Gabriel González - Building the First Rum-Based RTD Cocktail

all right welcome to shelf help today we're speaking with Gabriel Gonzalez co founder co CEO of Casalum Latin inspired rum based Seltzer brand that's scaling pretty rapidly in big name retailers like Walmart like Whole Foods Walmart etcetera founded by three South American immigrants Gabriel and team are pretty dead set on building the Red Bull of Latino culture which we're definitely gonna dive into but really just a brand that shows up in all the main places that you know surrounds culture music fashion sports not just on the shelf so building something really cool excited to get into it first off Gabriel just for listeners that aren't that familiar with with Casalu just give us kind of quick lay of the land just in terms of kind of the origin story behind the brand more products in the lineup and then maybe just throw out a few places that people can get their hands on them and then we'll go from there absolutely Adam thank you look Casa Louis and a representation of our culture we felt that our culture was at a place where we as kids lived it with black culture where we were becoming pop culture right I grew up with Kanye with Jay with MTV NBA like really leading what was going on in terms of global culture and now kids are growing up the Bad Bunny and Lionel Messi at the MLS and what you see there is just a clear cultural evolution of Latin culture just being beyond just Latinos for Latinos but Latinos for the world and we saw that and we really believe we needed a brand that represented us in parallel to that and the reason why we are in this category is because my co founder and I we we love beer moments and I love beer but he didn't he was always the guy who would not necessarily drink beer I wasn't the biggest fan and he said look I love beer moments I just wish I had something that tasted slightly different for me personally um and that was at the moment where we were seeing the rise of high Noon White Claw during the pandemic and he said why isn't there one made for Latinos or with Latin culture at its core and why isn't there one made with rum and we are Venezuelans and we grew up with rum really and we saw we saw that not only in Venezuela and the Caribbean but if you really think about it from Mexico down to Argentina rum has strong presence throughout Central America and South America and it really clicked for us that we could create something at the intersection of Latin culture and our consumer habits that were shifting that was authentic and that could really capture our generation and that's where our name comes from Casa it's our home it's our heritage and Salud which is an open door to share Latin culture with everybody and and that's what we want to do in this category which we feel is massively under serves Latinos and despite that you know we see an amazing opportunity and we are building it ourselves thinking back to the early days of formulation and R&D for a minute I imagine like most product development journeys it took a while to dial things in find the formulation process that worked and it's kind of curious you know without giving it away giving away too many secrets of course some of those key variables you played around with are kind of two key key tweaks you made along the way that between that first maybe that first version you made to the final version where you where you guys all said yeah this is right we feel great about bringing this to market yeah I mean if you think about the the the early days it all started in the summer of 2020 actually and started with my co founder with that question of um fundamentally how to think about a Seltzer or rum Seltzer that was for ourselves and there were a couple key uh constraints you know to build the box where we were going to build the product and the first one was we wanted it to have dark aged rum in back home in Venezuela for you to be able able to call something rum it has to be aged two years so we were already starting with a high quality base for the drink and fundamentally was water juice and a little bit of agave syrup and we started simply with a lemon lime a concoction and from a soda stream which is where it all started in the kitchen uh it evolved to a keg and then it evolved to working with a partner that could help us develop a industrial level formula and and it hasn't stopped you know like that early R&D has evolved all the way from that initial flavor profile that we created to insights that have taken us to the flavors that we have right now which we have four flavors in the market three years later and we can dig into it but that's sort of the context in the early days and we started none of us came from alcohol or beverage or honestly CPG we were fully ignorant of what we were getting into which most likely was a blessing because if we had known maybe we had we would have avoided it and we just went full on no route to market really knowledge of what we were doing except for knocking on doors and seeing the response of the people and of the retailers that we were able to get into and so then it became and it evolved to landing a distributor it's called Breakthrough Out in South Florida or well actually covers all Florida for us and getting into Total Wine towards the evolution from going from one flavor to two flavors to four and a lot of pitfalls and learnings throughout that journey over the past three years scaling up manufacturing and and co packers I assume you guys weren't you aren't still making this in in in your kitchen but uh yeah and at what time at what point during that formulation process did you guys start engaging with co packers and how did you guys kind of about finding a beverage co packer that you felt like was gonna be the right one for you guys so it starts with what we knew and so when we went from the kitchen to a keg which is what allowed us to test it in the market we took it to Miami it was as the founder sleeping in the same bed horizontally because we had moved from different parts of the US to give it out to people for them to try get feedback and it helped us tweak the initial