economics graduate, Matt’s early professional roles took him first to the Defence Intelligence Staff and then HM Treasury in London’s Whitehall. After studying for a Master’s in International Relations, Matt moved into politics, becoming the head of Economic Section in the legendary Conservative Research Department in 2002, aged just 26. Matt went on to become the Conservative Party’s chief political adviser.
In 2006, Matt moved from London to Sydney and from politics to brand strategy, joining the world’s largest brand experience firm, Jack Morton Worldwide. Starting out as head of strategy in Australia, Matt moved to take on strategy for Jack Morton New York in 2009 before becoming leader of the Jack Morton global strategy and creative community in 2010.
In 2012, Matt and his young family relocated back to Australia where he set up his own brand purpose consultancy, Better Happy. He handed one of his first business cards to Stuart Gregor at a lunch in Surry Hills, and within a year Matt, Stu and Stu’s best mate Cam were making plans to make gin together.
Today, Matt is the proud co-founder and brand director of Four Pillars Gin, a gin business that has been named the world’s best gin producer an extraordinary three times by the International Wine and Spirits Competition in London. Matt is also a passionate keynote speaker, mentor, adviser, board member and collaborator with creative agencies, start-up businesses, corporate brands and not-for-profit organisations. He’s also half of Think Story Experience, a boutique advisory firm he runs with his partner Rebecca Bourne Jones.
Matt describes himself the same way he did on his first Jack Morton business card back in 2006, as a creative strategist. You can learn more about Matt’s work, experience, passions and interests on his website www.thinkstoryexperience.com.
PROLOGUE: What this book is. And what it’s not.
Welcome, friends. Before we begin, let’s make sure you’re in the right place. Because this is not the definitive story of Four Pillars Gin. At best, only a third of that story is mine to tell. So here it is, my side of the gin-soaked story and the lessons I took from over a decade of helping to build a world-class gin business.
Back in 2012, I crossed paths with two of the most extraordinary and talented humans I will ever meet: Cam and Stu. These two men would go on to change gin in Australia and change my life in the process: Cam with his drive, pragmatism and ability to become one of the world’s great gin distillers; Stu with his entrepreneurial creative instincts, optimism and unparalleled ability to open doors and build relationships. Without them at the heart of everything, Four Pillars simply wouldn’t have happened.
This book is the story of the things I did, or at least the things I contributed to — the value I (hopefully) added. The ways I helped shape how the Four Pillars story unfolded and how we successfully built an extraordinary business together and, in the process, led a craft spirits revolution in Australia that saw the number of distilleries in this country grow from under 30 to over 600 in a decade.
At the heart of my side of the Four Pillars story is how we ensured that the world-class gin product at the heart of our business always (or at least more often than not) got the credit it deserved and benefited from the positive bias that would help it grow. Bias is a concept I’m going to talk about a lot.
I will share some stories about how we made the world’s best gin at Four Pillars and how we made sure the world knew about it. And, when all the talk of gin gets too much to take without reaching for a bottle of Four Pillars, there are also a few drinks breaks and recipes along the way too.
The book is divided into four key parts, reflecting what I see as the four key parts to building a business like Four Pillars Gin. They aren’t perfectly chronological, although I do start at the beginning and end at the end (it’s the middle where timelines get a little mixed up). Instead of being chronologically accurate, I’ve tried to bundle the stories and lessons in four big themes: thinking clearly about your business; crafting the core elements of your business; sharing the fruits of your craft with the world and getting the credit you deserve for it; and growing in the face of change, disruption, new opportunities but also new challenges.
I’d like to think these four phases are relevant whether you’re a small start-up business or an established player. I’d also like to think you can apply this thinking to things that aren’t businesses, such as a charity, an organisation, a movement or even the development of your own personal brand and career.
Each of the four sections of this book contains four ‘useful bits’, where I pull out the gin-soaked lessons from our experience and show how they can be applied to just about anything. They’re definitely not rocket science, but they are (hopefully) a helpful guide to thinking in useful ways about the four key stages of starting and/or scaling any business:
How to think clearly about the business you’re going to build. What decisions are you really making? Are you clear on the implications and reasoning behind those decisions?
How to identify and commit to the core craft at the heart of your business. What’s your why? What’s your how? And what business are you really in?
How to share the fruits of your craft and ensure you receive the credit you deserve for the value you create. And how to think about the role of emotion, design, storytelling and experiences in growing your business.
