Brand building on a budget

Two former licensees are challenging the big brands with a niche Italian spirit If you've had a day out in Brighton at any time in the last five years, you've probably encountered an Italian liqueur called Tuaca (pro- nounced too-aca).

The drink is sold and marketed by Poul Jensen and Sammy Berry who will chalk up 10 years working on the brand next year.

Everywhere you go in the city there are Tuaca posters and tent cards, and bars serving Tuaca shots and Tuscan Mule cocktails, yet despite a Smirnoff-style distribution level of 98% in their home city, sales elsewhere in the UK barely register.

Distribution has gone in-house That could be about to change.

The brand's distribution has been taken in-house by Brown-Forman, which has bought into the brand in Italy, and Jensen and Berry have been retained to handle sales and marketing.

A launch in Edinburgh, Bristol and Leeds is imminent, fronted by a team of brand ambassadors.

Little did Berry know when she was first offered a shot of Tuaca in a hick bar in a mining town in Colorado in 1996 that it would come to all this.

Besotted with the drink, she sourced some for the St James's Tavern, the pub in which she worked in Brighton's Kemptown district, and which was run by Jensen.

She tracked the brand down to the Canepa family distilling business in Tuscany (with help from Jensen's Italian-speaking mum) and they were unwittingly on their way to becoming drinks marketers.

Cases came by parcel courier The first two cases came by parcel courier and cost £466 to import.

Berry recalls: 'We didn't know how to import.

We didn't know anything about paying duty or bonded warehouses.'

They sold nine bottles in the St James's on the first night and haven't looked back since, building the brand on the back of strong support in local listings and the lifestyle press and the hard graft of taking the brand out to licensees.

'We want to do the same in the other cities as we've done in Brighton,' says Berry, 'only not take so long about it.

If people want to sell Tuaca and work with us to build the brand we'll support them, but we're not going to pay huge listings fees.'

Berry says Danes (their name for the Tuaca operation that reflects Jensen's family background) has found Brown-Forman's approach to themselves and the UK refreshing.

'We're not corporate bods and if it had been Diageo or Maxxium [who'd taken over instead] we'd probably have been booted out long ago, but they seem to believe in what we're doing and see that it's working.'

A sign on Danes' door still asks for packages to be left at the garage next door if no one's in.

It may not be the security-pass-and-sales-conference approach to doing business, but if it isn't broken, why fix it?