what an interesting mirror for you to live with yeah yeah exactly very different vision of health for you to say oh could I bring that into how I live yeah and how I work

yeah because I think there's a lot of permission granted to us to drink a lot stay up late you know have pizza for breakfast and so the whole lifestyle was you know quite demanding um long hours physical and so you i felt really beaten up by the job and georgia van teal who i lived with her husband also was a brand ambassador so she had it from me as her roommate and her husband so she was seeing just how difficult it was for us to just thrive so she We worked on a lot of education for bartenders, which we called Drink, Eat, Live, which was just this idea of how can we thrive in this business? What are the sort of long-term interventions that we need to use in order to do well and live a long, happy, flourishing life in hospitality or in advocacy or bartending? So we did a lot of education, but nature for me was the first one.

And then I sort of went on to a bit of a mission talking about sugar and and how we should reduce the amount of sugar that we use in cocktails.

So the whole health conversation was health, nature, well-being, thinking about how much we're consuming.

And that part of my life really naturally brought me to Ben Branson, who serendipitously came into Belvedere to talk about how we can use design nature and design on the belvedere bottle to reference how much nature we would use in that brand and then ben and i just started talking about nature anyway and he lent me a book and we kind of became really good friends and i was one of the very first people that he bought bought seed lip too because he i was in the drinks business and he was a designer so i think he wanted some feedback and so that's how we started the conversation around seed lip initially i was very supportive of everything he was doing I don't know if you've ever met Ben, but he's a very persuasive character.

And, you know, he was incredibly passionate, which at that time, so when would this have been? 2015, maybe? 14, 15? You know, this concept of a non-alcoholic distilled spirit was crazy.

It was really kind of crazy, a crazy idea.

What does the future look like if you are able to make happen what you want to have happen with the support of government? Yeah.

Because if the toy breaks, brands stop investing into competitions and the circle starts again.

Look, it doesn't always have to be a competition, you know, from a brand building perspective.

It's just the competition seems to be very effective because of the nature of our business, because perhaps the personality type that attracts that type of bartender.

And I think just because it tends to show how we're progressing and how we're learning.

Last year, I only got to the top four in world class.

This year, I got to the top two.

There's a sense of like, I'm getting better.

to explain you can have a gin and tonic that is probably going to be the same ABV as a beer, especially if you're drinking IPA.

they were trying to steal your-

No.

So Belvedere e- effectively, you know, defined what luxury vodka should taste like, look like, feel like.

Um, and that came from, uh, Poland.

That bottle had been in pro- in production in Poland, so that acid-etched design is a Polish design.

You know, having the window through the back of the bottle, that's a very, that was a very Polish design.

Um, uh, there's another vodka, Chopin, that also has that similar effect.

Mm.