And, finally, how to navigate growth and change as your business succeeds, as it evolves and faces new challenges and opportunities. How to know when to stay the course and when to adjust to your new realities.
In other words, these sections are no replacement for a fully formed business, product, brand or marketing strategy — over time, you’ll need all of those things — but they will help you think at a high level. And sometimes that high-level clarity is all you need to keep moving forward with confidence and conviction.
For anyone reading this book who loves gin, I hope it offers some fresh perspectives on what has made Four Pillars (I believe) the most exciting, innovative, uncompromising and simply delicious gin producer on the planet. And for anyone with their own idea for a business, a product, an organisation, a movement — whatever it may be — I hope this book gives you some frameworks to build your own layers of brand bias around your efforts, and ensure that you and whatever value you create get the credit you so richly deserve.
Lastly, please don’t think I’m right — about anything really — whether it’s how to build a great brand or how to stir the perfect martini. As the saying goes, ‘all models are wrong, but some are useful’. I hope some of the models I talk about in this book are useful. And, perhaps by showing where these thought processes took the Four Pillars business, they can help you think about how to navigate wherever you want to go.
So don’t read this book if you’re looking for scientific marketing facts. There are no sure things when it comes to starting and growing a business. There are just decisions and choices to make. I hope this book prompts you to think about and make enough of the right decisions and choices. And I hope it inspires you to have fun and keep smiling while you do it.
Few of us can do what Cameron did (whether it’s when he ran around a 400-metre track fast enough to get to the Olympics in 1996 or when he became the most awarded gin distiller on the planet), and I can say with confidence that I’ll never meet another person with the room-filling charisma and personality of Stuart. But we’ve all got something we do well, something that gives us energy, and something we want to do with all that talent and passion. I hope this book inspires you to think about how to make the most of those possibilities.
And now, with all that said, and with those caveats in place, it’s time to begin. Let’s start a gin business.
PART ONEThinking
ONEIn the beginning, there was a decision
Sometimes, very rarely, you come across a genuinely big idea. An idea that stops you in your tracks. An idea to make or do something wildly groundbreaking and completely novel. Perhaps even an idea that can change the world. This is not a book about big ideas like that.
In truth, there are few big, transformative ideas to be found. Most ideas (even the ones that do go on to change the world) are variations on previously explored themes — take Uber, which started out as an idea for a limo service that showed where your car was on a map (which, itself, was inspired by a device Daniel Craig’s James Bond used in the film Casino Royale). Or take the ‘idea’ to make gin. It’s hardly new. To make gin is simply to follow in the footsteps of Dutch genever makers from the 1600s and British gin barons from the 1700s (more on the history of gin in Chapter 3).
So, this is not a book about big ideas; instead, it’s about small ideas. The small ideas that, together, can help grow a business (and a brand … we’ll touch on that distinction later too). The small ideas that result from countless daily acts and decisions. So, really, this is a book about decisions.
As you get older, you realise there are so many truths no one tells you when you’re younger — like how much of parenting is actually logistics. Or, in this case, how much of the founding and leading of a business is just the seemingly endless task of making decisions (and living with the decisions you make). No wonder I felt so exhausted after the three COVID-affected years of 2020, 2021 and 2022. We had made so many rapid decisions on the fly and against a background of such uncertainty and constant change. It wasn’t the school at home that exhausted me … it was the decision making at work.
Starting a business is merely a decision, one decision that leads to many others. Each of those decisions amounts to a small idea. Even the decision to not do something is, itself, a small idea with consequences and impact. Get enough of these small ideas right, execute enough of them brilliantly and you might be onto something. This is the truth of most businesses. There are no shortcuts. No magic bullets. No game-changing big ideas. Just decisions, choices, priorities, compromises, mistakes, hustle and execution. But I’m already jumping ahead because we haven’t got to the first decision yet.
The decision to make gin wasn’t mine. It was Stu’s and Cam’s.
Cam is an Olympian. Both literally and figuratively. Literally, because he dragged his body around a running track fast enough to make Australia’s 400-metre relay team at Atlanta in 1996 (he made the semis, if you’re wondering, and in some very questionable running shorts). Figuratively, because he has a capacity for determination, execution and excellence that puts him in the top-three people I would take into any battle with me. He also happens to be wildly creative, have an extraordinary palate and is one of the funniest, most engaging people I’ve ever spent time with. Yep, in short, if you were designing the perfect co-founder and distiller for a craft gin business, you’d end up with Cameron Mackenzie.
