How We Made It in Africa: building The Duchess
How We Made It in Africa profiled the Duchess story — the brand-building, the distribution hustle, and the move from 1 million bottles in year one to 8 million in year five.
In January 2022, How We Made It in Africa ran a long-form profile of The Duchess. The piece walked through the founding, the year-one distribution hustle, and where the brand was going internationally.
The numbers as of January 2022:
- 8 million+ bottles shipped
- 7 countries on shelf
- 50%+ of revenue from export
- 74% of customers women aged 18–34
But the parts of the piece that travel furthest are the operating details, not the numbers.
On distribution: “I did a lot of LinkedIn stalking to find purchasing managers and made a lot of cold calls to the head offices of big retailers to pitch to their head of beverages.” That sentence is the entire founder-led-distribution playbook compressed into thirty words. Most early-stage founders never write the cold email or make the cold call because it feels undignified. It is the highest-leverage hour you can spend in year one.
On manufacturing: Duchess is co-packed by Chill Beverages International in Stellenbosch. Outsourced manufacture, owned brand. That decision — brand-led FMCG, not formulation-led — is one of the most important calls we made early. We protected the brand, the design, the story. We didn’t try to also be a beverage manufacturer.
On Brannas Draught: The piece names the precursor venture. “I learnt a lot about the beverage industry while developing Brannas Draught: how to create a brand from scratch, how to create the liquid, how to manufacture a beverage line and how the distribution network operates.” Brannas was the school. The Duchess was the application of what I learned there.
On distribution complexity: “We’ve got different approaches for different markets and I can honestly say we haven’t yet solved our distribution strategy.” That’s an honest line. Most founders won’t say “haven’t solved it” in print. The work of international expansion is messy. Saying so doesn’t lose deals. It builds trust.
The full piece is worth a read if you want the longer-form founding story → How We Made It in Africa.