YouSaid · the spoken record

Kat Hantas

lines on the record: 97
first: 2024-10-21
most recent: 2024-10-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“So I love to make Greek food. So, this drinks so light, you know, I don't think it like complements the way that you look to wine to like bring out certain flavors, but I think of it more like it's refreshing and it accompanies nicely.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like to say timing versus luck because luck sort of feels like it's happening to you, but timing, you know, with the movie, the timing was awful because they decided they didn't want to be a boy band anymore and I couldn't have planned it. And with this one, the timing was perfect. We hit every trend going on in spirits at the time. And the market was ready for this product. For sure, there were moments of luck, you know, that went our way. And then the rest of it is just hustle, making yourself, you know, in every step of the way kind of seem bigger than you are so that you can make the money go further, you know. And that is so hugely important. And I think played a huge role in why things happen so quickly for us. We connected those dots and did a really good job at it.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Unbelievable I mean, when you think about this, right, the fact that you took 10 years away and then you come back into this business, and obviously you built a network and you had some advantages because of your place in life and the people you met and you were in San Francisco and there's a lot of tech people there and influential people there, but still you still have to make a product that works, right? How much of this story and what happened? Do you attribute to the work you put in and how much do you think had to do with luck and timing and good fortune and being at the right place at the right time?”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, like three years from the day we ended up on shelves, almost to the day, three years. Like we got on shelf in April of 2019 and we closed the deal with Diageo March of 2022.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I know that the journey we've just talked about it for a long time was grueling and challenging, but when you look at it from 35,000 feet, it's like, whoa, that was like... Total of four years from like a less from like launch to exit.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, we still meet with customers like our big customers and get to pitch ideas that they either do or don't do. It's up to them. They get to do what they want. And that frees us up to go and be creative and do other things.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And, you know, and then we thought, is this a good deal for our investors? You know, are our investors making money? And so like by all accounts that our investors were like, are you kidding me? It was one of our best investments that we made of the year, you know. And we didn't even keep their money for very long because $4 million we raised, they only had that money for like a year and a half, you know? So it was like everybody was happy, we were happy, and we felt like this brand now has a home and is going to go and save everyone from drinking crappy margaritas.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Already there were already two brands that had totally copied us and that were being sold. And we knew there were more coming. So we knew there was like, we needed some air cover, right? If we were going to take this brand globally. And when we looked at Diageo, we thought, hey, listen, they actually are the biggest in tequila, which we thought was a huge positive, right? Because they have Don Julio and Casamigos. So the on-premise already knows their brands really well. So you can piggyback on that, you know, knowledge. And they had nothing in flavors, so we were totally unique in their portfolio.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So by every measure, we had accomplished everything we'd set out to do. And now it was like, how is this going to live on forever, right? And get even bigger. We also knew that there would be quick copies, copycats, right?”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everything, yeah They read everything. So there's Nielsen and IRI data. And we were now on the leaderboard. Like, suddenly, this little brand, 21 Seeds, is now suddenly the leader in flavored tequila. And it's actually growing serious share. So we started to get inquiries”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Target Walmart. We got in to Whole Foods nationally. So what made that possible was having this national distribution deal with Southern because these big guys, when you're multiple states with Walmart, they don't want to deal with a bunch of different distributors. You know, they want to deal with one distributor in multiple states.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For 2020, we actually were profitable because it was, you know, you didn't have to spend as much money on things like flying to distributors and opening a market. So like those kind of expenses, you know, can really add up. And we didn't have any of that stuff. We were able to open all of those markets over Zoom, which it saved us a lot of money.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, my sister, who was like, she was an amazing forecaster. And during the pandemic, she knew stuff was going to really start to shut down. So she had the foresight to bring a lot of product in stateside. So we overbought so that we wouldn't run out of supply. And part of that is because when you're in the chains, you can't run out of stock. Otherwise, they'll move someone else into your slot. They don't just run empty shelves, which then turned out to be great for us because we had product to sell. But by that point, we were now in total wine and more. We were regionally in Whole Foods. So we had expanded to more stores in California.