And then there’s Stuart. If generosity was an Olympic discipline, Stu would doubtless be an Olympian too. Like Cam, he’s genuinely hilarious. Like Cam, he has an extraordinary palate. And, like Cam, he had spent decades in the Australian booze industry. Unlike Cam, Stu had gone on to build one of Australia’s great communications agencies, specialising in the food and drink space. So Stu knew people, he knew business and he knew stuff. Between the two of them, we had the raw material to do something special in gin.
In the past, Stu and Cam had decided to make wine together (twice), buy stakes in racehorses together (too often) and not work in the same office together (again). And now here they were making a new decision. To make gin together. But this decision was different. It came with a caveat. This time, they would get a third partner involved: me.
Cam and Stu had both worked in and around the wine industry for years, both with a deep knowledge and passion for wine and spirits of all types. Cameron had spent time getting his hands dirty in production, operations and distribution roles, while Stu had built an extraordinary PR and communications business, Liquid Ideas, and had become arguably one of Australia’s most sought-after strategic partners for wine brands (and all kinds of food, drink and hospitality businesses). These two, in other words, were made to make gin together.
If Cam and Stu were both made to go into the gin business, I was the less obvious contributor to the success of Four Pillars. My background is an eclectic one, starting off as a UK Government economist, moving first into politics as a policy adviser then a speechwriter then a communication strategist, moving into the world of brand and brand agencies.
By the time I met Cam and Stu, I had spent 15 years advising people and businesses, from future prime ministers like Theresa May and David Cameron to global brands like Samsung and Google. Locally, I had advised future unicorns (i.e. billion-dollar companies) like Deputy, and all manner of great Australian businesses and brands from AMP and the NRMA to Voyager Estate and St. Agnes.
But giving advice is one thing; putting your own advice into practice is quite another. So, while I didn’t lack confidence in my abilities, I hadn’t yet had the opportunity to use my skills and experience to create something myself. And now I was going to do it in a category where I had near zero professional experience (albeit a fair bit of experience as a consumer).
What drew me to gin? In short, it seemed to me that gin provided that rarest of opportunities: to create a truly differentiated (and better) product that would still need creative thinking and brand-building to get it the credit it deserved. As someone who has never been a fan of traditional, advertising-led marketing and who believes the world is already full of enough stuff and doesn’t need more commoditised clutter, the opportunity to help create better gin and to make sure Cam’s and Stu’s efforts would get the credit they deserved was too tempting to say ‘no’ to. I was in.
In moving from that first decision (to make gin, not tonic) to that next decision (to find a third partner) to the next decisions (the partner would be me and I would say ‘yes’ to the opportunity), we were learning our first important lessons about starting a business.
There’s no one thing that defines a business and determines whether it will succeed, fail or (in many cases) tick along doing neither. A business is simply the sum total of the consequences of its decisions.
Stu, Cam and I have made literally thousands of decisions over a decade of building Four Pillars Gin. I guess we must have got enough of them right that I’m sitting here writing this book. And, in the next chapter, I’ll explore some of the ways that we (sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously, and sometimes with pure serendipity) approached making our first big decisions together.
TWOOkay, so we’re doing this. But doing what, exactly?
I’ve told the Four Pillars story hundreds thousands of times over the past decade, and someone will always ask, ‘Where did the idea of making gin come from?’ And I’ve always been keen to own the fact that making gin was not an idea, it was a decision.
I’m not trying to be contrary here or split linguistic hairs for the sake of it. I’m trying to help clarify what I suspect is, for most of us, the experience of creating a business, which is to say that we make a decision to take action and do something.
Writing this now can risk being a reinvention of history, a making sense of what happened in a way that feels far more structured and strategic than it really was. So, now, here’s the truth of how we moved through these steps.
It was 2012, and I’d been working with Stu and his Liquid Ideas team for a few months. It was clear we shared a perspective on how brands got built and what worked in this new socially wired landscape. While our working and communications styles are quite different, our ways of thinking are remarkably aligned, and from day one I felt this was someone I could work with and learn from. In addition, we both loved food and wine (about which he knew infinitely more than me) and shared a passion for Manchester United. The building blocks of friendship and partnership were in place.
