Geoff Miles, VP of Marketing at Bev, on building a startup consumer brand

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Geoff Miles is the VP of Marketing at Bev, a beverage brand that promotes female empowerment in business and beyond. Geoff was previously the Co-Founder of Collective Agency that supported progressive political and social organizations through original digital campaigns. Brian and Geoff go behind the scenes to talk about starting a new brand, growing an audience, focusing on specific marketing efforts early on, and Bev's launch of a new media platform, Made By Chicks.

Transcript

Brian Bosche:
Recording now. All right, everyone. Welcome back to the creativeBTS podcast. This is Brian Bosche, and today I am so excited to bring on Geoff Miles, the VP of marketing at Bev. Geoff, thanks so much for coming on.

Geoff Miles:
Thanks, Brian. Great to talk to you. It's been a little while.

Brian Bosche:
I know. This is a more personal connection for me with Alix and I went to Dartmouth together, the founder of Bev. So, I've seen her progress from the start, and building Bev over time. But would love to get a little more background on yourself as you've taken over marketing for Bev.

Geoff Miles:
Yeah. That's been an interesting ... We can go down a lot of paths with that one. Alix and I are also married, which we don't talk about a lot. But we have that family dynamic going on, which has its own challenges. But I came on-

Brian Bosche:
You just work all the time? That's all right. It's personal.

Geoff Miles:
We work all the time, yeah. And then, she will actually drag me away from my computer at times. But we started working together. My background, we actually knew each other outside of just you, and Alix, and Dartmouth back when, before you got acquired by Smartsheet. I think we did something, a project together. But I was working in the political realm, and advertising, and consumer products as well.

Geoff Miles:
And last fall, we were talking and Alix was like, "Hey, I need some help in the marketing department." It was very young team, and she's like, "Will you come in and help out for a couple months?" And now just about a year later, it's been a little more than a couple months. But we have had a lot of growth. Very thankful for that during this time, like during COVID. And it's been exciting. It's been a wild ride. Lots of ups and downs. I've been a fly on the wall for all of it, through the whole life cycle of Bev. But especially since I've come on, being able to see those ups and downs, and feel them more personally. It's been exciting and great. I have a great team that I work with here.

Brian Bosche:
Yeah. Well, I've talked to some larger marketing teams, much larger enterprises, down to mid size and growth type companies. But I haven't spoken to like a true startup yet that's been built from the ground up, and building the marketing from the ground up. And with Bev-

Geoff Miles:
Oh. Well, let's get into it.

Brian Bosche:
Yeah, exactly. Do you want to give a quick pitch on Bev?

Geoff Miles:
Yeah, sure. I'm actually not, I don't know if you're recording this for video, I'm not drinking Bev right now.

Brian Bosche:
That's okay.

Geoff Miles:
Yeah. So Bev, Alix started this a little over two and a half years ago now, which is wild. Based around what she was experiencing in social scenes, both during college and post. Wanting to create a product in the more social, party atmosphere that was made for and by women, and speaks to women.

Geoff Miles:
And if you look at your shelves, like Jack Daniels, and you see a lot of darker colors, you're starting to see more and more come out of that. But a lot of what when Alix started the brand, it was mostly men marketing towards men, or men targeting towards men buying drinks for women. And she wanted to create a drink that, and not just a drink, Bev's mission 'break the glass' really is about breaking barriers for women and underrepresented communities to really expand themselves in lots of different ways. And that's how Made by Chicks actually comes into play in all of this is a tying thread in everything that we're doing.

Brian Bosche:
Yeah. And it's interesting for consumer goods especially and new brands that you're launching, you're launching a brand. Which compared to B2B software like we did at Slope, our startup, which was very B2B, SAS focused, you start with a product, and then you build the brand around that where the brand is so central to any kind of consumer good that you launch.

Brian Bosche:
So, what has it been like? You almost pitched the brand first, and then it's a key part of that product as it grows.

Geoff Miles:
Yeah. When Alix raised her first round of seed money, before I was involved at all, there were no sales. She pitched the idea, and the brand, and the vision, and she did that very intuitively. I think that comes across really just in her to people. But what we see a lot of marketers, founders, they make mistakes in terms of creating products, creating the what. I'm sure most people who listen to your podcasts are quite familiar with Simon Sinek and Start With Why. That concept's been around for awhile, but very few put that really into practice and heart.