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But also to just be our distributor within the state of California. At this point, we're still doing everything ourselves. Another lucky thing happened to us at the end of the summer of 2019, another one of our investors, knew Katie Kuric. And so Katie Kuric had tried 21 seeds at her house. And that summer, New York magazine interviewed her and said, what was your favorite finding from the Hamptons that summer? And she said, it was 21 seeds. And I think it's going to be the next Casamigos. So then, of course, we took that and marketed to our distributors and marketed to the buyer at Molly Stones and marketed to Bevmo and pushed that out. And people don't, they think that it just happens and that's the end of it. You have to push all of that out to all of the people.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's a liquor store that's independent because most Spirits brands at launch are not at BevMo in 147 stores, right? So they're into mom and pop shop. So there's certain mom and pop. Liquor stores that they pay attention to. So we wanted to make sure we were in those stores so we could go on the radar of those folks.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were also marketing to those folks. And the thing about those folks is they pay attention to certain accounts. So we went out and got into those accounts.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Places where mom shop. If she doesn't shop there, we don't want to be there. So we were very, very focused, which was what allowed us to really stretch our dollars, right? We were also wanting to get a distributor right that actually had a sales force. So we wouldn't have to go out and do all this ourselves.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So basically, you can't give away alcohol And you can't give away like a gift card to a retailer. All we would give you is the value of three bottles of tequila. So, what you would ultimately win was just $100, basically.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we pitched the article to them about an easy three step spicy margarita that you can make at home. And even if you don't know anything about how to make cocktails. And we would take those pieces of content and amplify the heck out of them. And one of our investors was an esthetician for Jessica Alba. Anjessica Alba fell in love with it straight away. And she just posted, you know, my favorite new adult beverage on her Instagram. And then we were going out and doing giveaways like tons of giveaways on social media.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now, the plan was, right, we're going to go where she is. So basically we're going to go on Pinterest. We're going to go on Facebook. We're going to go on Instagram. And then we did get a little lucky, right, in that we ended up on television right away because BevMo did a thing for Cinco de Mayo. So basically like any touch point of press that we got and obviously, you know We did know a lot of people in publishing so we were able to get some articles written about us like we pitched pop sugar for example which is a very similar site to Refiner 29.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Initially, we did not. Initially, for the seed round, we were just going to focus on friends and family. We focused a lot on women because we wanted to be predominantly female owned. So we went after a lot of female investors, which typically in the Bay Area, they get left out of stuff, right?”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You got to pay the distributor, you got to make that tequila. I mean, this is now you got the bottles, and by the way, what was just as out of curiosity, what was the retail price going to be per bottle?”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, we felt really good about that. But we still had to actually make it at scale. And that was a real problem. Because we'd never try it before. So when we took down to Mexico to do our first production run using the instructions that we have come up with. And when we went to do that at scale, it just didn't work. And it was taking way, way too much time. And it was the equipment was breaking. We were clogging it up with like the pulp, you know, from the fruit and it was a disaster. And so that night we went home. It was like day one. And that night we went back to our hotels and we got the email from Bevmo. That was the PO.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're like, where's Gary? So then we send another email. And again, this person comes out and it's not him. And they're like, well, he's gone. He's leaving Bevmo. He's no longer the person that's in charge of spirits. And they're like, this woman, Kim, the new buyer, she's doing the line reviews. We go in, we pitch her the product line and she tastes them all. And she says to us, she's like, you know what? These are really good products. And I think we'll end up probably bringing in one or two of these. Yeah. And we said, great, you know, do the, you know, margarita two ways, spicy margarita with the cucumber alapeno and a regular margarita with the valencia orange.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No way. If you get one, you're lucky as a new brand, right? Because we're competing for shelf space against Diageo and Bacardi and Constellation and all their brands, right? Yeah. So that shelf space is very, very Coveted. So, and by the way, in spirits, you don't have to pay slotting fees like you do in non-alcohol. So it's a little more fair in that if you really do have that shining product, you can get through and it's not a matter of how much you can pay, right? With the slotting fees, you have to pay. So we get there. Same thing. We're waiting. We're waiting. We're waiting. Nobody comes.