How to Build a Data-Driven Brand

Aug 4, 2022 | , | Park Street University |

In recent years, emerging brands have gained greater access to consumer data and now they are looking for ways to craft a strategy around this invaluable information. Chris Ladas, Founder of XAL Consulting, opened up Park Street University’s panel on building a data-driven brand at Bar Convent Brooklyn by explaining the key differences between qualitative and quantitative data. Ladas dove into the types of information that can be derived from each data category, how to interpret this information, and why brands should invest in this asset.

“I strongly urge any brands getting ready to launch or if you’ve even launched already, unsuccessfully or successfully, consider all the data readily available,” advised Ladas. “Collect it, organize it, and analyze it. I also suggest taking a step back to regroup and see if there’s any data that can make your brand operate leaner and perhaps influence your business strategy to yield a more effective outcome.”

 

April Wachtel, Founder of Cheeky Cocktails, followed with a discussion on starting a brand from scratch using data-based insights. Wachtel explained the importance of leveraging industry data and consumer insights to craft a brand identity to fit existing market conditions. She advised brands to cast a wide net and establish multiple methods for sourcing data.

“I would not rely on a single method of collecting data,” explained Wachtel. “Because data can fake you out. It can show like it’s true and means one thing and then in fact it doesn’t. So I have a whole bunch of methods for collecting data, both quantitative and qualitative, as well.”

 

Paul Monahan, Co-Founder of Matchbook Distilling, explained how data can help brands analyze the economics of the production phase. Monahan covered how contract distillers cost out the production process and gave suppliers a window into the technical aspects of guiding a product from concept to shelf. Monahan emphasizes the importance of understanding the real cost of raw materials and the attached production fees so brands can translate the data into an effective template that will bring their projects to life.

“Understanding the granular data that you pay for when you’re producing a project or trying to bring a project to life is a super important part,” emphasized Monahan. “If you cannot put together enough funding or have enough money to pay the bills at net 30 or net 60 if someone is nice enough to give you terms as a young startup brand, then, unfortunately, you’re not going to get past that first purchase order from a distiller like us.”

 

Justin Lew, Consumer Marketing and Digital Director at Distill Ventures, closed out the panel by delivering an overview of agile data models. Lew offered a perspective on successfully creating a model to drive conversions and laid out the process of testing and measuring data in order to learn from it and efficiently scale business insights. Lew even shared some useful examples of brands that crafted their social media presence around data insights.

“Have a clear sense of what you’re looking to accomplish and make decisions based on that,” said Lew. “So if you’re trying to focus overall on driving conversion, and that’s the bottom of your funnel, then have everything linked to that but start building your funnel.”

 

How to Make Data-Driven Decisions

Chris Ladas 0:10

How are we doing today, everyone? Thank you to Andrés and Park Street for this opportunity. I’m excited to be here today. As mentioned, I’m Chris Ladas, founder of XAL Consulting, a craft alcohol beverage consulting firm. Like many of you, I’m a small business owner continuously looking for ways to improve my business and provide better services for my clients. Throughout my career, I’ve always strived to improve sales and work smarter, not harder—which leads us to our conversation about data. Data is defined as the facts and statistics gathered together for reference or analysis. Beyond that definition, data is an asset—it is actually the single most valuable asset on the planet right now. Ninety-seven percent of brands use data to power their business opportunities, and 76% of businesses use data to form their entire business strategy. I’m here today to discuss how the two primary types of data can help brands grow efficiently and successfully.

Chris Ladas 2:05

To understand data, we must recognize the two primary categories: qualitative and quantitative data. Qualitative data consists of descriptive and conceptual findings collected through questionnaires, interviews, or observation. Analyzing qualitative data allows us to explore ideas and contextualize quantitative results. Examples include documents, photographs, audio, video recordings, descriptions, and open-ended questionnaires. In the alcohol beverage business, content analysis—categorizing verbal or behavioral feedback to classify and summarize data—is particularly relevant. For a brand in its early stages, qualitative data includes feedback on packaging, labels, taste, smell, or focus group findings. This helps assess a brand’s viability, retail appeal, value proposition, pricing, and overall market competitiveness—especially for unique or newly imported products.