Geoff Miles:
I think for Bev, the why is at the heart of everything that we do. Every content piece that comes out of it, we talk about it literally all the time. And connecting to people on that emotional level becomes a lot easier when you have the why in front of you. Right? You can hear the concept of like, "Why am I doing this?" And the bigger vision, but if you're not holding it in front of you and using it as the lens that you're doing your work through every single day, it's not going to come through.

Brian Bosche:
Yeah. And on that as you've grown the brand, what has it been like over the last year? Has it changed? Have you evolved it? What's the progression since you've started?

Geoff Miles:
Yeah. It's evolved a lot. For one, at one point we realized we needed to make money.

Brian Bosche:
As all businesses realize at some point.

Geoff Miles:
Yeah. And we signed up last summer, last September, pretty much right before I joined with our distribution partner, Southern Glaciers. It's the largest wine and spirits distributor in North America, and they're amazing. They're our distributor for retail stores. So, we're in Target now. We also got Target, Safeway, Kroger, Albertson's, all these great grocery chains. And so, they help us get into those, distribute on the retail side. And that was even before D2C e-commerce was a thing for us. That was not a big channel. Basically up until February is when it started increasing.

Geoff Miles:
And then, since people have been at home and in quarantine, I would say wine sales have got up quite a bit. And we've had to pivot as well during that in order to meet the demand, and also deal with the fact that what was 40% of our revenue being on-premise bars, restaurants was now closed. And we had to figure out how we were going to make money. Also, how we were going to work with our distributor on that front.

Geoff Miles:
And thankfully, we've still done fairly well in terms of the off-premise like in grocery chains. Bars and restaurants are still hurting quite a bit, as you know. But our e-commerce just started taking off, and so we pivoted to that hugely in March. We started running paid ads, and focusing just where we were putting our marketing effort into direct response, but building out the channels for the long haul in terms of how we were interacting with our customers, and truly making it a digital first brand.

Brian Bosche:
Yeah. Well, check out the new website launch I think was a few months ago. Incredible, beautiful.

Geoff Miles:
Thanks.

Brian Bosche:
I've really, really appreciated that launch. But give the audience a little idea of you talked about distributors, you talked about going directly to on-prem and D2C. Are those the only three channels? Are those the focuses? And how does the marketing change for each of those different channels?

Geoff Miles:
Yeah. So, those are our main channels that make up the vast majority of our revenue. We also have started doing some e-commerce D2C gifting for corporations, right? So, if you're the executive assistant to Bill Gates, whoever you are, I hope you're listening. You can go and sign up, and we make it really easy to do custom gifts, too, for more corporate staff.

Geoff Miles:
But off-prem, on-prem, and D2C are our major channels. And the way I think about them is, well, we haven't honestly had to focus too much on on-prem during all of this, but we want to support obviously the grocery. Being in Target, it's super important not to get pulled off. So, the launching months for any brand into a major chain like that, you need to have pull through.

Geoff Miles:
And so, we run targeted ads, geo-targeted ads around locations like that. And just to make sure that we are getting the pull through that we need to during this time. And it's interesting to see the behavior of people. We've seen a lot of trial driven on direct-to-consumer. Just we as Bev have seen it, but also talking to a lot of other friends and consumer CBG businesses.

Geoff Miles:
A lot of trial being driven online, and for the most part it's starting to change a little bit now, but in retail people are running in, they're running out. They're not spending time or browsing shelves, right? Because you don't-

Brian Bosche:
It's scary.

Geoff Miles:
You want to get in and get out.

Brian Bosche:
I want to get in and get out. Yeah. Or just get delivery.

Geoff Miles:
Get your stuff. Right. Or just get Instacart. In which case, you already know, but that's also been a place for discovery. I think a lot of the bigger brands are throwing money though in there.

Brian Bosche:
To promote those -

Geoff Miles:
I'm sure Instacart is doing pretty well in terms of they're promoted ad dollars.