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we go in to the meeting and we tell him our story, he tastes the products. And you could see his face lit up. He's like, wow, he was blown away. This is really good. And he said, okay, if you get your product done and ready, then let's do the line review. So cut to, we set the meeting with Gary and I email him just to find out how many people are going to be in a line review just so I bring enough product for sampling and all of that. And I don't hear back from him. But we'd already made the appointment. And I thought, you know, he's really busy because he's in line reviews. So this is fine. Let's just bring more product than we need. And so we say, okay, we're going to go into our meeting on Friday. And our thinking for the labels was like, okay, everyone's telling us at most we might get two SKUs approved.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we were sitting there, we're like, Do we run? Should we just get out of here? Like, she doesn't know who we are. Like, this is our chance to go. We should go. And as we're debating whether we should just get up and leave, this guy comes out and he says, hi, I'm Gary. I'm the new so-and-so. My meeting just canceled. I'll take the meeting. And we were just like, oh”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Correct. And back to my movie days, I'm thinking when the studio head leaves, you're done. You don't want to be known as that person's tequila.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so by the end of 2018, and we call up our friend at Bedmo and we say, okay, we have our bottles. Now, we were Frankensteining it, right? Like pouring the liquid in. And we made our appointment with this guy and we go down to Bevmo and on a Friday, we confirmed the meeting and we get there on Monday and we pick up the phone. There's no receptionist at BEBMO. And we were 15 minutes early because we were very excited. We're talking talking and 15 minutes go by and nobody comes to get us. And so we're thinking, oh, maybe we should email, send an email because maybe there's no receptionist, so they probably don't have assistant. So we send an email. And then five minutes later, this lady comes out and she says, hey, you know, you're here to see so-and-so. Yes, well, so-and-so doesn't work here anymore. And we're like, well, we just talked to him on Friday. What do you mean? Well, he didn't know he wasn't working here on Friday.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. So then at that point, we had been working with like a consultant, this guy that had been in the spirits industry, and he had worked with another design firm. And so he said, listen, these three girls. And they did an incredible job with our bottles.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the spring, and you have to be ready with your product, everything done in like January. And if you are lucky enough to be invited to present at a line review, you have an opportunity to pitch your product. And then if they decide to take you, then you go into their resets so they completely reset the stores, all the shelves in the spring, and then based on how those products perform, then they do plug and play in the fall, which is like a reshuffling. So basically you have like kind of like one chance to get in there.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. And so he actually was one person that was very encouraging to us. And so he said, listen, once you get further along and you have a finished bottle, you know, they had these things called line reviews, which we hadn't heard of until, you know, we had this conversation. And what a line review is, is all the major retailers, which is where we want it to be, right? Our strategy was like, we're going to go where mom shop, mom shop, and grocery store chains. They shop at Target. They shop at Walmart. So we needed to get into those accounts. And those line reviews happen once a year.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. And he thought, you know, the kettle botanicals had come out, and he was like, it's sort of like a similar proposition in that it's, you know, a little lower ABV and it's, you know, that's like lighter vodka with flavor. And this is tequila with flavor. I get it. Like he thought I could see that. Tequila is on fire as a category. And this could be kind of like the kettle botanicals and the tequila aisle.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. Yeah. So we had, through like a friend of a friend of a friend We had able to get to who at the time was the liquor buyer at Bevmo and just pick their brain on this idea, right? And actually, to your earlier question, guy, he was the one who was like, actually, I think this is a good idea.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, exactly. And more importantly, guy, going back to our consumer, she's not going to make a separate trip to that mom and pop store. She's buying her stuff where she buys her stuff.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it ate up a lot of time for us, which was quite valuable because, you know, we needed, we had sort of, I can tell you about these sort of early meetings that we had in terms of the final piece, which is who are the retailers, right? We wanted to be aware mom shop. So we had pitched a big retailer in California that had many locations, like 147 locations throughout California selling alcohol.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think we had only put in at this point $100,000. So it was like almost, I would say almost half our budget was going to this. Yeah.