Chris Ladas 4:57

Quantitative data, on the other hand, is what most people think of when referring to data. It is used when a researcher is trying to quantify a problem or address the “what” or “how many” aspects of a research question. It is data that can be counted or measured on a numeric scale. Examples include counts, measurements, sensory calculations, or the quantification of qualitative feedback—for instance, noting that 5 out of 10 consumers would drink a specific product. Quantitative data collection relies primarily on surveys (executed online via emails, QR codes, or social media) and structured interviews.

Chris Ladas 6:27

Quantitative data can be interpreted using various analytical methods, such as cross-tabulation, trend analysis, conjoint analysis, and gap analysis. Interpreting data is just as important as collecting it. For the alcohol beverage industry, quantitative data includes sales figures by case, category, account, location, or time period. This numerical data directly drives sales strategy. For example, realizing that a college-town happy hour shot program yields double the monthly depletions provides actionable data on market selection, pricing, e-commerce targeting, and on-premise to off-premise expansion strategies.

Chris Ladas 8:00

Consider a scenario where a study evaluates 500 consumers divided across regions, economic classes, and beverage preferences. Gathering feedback on taste and packaging yields qualitative data, while measuring how many participants would buy the drink, how they would consume it, and what price they would pay yields quantitative data. Combining both provides an invaluable roadmap for a brand’s go-to-market strategy.

Chris Ladas 8:37

In summary, acquiring and analyzing data is not an unnecessary or unaffordable expense for craft and emerging brands—it is an investment that prevents costly missteps. Compared to the expense of placing full-time sales representatives or launching unproven programming in a market, leveraging data allows you to operate leaner and refine your strategy for maximum effectiveness. Collecting, organizing, and analyzing available data is the difference between achieving your business goals and falling short. Thank you for your time today!

The 5 Steps to Crafting a Brand Identity

April Wachtel 0:09

Thank you so much for entertaining me here today. My name is April Wachtel, and I am the founder and CEO of Cheeky, a line of bar-quality syrups and juices for home and bar use. I also host the Movers and Shakers podcast on people and ideas changing the beverage landscape. Truly, my background is industry-first: I’ve spent 25 years in food, beverage, and hospitality. I came up through bars in Boston, worked as a brand ambassador for Bacardi, consulted for Diageo for five years in the US on-premise market, and have taught thousands of students how to make cocktails in person and online. So as I mentioned, my background is industry and product first, not business. The perspective I’m sharing today is how you slap things together from zero to launch a viable brand that ensures short-, mid-, and long-term success.

April Wachtel 1:08

If you are starting a brand or launching a new product, you aren’t starting with a completely blank slate. Whether solving an industry problem as an expert or identifying a need as a consumer, you start with a little insight—and if you play your cards right, that becomes a big insight. There is a famous, likely fake quote attributed to Michelangelo when asked how he carved the David: “I just chipped away everything that did not look like David.” Truly, I believe the role of the entrepreneur is to take a vague, amorphous idea and chip away at it over time until a clear picture of a brand sits in front of you.

April Wachtel 2:20

The three insights I started with when launching Cheeky were:

  1. Hospitality is personal and emotional: People feel deep connections, joy, worth, or significance around hospitality.

  2. Craft cocktails build connection: It’s only a small fraction about flavor—it’s mostly about the experience of having something custom-made for you, whether at a bar or at home.

  3. Cocktails are a giant pain to make: This applies to consumers and trade alike. Bartenders have the tools and time, but churning out volume is problematic, which is why batching exists.

If you are launching a brand, put your idea on paper—whether a cocktail napkin, Word doc, deck, or business plan. Get feedback, but remember that consumers will lie to you and say they love an idea just to be nice. The best way to get real data is to get people to commit with actual money.

April Wachtel 4:39

Always consider industry data. Current and historical market conditions are relevant, as is understanding your Total Addressable Market (TAM) based on whether you want a lifestyle business or a high-growth company. Examine competitors who have done something similar: when bootstrapping Cheeky before taking on investors, one big question was market size. Finding Fever-Tree’s annual report showing a $3.5 billion market cap proved there was ample opportunity in the premium mixer segment.

April Wachtel 6:13

When collecting data, look for patterns and outliers across sales channels. Set up multiple methods to collect both quantitative and qualitative data rather than relying on a single source. Ideally, you want a clean flow of data through a single dashboard, but in reality, early-stage businesses must cobble together different technologies and manual analysis to get actionable insights. Don’t be afraid to “scale the unscalable”: early on, I spent a lot of time talking directly to customers via phone, email, chatbots, and even hand-delivering packages in Brooklyn to gather rich qualitative feedback from super-users.

April Wachtel 8:32

What data should you track? Sales revenue and growth are obvious—including distribution points, order size, reorder rates, and sell-through. In direct-to-consumer sales, track cart size increases over time. Keep an eye on unusually large or small orders. For example, if someone orders a single $7.50 four-ounce bottle and pays $15 to $20 for shipping, it’s almost always a corporate buyer or venue evaluating the product for a larger order—so I always Google those single-bottle buyers. Additionally, track your Net Promoter Score (NPS) and real referral rates to see how customers share your brand within their networks.

April Wachtel 12:34

A few caveats to keep in mind: data is not always predictive of the future, nor is it meaningful without context. For instance, a B2B Net Promoter Score of 100 is fantastic, but B2B customers value customer service just as much as the product itself. You need supporting qualitative data to know if the product itself is truly resonating. Lastly, remember the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi: data collection is not a one-time exercise. You don’t measure once and get permanent answers. Evaluating your data and making perfect sushi both require a full-time, lifetime commitment. Thank you so much for your time!

Beverage Alcohol Production 101: The Cost of Goods

Paul Monahan 0:09

Hey, y’all! Chris, thank you so much. I’m going to dive into a granular, critical part of building brands: the cost of goods and how much it actually costs to put liquid into a bottle. If we’re trying to build a business, we need to have a firm understanding of what things cost. My name is Paul Monahan, and I’m the co-founder and CEO of Matchbook Distilling Company, a small distillery on the East End of Long Island on the North Fork. We are a facility that provides services and produces products. The biggest service we provide is helping entrepreneurs who have the itch to create a spirit brand in a congested space. We operate as a full concept-to-shelf facility: we mash, ferment, rectify, bottle, and even wholesale product directly to New York retailers in-house. Before deciding what you want your retail price to be, you need to understand how to get all your raw materials and dry goods onto the property.

Paul Monahan 1:47

Vendors like to send pro forma invoices. A vendor might quote you one price verbally, but the pro forma invoice reveals the true cost once you factor in shipping, freight, and yield per finished bottle. This dramatically changes your bottle cost before a wholesaler buys it and tacks on 30%, and before a retailer buys it and tacks on another 30%. All of a sudden, a super-premium gin you hoped to launch at $38 on the retail shelf ends up at $49. Understanding this granular cost data when bringing a project to life is essential. If you cannot assemble enough funding or manage net-30 or net-60 terms as a startup, you won’t get past that first purchase order with a contract distiller.

Paul Monahan 2:53

Let’s look at production unit economics. To break down how much a 300-gallon run costs versus a 600-gallon run at a contract distillery: a 300-gallon run yields about 750 bottles, while 600 gallons yields roughly double. When analyzing the labor hours required to produce a spirit, a surprisingly large percentage goes to cleaning (Clean-In-Place, or CIP). Contract distilleries run rum, whiskey, vodka, and gin back-to-back, and no brand wants crossover flavor from the previous spirit run. In fact, an eight-hour distillation job effectively takes 24 hours of total facility time once you account for eight hours of CIP cleaning before and eight hours after. Because fixed labor and cleaning setups are so similar across batch sizes, a 300-gallon run might cost $8.80 per bottle in pure production labor, whereas a 600-gallon run cuts that production cost nearly in half per unit simply by increasing scale.

Paul Monahan 6:42

Now let’s talk about glass economics. If you order 10 pallets of standard 750ml glass (just over 10,000 bottles), the glass itself might cost around $17,000, plus extra fees for pallets and freight, bringing the total to roughly $20,500. If you try to be conservative and buy only five pallets instead, the glass cost drops, but the freight cost stays virtually identical because it requires the same truck, gas, driver, and labor to deliver the load. Consequently, cutting your glass order in half does not cut your total landed cost in half. The true landed cost per bottle on smaller orders is significantly higher than the baseline quote, which can heavily impact your COGS if you aren’t tracking freight data accurately.

Paul Monahan 8:59

The same principle applies to labels. Printing a simple front-and-back label on a standard roll involves significant setup fees. Print shops charge primarily for setting up the machine template and labor; the paper itself is cheap. Ordering a run of only 100 labels might cost $10.45 per label due to setup amortization, whereas increasing your order to 1,000 labels drops the unit price dramatically. Even if you hold extra labels for samples, wholesaler needs, or rapid expansion into new states, buying at a higher volume upfront manages your COGS far more effectively.