Brian Bosche:
And when we started Slope, we were always just experimenting with the different channels, different spends on these different channels, what's going to work, what's going to not. Have you come up with a framework or a way of approaching? Because startup's limited dollars. You raise your round. You only have a limited budget to experiment with. What's been your approach to try to figure out which one of those work and when?

Geoff Miles:
Yeah. So, when we first started running ads, Facebook has been our largest channel in that. It's just-

Brian Bosche:
Facebook or Instagram?

Geoff Miles:
Both, but Facebook actually.

Brian Bosche:
Wow.

Geoff Miles:
Facebook and Instagram are just unmatched. I know there's a lot of social stuff going on around them right now, but in terms of how you can market on them, how you can reach people, it's unmatched in terms of just connecting with your audience and on a low budget.

Geoff Miles:
So small businesses, you talk to any small business that's running Facebook ads, running them successfully, and they'll tell you it's making their business. And for us when we were first starting, we didn't have any money coming in in terms of D2C revenue, it did truly make our business.

Geoff Miles:
So, we tested very top of funnel. Not having much in our email, or we had just launched an SMS platform in March when we started pivoting. We got that set up. So, it didn't really have a ton of owned channels, and everything was testing on top of funnel and Facebook. Different creatives, and videos that we had made in-house, and testing a lot of different copy until we found what works. Just throwing stuff on the wall. And different audiences. I guess that's how you should do it.

Brian Bosche:
Yes. Especially a startup.

Geoff Miles:
For anybody who's testing ads, start slowly. Test from a broad audience probably first. If you have the ability to throw a decently small amount of money in there, I think if you have at least 10K or something in a month to spend, throw it in a broad audience. Facebook's algorithms are good at finding the right people. And then, you break out into interest audiences, change up your creative. But it takes a little bit of time to figure out what works with your target demo.

Brian Bosche:
Yeah. There's a lot of startups, and these startup studios that are popping up that will come up with their actual startup ideas just through Facebook advertising. They'll just test the different copy, test the different audiences, and then whatever [inaudible 00:14:13] the most, they're like, "Oh, there's some potential here. We should run with this."

Geoff Miles:
Yep. We're actually running a campaign like that right now.

Brian Bosche:
With launching new products, right? Like it's a good way to test that.

Geoff Miles:
Yeah. Well, I don't think anybody said anything about launching new products on the team yet. I can't talk about that exactly. But yeah, we have new products coming down the line, and yeah, that's one of the ways we're testing it. Right? It's just to see what's resonating with people. And it's a great way to do customer surveys and product testing.

Brian Bosche:
Yeah, exactly. And it can just be for if you just want to take some flyers. I have friends in the CPG industry, too, where they just want to test, "All right. Let's try to validate this idea in the market," and they can be done through Facebook ads. Pretty cool.

Geoff Miles:
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

Brian Bosche:
All right. So, resources are always constrained at startups, especially on the marketing side. So, give us an idea of your team. What are you operating with? How do you break it apart? Who has which role? In-house, external? How do you piece this team together?

Geoff Miles:
I'm actually hiring right now for a new e-commerce growth person. Thing about growth people is most of the best ones are consultants because they know their value, so it's very annoying to try to find one.

Brian Bosche:
Especially D2C, advertisers, growth people. They can just work across so many brands, and they're so good at it.

Geoff Miles:
Yeah, they're so good at it. We're trying to find one internally. Right now, mostly to do our own on-site AB testing, building landing pages, and look at the data, and tell us which direction creative should go to, both for our paid and organic content.

Geoff Miles:
But right now, I'm doing most of the e-commerce. We also are working with an agency now. We brought one on the end of last month just to expand our capacity as we're growing. And we have our creative team. So our creative director, Charlotte, who actually has been working with Alix on Bev since the very beginning. She designed the brand. She's amazing. She [inaudible 00:16:29] all of our creative focus. We have another designer, too, on the team for support. And we really just we want to actually make our content mostly in-house, or at least managed in-house in terms of working with ambassadors and influencers.

Geoff Miles:
But we have a very specific vision for content. I don't think we have gotten to a point where we're having our own internal creative fatigue, or not seeing stuff. We always try to, through different things we do in our team, try to see things outside of our own bubble, which is generally where agencies would come in.

