Nishat Gupte, CEO of Compass Box Whisky, delivers a masterclass on the pillars of spirits distribution and how to transform your distributor into your most powerful marketer. Nishat challenges the “old contract” of brand distribution where brands merely send pitch sheets, pricing ladders, and POS materials to an importer and proposes a “new contract” built on three strict pillars: Alignment, Investment, and Accountability.
Park Street Imports is the back-office and importing solution for alcoholic beverage brands launching and scaling in the U.S. market.
Nishat Gupte’s Presentation Transcript
My background is in the beverage industry; well, not quite 30 years, but 20 years plus now, which is a long time. I started off with Diageo in their global business development team. I then went into investment banking for many years, running the global investment banking franchise for Credit Suisse across beverages and European luxury. During that time, I led the sale of Aviation Gin on behalf of Davos Brands to Diageo.
About six or seven years ago, I pivoted to an entrepreneurial journey. I co-founded and served as the founding CEO of a few brands in the US, including Blake Lively’s Betty Buzz and Betty Booze. A few years ago, I also launched Pantalones Tequila with Matthew McConaughey. Last March, because I had spent five years commuting every single weekend between London and New York, I decided to change it up a bit and stepped into the role of CEO at Compass Box Whisky.
Today, I want to talk about things from a brand owner’s perspective: how do you work successfully with a distributor? Over the next eight to ten minutes, I want to convince you that the most important marketing you will ever do happens in rooms where neither you, as the brand owner, nor anyone else from your team, will ever be present. Your distributor is the most underrated marketeer on your payroll, and I want to talk about how you make sure they are earning their keep.
Let me start with a story. This didn’t happen here in the UK, but to give you an example, we had arranged a brand tasting weeks and weeks in advance over in Japan. The tasting rolled around, and unexpectedly, no one from our core team was able to travel and attend. Normally, a brand would say, “Let’s cancel the tasting and reschedule it for another time.” Instead, because we had thoroughly trained our distributor in advance on our narrative, our brand history, and what we wanted to sell, he ran the tasting for us using our exact format.
Weeks passed by with no real feedback, and we didn’t actually know who had attended. As it turned out, one of the biggest retail spirit buyers in Japan was sitting in that room. Frankly, I didn’t even know this massive account existed at the time! He sat through the tasting, didn’t announce himself, didn’t tell anybody who he was, and didn’t mention whether or not he liked the liquid.
A few months later, he reached out and said, “Hey, I really liked that brand. I want to launch it across our network, and I’d like to do a $15,000 corporate buy.” We are actually launching a limited-edition product with them at the end of this month. My point in telling this story is that as independent brands, we must simply assume that we are almost never going to be in the actual rooms of influence. Therefore, the greatest commercial leverage you can establish doesn’t come from consumer-facing events; it comes from trade shows and distributor trainings that often get completely underrated.
Most spirits marketing operates on the assumption that the brand owner is always in the room. When we look at LinkedIn posts, it’s all people talking about the “disruptive marketing” they’ve executed and how amazing it is. But the truth is, no craft or emerging brand possesses a marketing budget that can transcend the noise and break through at a massive scale. You can’t do it consistently. What you do have is the ability to influence, train, and arm the sales reps who are physically walking into those rooms.
Where are those rooms of influence? In the on-trade, it’s the bartenders who recommend spirits or decide what goes onto their cocktail menus. In the off-trade, it’s the category managers making decisions about what to put on a shelf—and crucially, where to place it on that shelf. In e-commerce, a lot of sales on platforms like Amazon are managed directly through your distributor’s portal. There is an immense amount of trade interaction happening every day where the brand owner has zero direct control over the conversation.
This brings us to what I see as the “old way” versus the “new contract.” Under the old contract, brand owners would create beautiful POS materials, compile sell sheets, map out a pricing ladder, ship them off to the distributor, and hope they sold the liquid. Then, you would review depletions on a monthly or quarterly basis. When you reviewed those trailing numbers looking backward, nobody ever really knew which programming had actually worked and which had failed.
The market has become so hyper-competitive that if you allow friction to exist between the brand, the distributor, and the retailer—or if your story arc isn’t perfectly aligned—it is almost impossible to win. You must establish one clear narrative across every single room. Whether the consumer interacts with your brand in a bar, a traditional retail store, or online, there has to be absolute consistency in the storytelling.
It is equally important to work hand-in-hand with your distributor to evaluate where you are going to invest your commercial capital. You cannot win everywhere, so deciding exactly where to co-fund initiatives is vital. Finally, while businesses love supplier and distributor scorecards, the truth is there should only ever be one shared scorecard where both parties are completely aligned on what success looks like.
To achieve this, I rely on three core pillars: alignment, investment, and accountability.
Alignment is simple in theory: have an annual plan, but make it incredibly detailed. Brands often say, “I want to sell 1,000 cases,” or 10,000 cases, or whatever the target is. In isolation, that number means nothing. The plan must be explicitly broken down by channel, outlining exactly how you are going to achieve that volume and what specific pull-through tactics will drive retail velocity. Spend time mapping that out.
Next is investment. Identify the key target accounts that you can sustainably grow over the long term, and determine exactly how you and your distributor are going to co-invest to scale them together.
The final, challenging pillar is accountability. Too often, when you walk into Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs), there is an excess of corporate politeness. People say things like, “Well, perhaps we could have done this or that slightly differently,” rather than offering brutally honest feedback. You need to measure performance quantitatively to determine what worked and what didn’t. Most importantly, you need to identify your “activation graveyards”—the programs where you went all-in commercially, but completely failed.
How do you apply these principles across your business channels?
In the on-trade, focus on a “train the trainer” philosophy. If your distributor has a dedicated on-premise specialist, ensure they know exactly what narrative your brand wants to tell at the bar. Dictate the specific menu listings you want to achieve; do not leave it to chance, because sales reps will naturally default to talking about whatever products they feel most comfortable selling. You must drive that thought process.
In the off-trade, be incredibly clear about where your bottle needs to sit on the retail shelf. Being positioned in the wrong block or at the wrong price point will ultimately result in your brand getting delisted.
Finally, on e-commerce and D2C platforms, never leave it to someone else to dictate your brand identity. Control your digital assets so that your storytelling remains uniform across every touchpoint. When a consumer interacts with your brand, that consistent experience is what ultimately drives rate of sale.
I’ll leave you with one final thought: stop marketing to the trade, and start marketing through them. As brand owners, that is the golden rule we too often forget.
Thank you very much.