formula accordingly we then said OK you know we have a real shot we were lucky to be able to raise a little bit of money cause none of us came from the background or had capital that we could invest being immigrant the three of us and that initial seed capital was used towards finding those partners and trying to learn who could help us create the formula you know we were with some people that claim things that could be delivered and they were not at all so we Learned that pretty quickly and we started with a co packing facility a small distillery called Siami in Hollywood Florida because one of the things we knew is that we wanted to launch in South Florida in Miami and the reason we wanted to do that besides the obvious of the Caribbean and Hispanic highly dense population was that the bet that we took was about this is probably the hardest market we could ever go why if you're going down 95 you're gonna see absolute vodka marketing in Spanish like everybody's trying to go towards this consumer right where it's evidently not a separate white space that you can get into it's just simply like who can capture this consumer if we can do that then I think we have a really strong foundation then to go elsewhere where we think we can even have more appeal across the US and and be able to capture that consumer because the foundation has already been built so knowing that we chose this distillery in Hollywood they were great to work with and make our first initial products and then we've grown from that to now we use a co packing facility in the west side of the state that better fits our capacity and demand and eventually from that I guess you know we'll keep growing and probably use a couple throughout the throughout the country yeah having conversations with them was it hard to find one that was willing to take a chance on an upstart brand and surprisingly to a lot of people Florida doesn't necessarily have established too many established um high level call it uh co packers that may work with smaller MOQs as yeah been seen in other parts of the country and that made a challenge because it basically meant you either work with a brewery at a smaller level or a small distillery or you try to go to this higher um requirement co packers and there really wasn't anything in the middle you know let's call it to professionalize that ramp up so we ended up deciding to go with the smaller distillery that through conversations was simply open to doing it and they had a mobile canning facility they were starting to do this so there was a lot of learning through it luckily that initial formula that we had was bulletproof for those conditions but it's not always the case so so it's definitely something for founders to be careful with any recommendations you might have for some up and coming beverage founders that are just kind of starting that process of searching for the right co packer and yeah one down totally I think we all focus on who can make my thing for the cheapest and the fastest and I can't emphasize how much quality assurance is important because having a product that goes bad out in the market could most most certainly kill you the company for any potential capital that you have so I think understanding the variables that going to your drink specifically if we talk about drinks so for example juices could get fermented based on their pH or bricks and what are the variables that really go into the drink and how could they get affected by the conditions where they get created and because we had it happen to us we had a passion fruit SKU that fermented and because it was made in a beer facility and those two just didn't go hand in hand even after being pasteurized even after we us trying like what if we put preservatives like even after trying that it just didn't and came out to be what we expected it to be and we had to pivot from from that product and I think understanding the variables is the homework that that needs to get done and if you can produce the least amount possible just to see how it's taken by the market and also how the product functions whether it breaks or not optimize for that even if it's a little bit more expensive because in the long run and can pay off I guess double click on that cause I was gonna ask you about the that passion fruit skew which I think you mentioned like quickly became a hero skew but then also quickly became that has a formulation production challenges like is I guess is there I guess yeah maybe looking back now any like big things you would have done differently in regards to kind of rolling out this passion fruit skew in terms of the formulation and kind of R&D process now looking back now like oh cause we caught it after it was in the market and we talked to a lot of professionals and everybody was like I don't know how this happened but we did work with boil brands shout out to the boil team pretty famous in the CPG space to help us take a look at the challenge because it it wasn't evident and they were the ones who helped us find like this SKU simply cannot be produced in a place where there's beer cause yeast will fly no matter how clean the tank is and eventually get into it and if it's not properly mixed which is already challenging um you guys fundamentally created a unicorn of a product and those two just don't go together makes sense and if you wanna make this in the same way you're gonna have to find a facility that does not touch beer yeah it would be there are three that really come to mind so the first one is use a third party to validate or to check maybe you'll get an answer maybe you won't but at least you give yourself a chance to catching something before producing it number two make it in the least amount possible so you can see if it will really get basically move as fast as in the market luckily we knew that this was harmless for the consumer so there weren't safety concerns it was more about basically was turning into kombucha and it's like hey I bought an RTD a rum RTD I didn't buy kombucha right like it's just a different product so it it and I've heard a lot of different founders go through the same