Geoff Miles:
But we love just being able to move fast, and I think that's an important part of our team is we want to be able to move fast to turn out content, to get a meme out or piece out that is super relevant at the time that it's there, right? You can't do that if you're, or you're going to be a lot slower if you're waiting for an agency, and doing back and forth like that.

Brian Bosche:
Yep. And you don't learn as much. If it's in-house, you just you get that quick feedback loop.

Geoff Miles:
Right. Yeah. No, absolutely. It's true.

Geoff Miles:
And then, we have our social media and events manager, Tess, and Emma who just came on around partnerships, to help with the partnerships. Funny thing about Tess is she just came. She was hired literally right before everybody went into quarantine, so she hasn't done a single part of the events part of her job, but she's been crushing social.

Brian Bosche:
Yeah. The plans have changed across a lot of different marketing teams. I know we're planning a huge event right now, and it's all virtual. Just everything's virtual now.

Geoff Miles:
Right. Right. We've done some virtual events, and I think that some have shown good success, but others haven't. It's sort of a weird feeling in terms of thinking about how we allocate our time as a resource. Right? And a lot of people are spending time on social. I think our social and our giveaways that we've done, different things that we ... Instagram live, Alix is actually, Alix the founder and my wife, is inside right now, answering questions for her own AMA on her Instagram, and that's done incredibly well recently.

Geoff Miles:
So, there's a lot of things that we've done to just be interactive and engaging that we've seen grow our audience more than it ever has been. I think people are on their phones a lot right now, and at their homes, and looking for stuff to interact with that they like, that they can connect to emotionally. And for our audience, it's going well, so we hope we're providing that.

Brian Bosche:
Yeah. Social has exploded across every marketer I talk to. It's the communities that are there. People want to connect more with these kind of the virtual communities. We started the whole marketing Twitter, Slack, and everyone actually goes to those happy hours every week because everything's shut off and in-person. So, I've definitely seen that.

Brian Bosche:
And it seemed like Facebook advertising, from the DTC gurus I follow, the growth hackers, Facebook spend has been all over the place. But you see some good prices because so many people are just on social all the time.

Geoff Miles:
Yeah. It has been all over the place. I was just talking, I don't know if you know the guys at Matcha Bar, but with them and some other people. I'll introduce you later. Max and Graham are great.

Geoff Miles:
But we were talking about D2C, and just e-commerce in general. Trends that people are seeing during this time, and yeah. We've been experiencing it, and it seems across the board, both from large brands pulling their spend from Facebook and a variety of other factors, it's just been all over the place.

Brian Bosche:
Yeah. All right. Let's move into our case study/whatever we're calling this segment. Just talking about a cool thing. And this is one of my favorites. Because at Slope, I pitched every VC that every company is a media company. That was our tagline in every single pitch. And Bev, you just launched, what, today? Yesterday?

Geoff Miles:
Yesterday, yes. Made by Chicks

Brian Bosche:
Made by Chicks. You're starting a media company. First one with the Alix and Mina Harris, the founder of Phenomenal Women. And you're launching a media company, and I'd love to just get a quick pitch on why are you doing this? Why is this part of the overall brand mission? Of 'break the glass'. I believe in it, but a lot of people are, "Why would a canned beverage, why would Bev start a media platform?"

Geoff Miles:
Yeah, and it's a good question. Alix actually always wanted to go, and before even the concept of Bev came, I think she originally wanted to go and start a media company before this. And because she wanted to have a way to spread the mission that she wanted to bring to the world, and media, you have distribution that you own, is a great way to do that. That was before she knew anything about the space, and realized that she could start off much better through a beverage and a canned wine that we could sell D2C.

Geoff Miles:
But now, we're looking at Made by Chicks, which has been part of the Bev brand from the very beginning as a tagline, it's written on the side of our cans, on everything really. And using that as a platform to empower women, talk about the real and raw issues. That's what the podcast is all about, as Alix has interviewed some truly amazing people. Starting with Mina Harris in this first podcast episode. And really getting into the raw, the dirty, the stuff that doesn't come out I feel like in most entrepreneurial interviews. And sharing that with people who are either wanting or looking at taking a career in entrepreneurship, or just it's life as well. It's advice on life.