Stu wanted me to meet his mate Cameron. He and Cam had played around with making wine together for years, first under the Donny Goodmac brand, then as part of Dirty Three Wines (where Marcus and Lisa are still making sensational wine to this day down in Gippsland, Victoria). Now, they were talking about making gin, but hadn’t got serious about it.
Our first dinner in Surry Hills was a chance for Cam to meet me. I don’t know what Stu had told him in advance, but Cam was a natural sceptic when it came to bullshit-peddling, self-styled, brand-marketing gurus, so it was probably an opportunity for him to judge whether he could work with me or not. The smart money was on not.
Somehow I passed the test, and the second dinner happened at Cam’s place in Healesville in the Yarra Valley. We talked about gin, and gin drinks, and Stu even invented a signature serve for the gin we hadn’t yet made. He called it the Keating (gin, tonic, Campari, lime — sophisticated, perhaps even a bit pretentious, slightly bitter, just like our former PM). The next day, pretty worse for wear, we talked more over breakfast and I walked away with the job of writing up our first (very basic) business and brand plan.
Two dinners, one hungover breakfast and one PowerPoint presentation, and suddenly this thing felt real, and we were agreeing to put some money in the bank to send Stu and Cam to the USA to learn more. Perhaps, ironically for a business that has been shaped so much by the fact that all three co-founders were bald/forty-something/experienced, we had the humility to begin by identifying what we didn’t know. In short, we didn’t know anything about making gin.
At this stage, some context would be helpful. In 2012, there were fewer than 30 distilleries operating in Australia, and Tasmanian whisky was arguably the only Australian spirit making waves (with the exception of Bundy, of course). As I write this in 2024, there are over 600 distilleries operating in Australia. And between them they make around 300 different gins. It’s hard to imagine how little precedent there was in Australia for what we were about to do. So Cam and Stu went to the USA to see what a real craft distilling scene looked like.
It may also have been true that Stu and Cam fancied a road trip, but either way, off they went to drive down the West Coast from Seattle to LA, stopping at over 30 craft distilleries along the way. They were going to be the drivers of the product (I knew, and still know, my place in the business!), and what happened on that trip is their story to tell. For me, three critical things came out of their travels.
First, Cam was essential to the whole enterprise, and lucky for us, he was hooked. He was going to be our master distiller, and he was going to invest the time and effort to teach himself to make world-class gin. Without his commitment over that early period, the Four Pillars dream simply wouldn’t have happened, and there would have been nothing for me and Stu to help grow. It was Cam’s drive and natural talent (supported always by Stu’s incredible palate) that created the conditions for us to execute our plan and gave us the right to succeed. I am under no illusions that, without this secret ingredient, Four Pillars would have been nothing.
Second, a great distiller would need a great still, and every time Stu and Cam had been blown away by the quality of a spirit on their travels, they would find a CARL still was responsible. Based on the outskirts of Stuttgart in Germany, the Carl family have been hand-making copper stills the same way for over a century. We had to have one — no matter how long the waiting list or how expensive they were. We paid our deposit and got our names down for a 450-litre gin still with all the bells and whistles (all up, we were going to need over half-a-million bucks just to make a single bottle … at least to the standards we were aspiring to). This was getting very real. But we were still ten months away from getting our hands on our shiny new gin machine.
Cam entered what we fondly remember as his Breaking Bad phase, purchasing a small laboratory still, and (Cam claims) having to persuade the local cops that he was cooking up lemon myrtle not crystal meth. What he was doing, of course, related to the third major aim of that US road trip: figuring out how to make a truly modern Australian gin.
What Cam and Stu experienced in the US was a craft distilling scene that was hell-bent on originality and local expression. The Americans, unsurprisingly, weren’t trying to replicate London Dry Gin, but were instead forging their own paths. Cam and Stu were inspired by great gins from producers like Junipero, Ransom and St George’s, and came back feeling liberated that we, too, could skip the ubiquitous London Dry–style gin and go straight to something more distinctive and unique. But that, in turn, required us to make new decisions, starting with: if we weren’t going to make gin in a recognised traditional style, what the hell were we going to make?
THREERiding the fourth gin wave
I’ve already noted that the distilling landscape in Australia was still in its infancy, but this is probably the right time to quickly recap the state of the gin category in 2012 more broadly. As I saw it (thanks to the rapid education I received from Stu and Cam), there had been four waves of gin, each with different levels of maturity, and only three of them had come to Australia at any meaningful scale.
