Massachusetts-based Willie’s Superbrew has hired former-New Belgium CMO Greg Owsley as its first chief brand officer (CBO).
Owsley will help lead Willie’s into a new brand growth strategy, including a rebrand scheduled to launch in February 2022.
Owsley spent more than 15 years at Colorado-based New Belgium Brewing, helping grow production from 30,000 barrels annually to 750,000 barrels, according to a press release. After leaving New Belgium in 2011, he founded the marketing consulting firm The Storied Brand, where he advised brand growth strategies for Pabst Blue Ribbon, Troegs Independent Brewing, and Firestone Walker’s 805 brand, as well as Stumptown Coffee and Revive Kombucha.
“[Owsley’s] built some of the most soulful, most beautiful brands in the beverage industry,” Nico Enriquez, Willie’s co-founder and CEO, told Brewbound. “Where seltzer has gone as a space, we are so different. We need to stand out from that, and we need someone who can help us do that.”
After rebranding from Farmer Willie’s to Willie’s Superbrew in 2018, the company shifted production from ginger beer to “superbrews,” a self-defined hybrid of hard cider and hard seltzer. The company has posted steady growth since rebranding, producing 50,000 case equivalents (about 3,629 barrels) in 2019 and 115,000 CEs (around 8,346 barrels) in 2020, Enriquez told Brewbound in August.
Through Owsley’s new leadership, the company plans to create a “new category” in hard seltzer that shows that Willie’s is different.
The idea for a new category came in-part from consumers, and a private national survey conducted with help from Meredith Giske, the founder of Hot House Insights, who worked at New Belgium with Owsley. Giske and Owsley conducted ethnographic interviews of hard seltzer drinkers both familiar and unfamiliar with Willie’s products.
“88% of them already think of [Willie’s] as something entirely different than hard seltzer,” Owsley told Brewbound. “They’re using terms like ‘it’s in its own category,’ so it’s like duh, there’s our goal right there. Let’s go out and create our own soulful beverage experience, and take that to a national audience [and] scale that up.”
The company’s plan is to expand throughout the entirety of the East Coast next year. Additionally, if the company is able to double sales in 2022 — Enriquez declined to share 2021 production numbers — chief sales officer Lee Schilll has promised to get a tattoo of a goat riding a surfboard.
“Our sales force is definitely going to be highly motivated, and I would say some of [Schill’s] friends in distributorships will be highly motivated as well,” Enriquez said.
Part of the company’s new growth strategy is to repackage its products to make them stand out on the shelf. It will also be leaning more heavily into its origin story.
“It’s the most irresistible origin story I’ve ever heard of: a goat farmer and a surfer with no idea how to start a company,” Owsley said. “We really want to further this origin story of the goat and the surfer in a way that’s really fun and engaging for people and allow them to participate in that story.”
“I think people want more [of] that feel of where we came from in [our branding], and I think that’s moving in this direction of, this is less about the sellers and more about the soul,” Enriquez added.
Enriquez and Owsley also plan to continue to expand Willie’s sustainability projects, including its beach clean-ups.
“Ever since I left New Belgium where we were striving so hard to be a sustainable business role model, to come upon a company that wants to be capitalism for good even when nobody is looking was heartwarming and feels like that’s a change artist I want to be a part of.”
While the company is holding off releasing too many details about its new releases until closer to the rebrand date, Owsley said to prepare for bright imagery of real fruit, and possibly a goat “with a speaking part.”