Geoff Miles:
We made Made by Chicks in the lens of these people also giving advice to Alix as a first time founder. Bev has started doing well. We've had a lot of stumbles along the way, and obviously still learning quite a bit every day.

Brian Bosche:
As every startup. Yup.

Geoff Miles:
So, that was the whole scope of Made by Chicks is the podcast, is giving advice to Alix as this first time founder, and hopefully having a lot of that advice resonate with the audience, and just becoming very vulnerable and authentic in sharing that.

Geoff Miles:
And as a media platform, we hope that expands much further than that. And we can create a community around those values where people feel empowered to share their own stories, and have impact on others. And we'll be creating more content around that. It's not necessarily made for Bev, but it's going to fuel the Bev brand, and who knows what else?

Brian Bosche:
Yeah. Well, that was my next question is how do you fit those two brands together? Is it one brand? Are they separate? How do you manage that from the marketing side?

Geoff Miles:
They are like neighbors touching shoulders. They're loosely connected. We have different, if you look at the branding of Made by Chicks, that rainbow swoop in there, that's actually on the front of our building, just [inaudible 00:24:53]. And we use rainbows in a lot of Bev art and branding throughout.

Geoff Miles:
So, we have nods to the other brand. Obviously, Made by Chicks is written on the sides of our cans. That's not going away anytime soon, so that's a very obvious one. But I look at Made by Chicks as what will hopefully become an umbrella platform with a strong voice that can speak to a lot more than just canned wine, and has a much larger intention of what we're building in it.

Brian Bosche:
Yeah. And when you think about other brands that might want to do this, are you thinking about having the metrics separately? If you're looking at the KPIs or OKRs for Bev versus Made by Chicks, do you think about them separately? Do they tie together? It's an interesting kind of thing to piece together.

Geoff Miles:
Yeah. I think we want to have some sort of attribution channel where we're seeing like, "Oh, is the podcast actually driving sales of Bev?" And Alix is actually just recording some mid-roll ads.

Brian Bosche:
That's hilarious.

Geoff Miles:
We're not a sponsored podcast. We just did this for fun, and to have some great stories told. But we just decided to write some funny mid-roll ads that Alix is recording.

Brian Bosche:
Some fake ones?

Geoff Miles:
Yeah. For Bev, but just funny.

Brian Bosche:
Oh, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's great.

Geoff Miles:
Having fun with them. Yeah. What was the question?

Brian Bosche:
Yeah. It's an interesting thing to link the OKRs and attribution together where are you thinking of Made by Chicks is like you're going to try to build that up as almost a separate brand with its own set of goals, and then kind of see what the attribution is? Because there's always going to be a tension there where you're wanting to drive more leads to Bev, but you don't want to do it at the expense of the Made by Chick's brand.

Geoff Miles:
Yeah. I think with Made by Chicks, this first podcast we're seeing this as a proof of concept, right? What we can do with it.

Brian Bosche:
Yeah. This is day one by the way, everyone. This is startup day one.

Geoff Miles:
This is day one.

Brian Bosche:
We're not looking back.

Geoff Miles:
We're not throwing a ton of money into this. We're seeing where, same way we test ads, what's resonating with people? And maybe it's not a podcast. Who knows. And we do want to build this out in a way that we're connecting with this audience in a meaningful way, and building something that, again, is larger than Bev. I think ideally it will grow to something that has its own OKRs, right? Is measured against itself. Has its own PnL. But we're not quite there yet.

Brian Bosche:
You haven't figured out on day one yet? We'll have to do a check-in at some point.

Geoff Miles:
Yeah. We'll see how this proof of concept goes. But I'm bullish on it. I think it's a cool ... Having your own owned channels, well, having your own channels, right? And having media as one, and it's not Facebook ads, it's not your Facebook page, or just your email list or SMS. Looking at actual own channels. If you have a voice and a following, that opens up the doors to so many additional revenue streams, both in advertising and then creating potentially other brands and stuff around it. I think just having your own platform like that, you can do a lot if it's done right.

Brian Bosche:
Yeah. Well, I just had Morning Brew on with their different email newsletters with the B2B media industry, and just growing that email list, growing your following and community, you're right, it opens up so much more. You own it. It really reduces the amount of investment you need to take to grow because you can sustain yourself a little bit more from all those opportunities.

Brian Bosche:
But when you think about growing the podcast, what are some other things, what do you think the next steps are if these tests go well? YouTube channels, feature films, Alix is on the big screen? What would be your ideal, huge vision for this?

Geoff Miles:
We'll see. I think my personal vision for this, which should connect with Alix on this, but-

Brian Bosche:
She'll find it on the pod. Just send her the podcast.

Geoff Miles:
No, we definitely want to build out, you're right, like I was saying before, our own in-house creative team. I think video is the next step for us in that. Video's huge. You look at YouTube, it's enormous platform. It requires a lot of work. You look at every major media outlet that has their own video team. Some do it incredibly efficiently, and I really would like to know how they do it. Because it just takes so much work.

Geoff Miles:
But I think for us, video is definitely next on their horizons, and building out that team. Both that would fuel our paid ads even more and our organic content, as well as this media platform, YouTube, and another things that we're doing. But I can see video as that next leap if this goes well. Even if this doesn't go well, we're going to move into video slowly. But I think this can help propel it even faster.

Brian Bosche:
Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. And yeah, it's incredible what some of those media companies can do with hundreds of videos a day across all channels.

Geoff Miles:
It's insane.

Brian Bosche:
They're just they're powerhouses.

Geoff Miles:
Hats off to Vice and Complex. All these major media companies that just churn out videos. It's insane.

Brian Bosche:
Well, luckily you're in Venice, so I think you can find some people who are familiar with YouTube wherever you turn on the boardwalk.

Geoff Miles:
There are a few, yes.

Brian Bosche:
Every TikTok I see is on Santa Monica pier or in Venice, so there's a lot of creators out there.

Geoff Miles:
Yeah. No, they're certainly not lacking out here. And it's a cool environment actually being in Venice, just to touch on that. We haven't been in the office for a long time, but I don't know if you've actually seen our office.

Brian Bosche:
I haven't been down.

Geoff Miles:
It's right behind the Venice sign.

Brian Bosche:
Okay, cool.

Geoff Miles:
Well post-quarantine, we'll socially distance meet up. Right behind the Venice sign, we took over this building, and painted it a very subtle pink with a rainbow painted on it. And it's such an iconic spot there that I think also just meshes so well with our brand. We were really lucky to stumble upon the space, and it was the perfect timing for our size and what we were looking for. But you just walk 10 feet, and you're on the boardwalk.

Brian Bosche:
That's amazing.

Geoff Miles:
And it fits so well. We've actually done a ton of in-house videos just on the boardwalk there with people skateboarding, or carrying a fanny pack behind their back. Just Venice has the unique ruggedness to it. A culture personality that is hard to find elsewhere just because I think it's such a melange of different personalities in it. But it has fit very well with our brand and the voice that we're trying to convey as well.

Brian Bosche:
And makes it a lot easier to create content when you can go out and have that as your studio. Definitely.

Geoff Miles:
Yeah, yeah.

Brian Bosche:
All right. We end each podcast with a parting shot. It's just advice. Like what would you leave the audience with? It could be to startup marketers. It could be to fortune 500 CMOs that are definitely listening to this podcast who might want to inject some startup marketing energy into their organization. But what's a takeaway that you'd give the audience on creativeBTS?

Geoff Miles:
One of my early college mentors, he was a physicist, he wasn't even in marketing, but this has resonated with me, and I tell it to everybody, and has kept me going really strongly throughout the years, but say what you do and do what you say. Two simple things that most marketers don't do. And by doing those, everything else is made easier.

Brian Bosche:
That's great advice.

Geoff Miles:
Yeah.

Brian Bosche:
All right. Well, thanks, Geoff. I really appreciate you coming on. And good luck fighting through the pandemic, and getting this new media company off the ground.

Geoff Miles:
Yeah. Thanks so much, Brian. Great being on.