The first was classic London Dry Gin, aka nana’s favourite tipple — think Gordons gin. This is the gin that gave me such a horrifyingly bad hangover back in 1998 that it put me off gin for another four years (in hindsight, it was my fault, not the gin’s).
On a good day, great London Dry Gin smells like a pine forest; on a bad day, it smells and, arguably, tastes like Pine O Cleen. London Dry Gin is traditionally made to precise and narrow specifications and, typically, with just a handful of botanicals, led and dominated by juniper. It’s as old as the hills, with benchmarks including Gordon’s (launched in 1769), Tanqueray (1830) and Beefeater (1863).
The late twentieth century saw a second, new wave of gin led by Bombay Sapphire (launched in 1987) and Tanqueray No. Ten (launched in 2000). These gins were still technically London Dry, but lighter in style, more botanically focused and often used vapour infusion to achieve a more delicate flavour profile. With gins like Bombay on the scene in the 1990s, gin was starting to get its mojo back, but it needed one more push from a new brand with a very novel approach.
Hendrick’s was launched in 1999, and represented the third style of gin: contemporary. Using two stills, two signature botanicals (cucumber and rose) and one signature serve (a G&T with cucumber), Hendrick’s quickly became a dominant player in the new category of super-premium contemporary gin.
By 2013, Hendrick’s was dominant in Australia, commanding over 60 per cent of the super-premium gin category (gin sold at over $70 a bottle). Fortunately for us, Hendrick’s domination of the category was helping to liberate drinkers’ ideas of what gin could be. And this was further augmented by the arrival of a key non-gin player on the scene: Fever-Tree. I’ll talk a bit more about what makes Fever-Tree (and good tonic in general) so special in the G&T drinks break on page 90.
Fever-Tree was part of a drinks revolution that was setting the scene for the fourth gin wave, elevating the gin and tonic with a focus on using quality tonic. Meanwhile, the rise of hugely influential bartenders, like Dale DeGroff, Sasha Petraske and Dick Bradsell, was helping to bring back the popularity of classic (often gin-led) cocktails.
Now that twentieth-century trends of vodka, flair bartending and tragically bad G&Ts were all behind us, a new century was bringing a gin boom, a resurgence of classic cocktails made with a few exceptional ingredients. The G&T was once again seen as a drink of choice for people under the age of 80, all of which set the stage for what was coming.
The fourth gin wave (which is still rolling on as I type) brought with it a new world of locally made (but globally famous) craft gin, with Sipsmith in London as its champion. This was the movement that had not yet come to Australia, and, to be fair, no one was clamouring for it. While there were some inspiring early movers in this space, most notably a gin called The West Winds Distillers from WA, I don’t think anyone was losing sleep over the lack of a great Aussie craft gin.
In short, there was an opportunity here. And, if we played our cards right, we had the chance to be at the front of this fourth craft gin wave in Australia. But, we also needed to be realistic that we were about to start solving a problem that no one was asking to be solved.
Maybe that wasn’t a bad thing. As the strategist Alex Smith has noted, sometimes listening to customers is the last thing you should do, as customers can only tell you what they want based on what they know (leading, as Alex puts it, to commodification of your offer and distraction from your original strategy).
So what did we decide to make? In short, we decided to make a modern Australian gin. After all, why would you set up a gin distillery 16 000 kilometres from London and make your first move a London Dry–style gin? Again, to paraphrase Alex Smith, we did something all businesses should do (but many fear), which was to be bad at something. In our case we chose to be bad at making classic London Dry Gin.
To be fair, Cameron could have made a great London Dry Gin. The point was that he didn’t even try. Because, just as we had made the decision to be uniquely focused on gin, we wanted to tighten that even further and be utterly focused on making modern Australian gin — gin we could only make because of the unique opportunities afforded to us by making gin in Australia. It was that extremely narrow definition of our focus, our craft, that ultimately spawned the extraordinary creativity that has defined Four Pillars.
Don’t listen to your customers (if we had, they would have told us that they didn’t need an Australian alternative to Hendrick’s), choose to be bad at things (in our case, making any other spirit than gin), and place your creativity within narrow constraints (we were modern Australian gin-makers working to self-imposed and highly exacting standards). These were all counterintuitive decisions we made in those early days that played a critical role in setting the long-term direction for Four Pillars. Let’s just take that last one as an example: the constraint to only make gin and only make that gin in a modern Australian style.