thing uh we weren't the only ones and the specific one would be be careful if you're making something with juice do not go full on in a beer making facility because it may get affected and be careful with it and and make do your homework before you decide to do it and take all the safety precautions you can totally that's really helpful well on the bright side of me right before we we jumped on here aggressive cord I was asking you about uh where what are you guys doing with Art Basil and you're telling me how you got so much inbound interest and like even you guys got an inbound interest from Nike and you got this like a partnership where you the cop Blue logo was sitting right next to Nike which is amazing at the stage you guys are at so in terms of and a brand identity and packaging design first off just in terms of thinking back to those early days what were some of the key things that are kind of top of mind for you when you guys were building out the brand identity positioning and voice for a salute look I think it is since day one I think when we started this podcast right um you know and and you you hit a note on it our goal has always been to be what Red Bull was to stream athlete culture you know stream sports we wanted to be for the young Latino generation so what we meant by that was okay how do we express the way we are as founders especially Ricardo and I I'm very big into music he's very big into fashion like we can tell you the next Bad Bunny 10 years ahead of it just because we live in there how do we build a brand that resonates with that generation the ones that are pushing culture forward the one that is really looking to make their Mark and since the beginning even with the name we said look at Red Bull right like Red Bull if I ask you you might tell me it's an energy drink if I ask someone else they might tell you it's an F1 team the beauty of it is can we have a name that resonates with you know Casaloo Football Club Casaloo productions like does it stand with the ethos of very clearly what we're doing here is elevating Latino culture so we work with Latino creators Latino talent we give them a platform for them to create and I think that's in the beginning resonated a lot every time we've engaged with Latinos that we think have a lot of talent we simply ask them hey what would you want to do what did you dream of that no other brand would take a bet on and that just opens their brain completely to be like hey we can do something and culturally it resonates so I'll give you an example our passion fruit was going bad one of our investors Tom Baker founder of Mister Black was like you just need to kill it and that was his advice so we said okay let's do a funeral and what we did was we worked with actors and writers that we knew they're really good they're really famous sketch personalities on TikTok and Instagram we said instead of us bringing passion fruit to your sketches TikToks etcetera to basically publicize that this ASQ is no longer around and we have new ones coming how about we let you write for an imaginary character and you guys act and we'll build a production around that to tell the story that passion fruit is dead but we're gonna cry him out and then new flavors are coming which for a lot of people would be ridiculous because you're basically making an advertisement for a product that is no longer around that was your top selling product and we did it and just the impact that it's had from the respect the level of respect there is for casaloo which is like oh my god like you guys did something that no brand would think of doing and you did it all surrounded by 100% Latino talent producer actor writers and yourselves as a brand ages like completely changes the level of respect that they have for Casalu as a brand or the world has for Casalu as a brand and um you know even getting a for that piece of content which is not typical doing that repeatedly and thinking that way repeatedly since we were very early it's what has put us in the map to get the respect of other big brands to say OK yeah you're the company I would like to work with because I like how you think and and I know you're pushing out you're just pushing the boundaries from a the visual identity packaging design standpoint how you wanted to actually convey this from a visual standpoint like what were what was top of mind for you guys yeah I mean I can show you the early drawings luckily it was an amazing experience because we worked with uh a friend of ours from college actually to build um our packaging and and and the design of the cans directed by with all the creative direction from Ricardo my co founder and the takeaway was the exercise was we were working with a a friend from North Carolina who you know we would be describing designs and we would be like hey this needs a little bit more of Bad Bunny on this side and and that's how we would communicate and then that forced us to like oh my god no one's gonna understand that like we need to translate what we're trying to say and how does that look visually and that was such a challenge in the beginning it was the most useful exercise for brand creation that we could have gotten because it helped us be more specific about about what we were looking at so if you look at the cans we can go there all day long because it all starts with the gold top the topper for example and for us that was an hommage to vintage Hispanic beers on one side and on the other side it was if you have a Celebration an older person in the group the grandpa eh lauelo is might have like a gold watch or some kind of bling that represents the heritage of that family and it was like OK cool that has to be part of our branding and the arch in the front it's a window it's a door opening towards Latin culture the texture on the back is the same as a fabric of your grandma's so where where you eat the tablecloth the palm trees are just an homage to a tropical feeling that it was you know it all started because in college I had I went to a party and this is in the back of the can this is the story that's in the back of the can I go to a party in early 