The Money Show with Bruce Whitfield
Sitting down with Bruce Whitfield on national prime-time radio to talk about The Duchess — what it took to build the world's first non-alcoholic G&T, and where the category was going.
In September 2022 I sat down with Bruce Whitfield on The Money Show — South African business radio’s prime-time slot — to talk about The Duchess. By that point we’d shipped over 8 million bottles, were on shelves in 7 countries, and 50%+ of our revenue was coming from export.
What Bruce wanted to talk about, though, wasn’t the numbers. It was the category. Why did a non-alcoholic G&T not exist before 2016? Why now? Why us?
The shortest version of the answer: people stopped wanting to be drunk in public. The longest version is what the show was for.
A few moments worth pulling from the conversation:
On why “non-alcoholic” is the wrong frame. I called the category Born Free on air — drinks designed alcohol-free from the beginning, not stripped down from an alcoholic original. The Duchess is Born Free. The de-alcoholised wines you find on the shelf next to it are not. Different category, different consumer, different price point.
On “you are what you drink”. The line lands every time. The shift from you are what you eat to you are what you drink is the macro-trend the whole category sits on top of. Wellness brands figured this out years before beverage brands did. The Duchess is what happens when the beverage industry catches up.
On distribution. Bruce asked how we got into 7 countries from a Stellenbosch warehouse. The honest answer was: a lot of cold-calling, a lot of LinkedIn-stalking purchasing managers, and one trip with a golden drinks trolley to Cape Town media houses in December 2016 that got us our first press wave.
The full clip lives on Bruce’s archive at Cape Talk’s The Money Show.