Paul Monahan 10:59

Finally, consider your finished cocktail or spirit breakdown. Calculate the true unit cost of every milliliter of liquid alongside your dry goods, glass, labels, stoppers, and federal excise taxes. Doing this complete cost analysis reveals whether your product can generate marginal returns or if you’ll run out of capital. Contract distilleries can help you break down these numbers, but it is up to brand owners to take this cost data seriously and build it into their financial models. Building a sustainable brand starts on the production floor long before the marketing campaign begins. Thank you, all!

Planning Your Paid Social Media Strategy (With Examples)

Justin Lew 0:10

One of the things April covered earlier that I thought was fascinating is the idea of scaling the unscalable. It reminds me of a joke: how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Today, we’re going to talk about how to build agile models—a framework that allows businesses, especially founder-led businesses, to “eat those elephants.” My name is Justin Lew, and I’m the Consumer Marketing and Digital Director for Distilled Ventures. Distilled Ventures is the world’s first accelerator dedicated to premium spirit brands and non-alcoholic spirits. All the brands we work with are founder-led, and when you enter our program, you receive capital, expertise, and ongoing mentoring.

Justin Lew 1:43

We believe founder-led brands are the most interesting in the industry, which is why we’ve committed over $120 million to 15 brands over the past nine years—ranging from non-alcoholic spirits like Ritual Zero Proof to New World whiskies like Stauning and Starward. We believe the competitive advantage of founder-led brands lies in their size and agility. I equate it to the difference between a cigarette racing boat and a massive container ship. A cigarette boat is super agile with fast decision-making and rapid innovation cycles, but has fewer resources. A container ship is heavily resourced in cash and people, but lacks agility. At Distilled Ventures, we follow a simple agile framework: establish one clear objective, then enter a cycle to Test, Measure, Learn, Optimize, and Scale.

Justin Lew 5:28

For example, in a paid social campaign aimed at driving sales, you move through three primary levers: testing your overall audience, identifying which creative assets work with that audience, and refining the copy that drives conversion. While large multinationals lock themselves into rigid annual planning cycles, smaller founder-led brands have the flexibility to evaluate performance weekly or monthly, make small bets, optimize quickly, and scale what works. Direct-to-consumer strategies often focus on conversion, but driving upper-funnel brand awareness should typically precede conversion efforts by six to eight months.

Justin Lew 7:26

A great case study from our portfolio is Ritual Zero Proof, a non-alcoholic spirit brand founded in 2019 that serves as a 1-to-1 replacement for spirits. They applied this agile framework across three areas:

  • Audience: They initially targeted contextual audiences like “sober curious” or “yoga moms.” When ad performance declined, they shifted to an AI-driven, algorithm-based model through Meta (Facebook/Instagram) to identify high-converting consumers.

  • Media Mix: Following Apple’s iOS 14 privacy changes—where 96% of users opted out of tracking—paid social efficiency dropped. Ritual pivoted from relying solely on paid social to adopting a full-funnel approach, leveraging programmatic advertising to build top-of-funnel awareness.

  • Creative: Rather than using traditional 30- or 60-second cutdowns, they customized native, contextually relevant creative tailored specifically to each platform and ad placement.

Justin Lew 12:10

The results speak for themselves. By constantly refining their message, Ritual’s organic social reach and DTC revenue scaled together at the same rate. Since launching in 2019, Ritual has more than doubled its revenue every year. They currently hold 25% of the U.S. non-alcoholic spirits market and a 31% share on Amazon—double that of their nearest competitor. Their success is a direct result of embedding a test, learn, and scale methodology into their daily operations.

Justin Lew 13:21

Here are key tips for founders building an agile growth model:

  1. Build a culture of continuous feedback: Agile testing must be a cross-functional company culture, not just a marketing effort.

  2. Set clear objectives: Align every test directly to the business outcome you are trying to drive.

  3. Follow the 70% Rule: Don’t let perfectionism slow you down. Operating at 70% certainty allows you to move fast and optimize iteratively. Focus on compounding 5% incremental gains rather than chasing rare 10% wins.

  4. Don’t solely focus on conversion: Allocate 70% to 80% of your budget toward top-of-funnel awareness to build demand before trying to capture conversion at the bottom of the funnel.

Thank you for your time!

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