2,012 I was just an immigrant coming from Venezuela and a friend comes to me and says hey are you feeling tropical yet ya estás tropical and what that meant was like oh my god like I'm in Boston so far away from my family and from everything that I've known but I'm in the right moment and with the people I need to be at and and that's a big part of Latin cultures like we find a way to enjoy no matter how far away we are from home and and we always find an excuse to celebrate the moment and I turned that into a playlist that I called tropicalation and then years later when Ricardo made the first concoction of casaloo he was calling it that tropicalation and I was like this is such a like it's not only through music it's not only through a moment like there are other ways of sharing this feeling and that's the feeling we are trying to communicate just like Red Bull communicates adrenaline like this is a feeling this core part of Latin culture this what we're trying to communicate this what we're trying to make everybody feel and and that's what Casaluno is all about so that's been part of the brand since the beginning go to market standpoint um especially these days which is how like busy the world is how many different types of companies and businesses are buying for consumers attention how easily people get distracted these days what did you guys kind of find was most effective in terms of capturing the market's attention and securing kind of a place in in people's minds in the early days when the brand was virtually unknown yeah we were lucky of launching in Miami in a sense that helped us a ton because yeah we moved to the city and uh it's funny it was the co founders living all in the same apartment with with our loved ones and I was married at the time still am now with a kid and gladly our significant others support us um we got roped into the music industry pretty quickly and what that meant was a lot of the right people trying the product very early on within three months of launching the brand you would have fade drinking it you know top 10 stream artists in the world tiny the most important producer in the history of Latin music Rauw Alejandro top five artist in the world so that happened very very fast and it doesn't translate necessarily into sales and I think that's something that other founders just gotta be careful right like not chasing the shiny object we did not search this or try to get this by design but it LED to what helped us a ton which was events and like concerts for example where we absolutely crush like I don't think we've ever been beaten in the category if we've decided to do a Latin concert um and just a couple weeks ago we did kebab which he's a Spanish singer and um and we absolutely blue any other category of the water just because it clicks and it is having the right product at the right moment and it's all about those two things together early in the day I think that paid off cause we were just planting seeds in what would lead to a right moment of consumption yeah and that's how we went about it in the beginning obviously doing in store tastings and other initiatives but primarily I attribute a lot to that we also going back to the point of who we are as a brand about giving chances to to people or serving as a platform where we can collaborate uh huh I was telling you about those actors who wrote the piece for uh for the maracuja advertisement we did recently but if you look two years earlier we were the first brand they ever worked with so we were the first brand deal if you can call it that way very cheap for us to do it but there's a famous Ycombinator line that maybe you don't remember all of your investors but you definitely remember the first one and being first at supporting up and coming talent you know if you can stay in the game long enough it really pays off so we were doing a lot of Instagram content with with that group and and had their loyalty and they were and they now turned down deals that are five times bigger than we are just because we were the first ones who took a bet on them and that's really paid off so working with content has really been a differentiator for us and being in music is is a key aspect as well broke into the market through starting with the 3PL that had just a liquor permit which I think I've heard I think I've heard you say was a terrible way to go about it tell me a bit about why was the why was that why that was so terrible look for us yeah yeah for us horrible I would if you are at least an RTD founder listening to this alcohol is different to traditional CPG so take it with a grain of salt for us specifically for casaloo choosing a 3PL was a terrible decision we also to be Frank we looked smart cause we were doing it consciously but we didn't necessarily have an alternative on the table so and why was it terrible because the the way it works is there were fixed monthly fees we needed to pay and then the retailers so if you think about a gas station or an open market like Miami where as long as you're under 6% you qualify under beer uh or wine and beer licenses which means you can sell to anybody pretty much um that sells alcohol and we would try to sell them and then normally they would not have an account registered with that third party logistics company and that would mean we would open that account for them we're already paying a monthly fee but then we needed to do the sale and we needed to pick up the check and if that check is not picked up quickly enough they get listed which means they can't receive alcohol from anybody else so we were on the hook for making our clients lose clients in a three people team and that was like such a dumb decision hindsight 2020 we didn't have an alternative just so just not a fit if you are in a more like craft product that you can take your time super high margin low velocity necessarily like maybe that that's a better choice but for us it didn't make sense when we switch through when we switch to breakthrough then it became a much easier game because normally as long as they're selling wine breakthrough is typically a wine distributor would normally have an account in the mainstream market however what we found and here's the lesson two years into the market that I would give to other that we found two years into the market that I would give to other founders not that we did not try this but for us selling to Latinos as our core initial demographic well the density of stores and accounts in Latino neighborhoods are dominated by beer players so that would be the right choice if I look back at least for us because of that reason where we are not necessarily opening new accounts for our distributor we are just going to the ones they already have and proving that we can sell there and so we've gone from definitely not do it to preferably not do it to then you know in the future we're looking more at the Beer Network as a way to scale because that's the right approach for us specifically and here's what you know we plan on doing and that's just something to understand and again if you look at the Beer Network for example for RTD players if you look at who's succeeding um you know hardly Surfside like they've all play that game they've done it right they've chosen the right approach or switched to the right approach early on because they're used to low margin high volume and so aligning incentives is very important if you're going into food and bath especially if you're using a distributor I think you guys now you've locked down shelf space at you know some pretty big name retailers Whole Foods Walmart Total Wine what are um what have you guys found or some of the kind of core tools tactics you found that have the most impact in terms of driving velocity across those doors you're in thus far and these could be like you know demos that you got running shelf talkers I have a laters like innovative promo strategy merchandising maybe just big music partnerships that are driving traffic yeah like what have you found as absolutely I think I think the key it all starts with the basics right so if you think about succeeding at least from our perspective is I tried something I liked it where can I find it where can I buy it do I ever go to that store and sure there's discovery happening in the stores but ideally you're educating a consumer that already goes to a store where they can find your product right and the rest then is converting someone who was already gonna go somewhere for a different product now you hear me say product that is the evolution of what we've seen we've listened to our customer for a long time and I think we were stubborn not to what we wanted to create but if you think about it fundamentally the hypothesis of why casaloo exists as a product is if you look at the American mainstream market it started with sparkling waters your Lacroix your spin drifts then you know Mark Anthony Brands was genius enough to say hey let's add some alcohol to it White Claw was born and then Heineken said look we can make a higher quality product let's put actual liquor into it and a whole market was created if you look at the Latino the problem is from beer to sparkling waters that never really happened hmm and so the evolution has been different I think in the beginning our hypothesis was about as was sparkling water we were wrong and that you know that'll be consumed because it's a normal progression from your rum and Coke to your rum and sparkling water and lime but it wasn't enough they were looking really for an innovative product that could combine what they enjoy from low calorie with what they already drink different teas different uh types of cocktails but in a format that was easy to consume full flavor and just convenient and I think that brings us to okay where does that product make sense and for us when we look at those retailers that you were mentioning we are seeing different levels of traction in different um chains extremely surprised about how we are performing in Whole Foods as our brand being built right now there complete surprise I would say I was ignorant to the possibility that it would work for us um and sort sort of a new thing and but from a strategy perspective has been okay where does our consumer who shops here where they go where are the areas that they attend how do we educate their mass market samplings which are those concerts basically and then being present readily available and visible in those stores so your shelf talkers your stacks your different assets that educate are very important I think the last piece to add is we previously had a package that was beautiful sort of low key and it just was not explicit enough and it would get lost on the shelf very dark hidden talking specifically about the box that we used to have so we changed from green to pink light pink to make it stand out with very explicit call out of what's the drink what's in this box and sort of the key call outs for who's looking for that you know low alcohol low sugar low carb and that's accelerated our our velocity and those are all been learnings from being in the market and yeah I I I engaged with a very sophisticated amazing investor in the CPG world and he said this is a war of attrition so stay long enough in the business and learn long enough and move fast to put those learnings into action and those are typically are the people who win yeah it's a ten year Marathon is what I hear a lot right another retailer which I thought I'd touch on you know Walmart is the biggest retailer out there tell me a bit about just the journey of actually getting on shelf there in terms of just getting that buyer meeting getting the commitment and then once you got the yes like all those kind of steps leading up to actually getting on shelf and having a successful launch look I really think that Walmart has changed um a lot in terms of I think for my early generation you know target was like the cool uh hit place to find stuff and for Gen Z is definitely Walmart my sincerest you know I have so much respect for for Walmart after going there the way it happened is we signed up to this platform called Range Me which I definitely recommend and we apply for the Golden Ticket open call and open call is fundamentally once a year bringing products that are made in in America to um Arkansas and you know the flight of Bentonville if you get selected and then thousands of applications 400 get to go and then out of those 400 40 or 50 get a golden ticket which is an opportunity to sell in Walmart lucky enough last year we got the opportunity to go and it's insane I mean for someone like me I I remember when I was a kid and I visited the US I used to buy my jackets and my toys at Walmart and then being there is such a full circle moment and you have a few minutes to pitch a buyer and then they'll decide right there whether you're in or not and we did that and we got our golden ticket you know a test specifically for us what's called a license to hunt which is a permission to go and pitch the stores for them to bring you in as a way to test whether Casalu would work in their retail in their retailers in certain areas and then from there you get to pitch again and see if you can expand whether it's regionally or statewide or multi state for us that is a process that took about a year from the yes to actually being activated to sell in the store so we've recently deployed in a few stores in the South Florida area and and right now it's holiday season so we're gonna see the results of that but and you know I can't say enough about about how amazing really am I I just have nothing but respect to it after talking to the guys at Athletic Brewing and other brands that were really built in Walmart or scaled up in Walmart is pretty cool because you would think about that as the last step you take and that may not be the case for everybody I really have seen and saw some founders in in the open call that clearly could do an amazing job in Walmart and and it could be the retailer where where they build a brand so for Casa Lu I think it's a it's a great place to get in front of our specifically our audience or our our Latino uh consumer in into Florida of Whole Foods have been a few minutes ago but I think after I'll getting on the shelf getting some market feedback you guys did a packaging refresh you felt like that was needed maybe just expand on that a little bit in terms of kind of like the why behind that and just maybe like you know looking back if you had done if you had done some things differently things a chance you kind of would have got it right right the first time and what would that have looked like so what we did specifically uh starts with our soccer Jersey about a year ago we had a conversation I got an eye and I was telling him look I I'm going to retailer some of them their lighting is not great we need to figure it out like since the beginning since day one we've known that green is our color right like you have to in our opinion marry to a color so if I ask you what color is Bud Light what color is Budweiser you're gonna know the answer and if you can do that and own a color then you're on to something in our case we knew green was that but I don't think we were giving green a chance to really stand out and I think that trigger a thought what would some of the designers and then the first put into practice that we had with it was for a soccer Jersey that he had been designing and he just wanted to do a drop and and give it to certain people and we sold it actually so we did 100 people pre order and you had to get on the list to even get it and it just bloomed really well it made the green stand out while serving as a contrast and and and really feeling just as a complementary color that that would work because before we had used like cream or white which were good but almost like too soft for the brand that we were trying to build uh huh and when we got out and we got we we just got a lot of recognition Soccer Bible posted about our Jersey and like how it spoke to Latin Heritage and and it just got picked up by people that we would have never imagined would get picked up and we saw the Jersey out there then we said okay cool maybe this would work in retail and we talked to Lauren our partner for the CPG side of design and we said hey can you put this into practice so we went back and forth for three months on how this could potentially look like and we ended up with the pink as the background green as the center and took inspiration from other brands like barrel on how they split their can and and we did something similar with a little twist and it worked out pretty well so now you know you really can't miss Casalu on the shelf and you can't miss what it is totally yeah looks great cause it happened to me once that I was at a store and a lady picks up a the laundry and I'll tell you to the laundry guys but turns it around looks at it goes puts it back you know the blue box and goes to the cashier he says hey I'm looking for a gin RTD and I was like what and then the guy gave her tank ray and I was like you had it in your hand and I saw this happen in front of me that's so what so I was like oh my god like we need to call out rum somewhere right I mean maybe maybe not right like at the end of the day you just want the brand to be the brand but I literally had this conversation also with Brad over at beatbox same thing so it's like the consumer just wants simplicity and and get to the point really quickly I think that's the other challenge when you're building a brand like it's important to build this whole world but I think for us in our category specifically where it's not a bottle that you read over you know 10 minutes you need to get to the point really quickly like if you were doing um no a water or a juice so it's kind of weird because you're placing these two worlds of liquor and almost like a soda right totally and I think to do it differently in the beginning you know I think we tried and um we tried to do it in the beginning I think if you have the cash to go with someone who's built brands that have been successful on the shelf I and no shame on saying that because it's not about it being pretty it's about it getting the job done and we were not great at that we we really wanted something that you know what was attached to the brand but eventually you need to get to something that a design that communicates not only not only that pops on the shelf but the one that communicates what you're doing look at a brand like carbless simple and maybe you're not a big fan of their design but they're selling a lot and it's not only flavor they know how to find it they know what it is and that is also important so if you can find both and depends on the brand you're trying to build I think um I think that's key and the earlier you do it the better so for us if I went back in time I would with all respect obviously to our partner in in the CPG side of design I would go to um a larger more established company that could deliver a design that could win on the shelf totally yeah those are all really great points more recently you guys launched this four flavor variety pack I think you mentioned to me like you thought this really was gonna be this is really kind of gonna be a tipping point for the brand tell me a bit about that and how it's been going so far it's proving to be I think you know we look back at it hindsight 2020 obviously uh we approach the market a bit different started with one flavor and we've always been confident about what what we've built but the taste profile I think for the initial audience that we were going into versus the one that was more educated on the hard Seltzer market those were just different so we needed to really create a variety of flavors where you could take a drink home a brand that you love and share it with people you love and that everybody would say it wasn't about I like it or I don't like it it was about which one do I like and that's a massive shift that I think is very particular to our category because if I was doing beer I always said I would just do a 12 pack of Limon that's my favorite flavor and that'll be good and it doesn't apply I think in RTD space right now so I you know we we thought about what are Latinos drinking and what flavor do they like and how do we marry the concept of casaloo with some of those flavors that we feel are authentic to the palette of our consumers so if you look at the lineup you got the lemon lime which is lemon so it's a graduation of that rum and Coke right getting the Coke replaced by something that's like like sparkling water so that's our base but then we have three flavors Mandarina which is Tangerine very common if you look at Jarritos Fanta like those are core aspects of something that's drank all across South America in different ways and we want to make sure we have one of those mainly as a replacement to passion fruit in the short term we have a Moscow Mule which is a mule flavor and the reason we call it Moscow Mule is that rum mule we pray that the bad one is opening song in a granosinte which is his most successful album but partly because it's it's a drink that that's very famous and has gone the time in in Latin America and then we have peach tea and the reason we put a peach tea in there um you know we there's a brand called Nasty Nestle but we drank a lot of it back at home in Venezuela and we were seeing our audience really just gravitate towards that flavor profile and we've always said there's lemon or lime tea and then there's peach tea in our culture and for some reason the people who are attached to peach tea they take it very very seriously so we decided on that one and man it's just like the response is insane it's insane I think it's like you know we would get stuff like you guys have built the coolest brand we love your brand we wanna work with you guys but I don't like your liquid and that was very tough to hear as a founder and you have to decide do you keep doing it or do you change or do you find somewhere in the middle I think what we realized was there are things that we like in our culture that could definitely be part of Casa Lu let's just bring it in and the shift in just you know three weeks has been massive that's awesome and and we're very happy about what it's generating and and yeah I think if we hadn't done that maybe the brand dies but now that we've done it I think it's the key to the success it all starts with product and totally and the context for the product love that well that's awesome it sounds like you guys are kind of ending the year ending the year on a high note did you guys are probably in you know definitely some level of deep 2026 planning mode you hit all your goals next year what is the business roughly look like by the end of the year yeah I mean for next year I think a deeper expansion within Florida and we've signed expansions as well in the state of Georgia and North Carolina you know I think we'll 10 x where we're selling right now and and yeah now it's putting fuel in the tank and and and growing I think the expansion that we're gonna see in Florida next year is gonna be very powerful and we're gonna go deeper and deeper into the market right now we have only 300 points of distribution I think we can hit trust in Florida we can hit 3,000 next year that's without counting what we're doing in Georgia and awesome man this has been awesome Gabriel really appreciate the time so many great insights here yeah what what's the best place for people to follow along with you specifically and then best place for people to follow along with the brand these days yeah so for me just look me up on LinkedIn if you put in caselou probably I'll show up and and let's connect there that's where I spend a lot of time whether it's sometimes sharing something and most times just doom scrolling and connecting with amazing people so please connect let's talk and if you care about Latino culture then let's chat for the brand Instagram is the place to be for us because how we approach content yup it's at drink Casalu C a s a L U give us a follow check what we're doing and hopefully I'm sure it'll resonate yeah awesome well appreciate the time Gabriel's been awesome think that's the pod when you were searching for those co packers yeah I think it was a very tough one to catch um so if we think about advice right pretty sure you guys like I think you kind of touched on this in the context of that's great I'm definitely rooting for you guys