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, now it's important to note that every brand that they have brought to market, like so many of their brands, are for men. I mean, but those were the big spirits brands. Like they had worked on many, many Spirits brands. All of them, I would say the majority of them, you know, are being marketed to men. And so they kept pushing our label and the design into a sort of very masculine like mustache handlebar kind of vibe. And we were like, that's not what we want. And so we'd give them notes and they would just ignore our notes. And it was actually very a little bit scary, right? Because here we were totally unknown. We were going with our gut. And we thought we can't keep doing this. We can't keep giving them these notes and them ignoring them. So we fired them.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. And so what we did was we took a walk to that tequila aisle and kind of looked at the aisle. And the first thing we noticed was that, first of all, there was no color. Color was missing from the aisle. So we knew we wanted it to be bright and stand out, but not be like we wanted it to feel premium. We were thinking like we wanted to almost be like a beautiful bottle of perfume that you would feel proud to give as a gift. So a lot of we needed the label in the bottle to do a lot of heavy lifting for us because that was where a lot of the marketing was going to happen. And then what was interesting there was, you know, we actually hired Design agency that was very, very prominent in the space. And it actually took up a big piece. That was one of our big mistakes that we made.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So initially, the three of us each put in the money to just it, and it was, I want to say $100,000. Yeah. We put in the $100,000 for the year of 2018 to just see if we could actually bring this. You know, make this product do the development of the actual product.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, just backing up for a sec, because I know that the tequila is now being, you got this distillery in Jalisco, this woman-owned distillery, and they're working on the product. Let's just go back to California for a second and talk about money. Because, you know, starting a beveraged brand is not cheap. I'm thinking you go to a bunch of investment companies, VCs, and you've got a pretty solid team there. Is that what you did to raise money?”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You can actually, and that's how we did it. Park Street is a distributor that checks the box on the three tier system. They are the ones who are delivering the booze to the customer writing, you know, doing all of that. They just don't have a sales force. So, yeah. So, if you can sell it in yourself, you have to sell it in yourself.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, they just said it's a pass. Really? Really? I'm surprised. Because at the time, tequila was being marketed to men and being sold like scotches and whiskeys. And that was what is how tequila was being marketed back then.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so we put together the pitch. We said, here's what we've observed this is drinks as easy as a glass of wine, half the calories. We're going after the mom consumer, and we're going to push easy at home cocktail solutions for her to her, you know, through online, like through Pinterest and Instagram and Facebook and so on. And they were like, no, thank you. Wait, why?”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Alright, but then you also have to start having conversations with distributors because this is a business that requires distribution. So even before you had a product, you had to try and get meetings with distributors. So what was your pitch to them?”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, and she actually, you know, her mother, this was actually really rare, her mother owned a bottling facility in Veracruz. And she saw a lot of herself in us.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it wasn't just the actual making of it, also the storage. Like, we needed to build refrigeration, being able to store the ingredients in refrigeration that didn't exist down there. So it was a real leap of faith. That the distillery had to take to actually make this product. So we found a distillery that was willing to do that. And it turned out it was owned by a woman.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Be honest with you, I would say they were sort of open to it, but the real issue for us was really in order to be able to infuse at scale, we needed to make some modifications at the distillery. And that's where the conversations became a little more complicated. Like, you want to do what? And you don't come from beverage and you've never started a spirits brand and your three girls, it is a very macho business still down there. Was a bit of that, but really it was about finding a partner who was willing to sort of innovate with us”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. So the first thing we did was we hired a lawyer. We hired a booze attorney. We thought we got to wrap our heads around like, first of all, the legalities of how you sell tequila, right? And then we also thought a booze attorney would point us in the direction of who are some of the distilleries down in Mexico that are making tequila for people.”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. So our whole idea was moms control the shopping. They make those decisions. So we're going to put this product where she can find it, right? We're going to tell her how to use it, give her permission to bring a hard alcohol into the home because prior to 21 seeds, really women would bring wine and beer by that for the house and they weren't in the business of really buying hard alcohol for the house. And we really changed that behavior”
2024-10-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · 21 Seeds: Kat Hantas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT