What you need to know:

• Two of his cofounders have “gracefully exited” Four Pillars post-Lion buyout. But Matt Jones is still involved – and aiming to help build a global spirits business out of Australia with Four Pillars as the spearhead. Southeast Asia is now considered an extension of home turf.
• The trio built the business from a “Breaking Bad” shed lab – after a knock from the local constabulary suspecting a meth factory – to a reported $90m empire, simultaneously blowing up Australia’s premium gin category.
• Jones says they did it by scaling craft and intimacy versus traditional sales and marketing funnels, while sticking to their direct-to-consumer guns from the off with Dan Murphy’s – even though it meant he got barred from subsequent meetings with the retailer.
• They also didn’t bother much with martech – instead investing early in “a really schmick customer experience handling system” to solve delivery issues. Jones still answers every complaint personally.
• The world has changed since start-ups could growth hack via social media – but Jones says there are many repeatable lessons for any brand aiming to repeat the trick.
• He suggests that quality trumps quality when it comes to media – and would be tapping smaller scale influencers today, with “intensity and intimacy more important than awareness and mass shotgunning of messaging”.
• Nail product, trade and customer relationships and execution, he says, and success will follow – provided you “value every customer relationship and every interaction online”, and look beyond traditional marketing metrics.
• Plus a bit of good fortune: “Anyone who tells you that they've had a business success and there was no luck involved is a bit of a dick.”
• There tonnes more in the podcast. Get the full download here.

“None of us knew a great deal about what we were getting ourselves into,” says Jones. Still, twelve years ago, “we made a decision to have a crack at making gin.”

The cues were there globally. Start-up distilleries like Sipsmith were making headway in London, big time whisky maker William Grant & Sons was toasting plaudits after branching out with Hendricks and mixer brands like Fevertree were riding the buzz.

Likewise the US, where independent distilleries mirrored the craft beer boom. Fellow co-founders Stuart Gregor and Cameron Mackenzie took a road trip to get the juice – in a BMW convertible. “It was a very important piece of technology for them”, per Jones. “They had a great time and came back brimming with excitement.”

But a nagging Antipodean doubt remained: “If this is such a great idea, why was no one doing it already?”

It was most likely due to economics and structural barriers, with Australia presiding over of the world’s most punitive tax regimes for spirits. As Jones puts it:

“If you and I are going into business tomorrow with a bottle of gin that costs $70-$75 a bottle, it's going to cost us a lot of money on equipment and botanicals and custom bottles, all the things that Four Pillars did in 2013. Then $30 of every bottle we sell, even after all the margins have gone to retailers and distributors, $30 of what we have left goes straight to the taxman.”

That posed a conundrum: those economics require a level of scale not typically associated with craft. But the co-founders thought they could do it – especially if they could make a higher margin direct-to-consumer model work.

But first they needed a still – the crucial piece of equipment for anyone making spirits – to replace the moonshine kit Mackenzie had knocked up.

“Cameron was in what we called his Breaking Bad phase. He had this little chemistry lab still at home.”

It had not gone unnoticed.

The first week after he took delivery, “there was a knock on the door. It's the local copper: ‘Hey Cam, I know you're a mate, but I just need to make sure you're not cooking up meth.” Mackenzie’s furtive response? “’I'm not, it's lemon myrtle’. That legit happened,” per Jones.

Tapping ‘ginvestors’

From the BMW-powered US reconnaissance mission, the trio knew they needed “the Rolls Royce of gin making machines” from a firm called Carl in Eislingen, Germany.

The problem was, “the waiting list was about a year, they are hand-made and they make about one a week – and they’re really expensive”.

Custom bottles and enough glass to justify them don’t come cheap either. Then there’s the site, energy, water and effluent requirements. While the founders had some combined cash, “we very quickly realised we needed to raise half a million bucks”, says Jones.

So they started tapping 20 family and friend investors for $25k each. “We thought we very clever. We called them ‘ginvestors’. We kept doing that until we got to ‘ginnovation’, then we decided to stop. The shark was jumped at that point.”

Convincing people to back a $25k long shot took some doing. But the slow burn allowed the trio – then co-CEOs – to work out how to “stay in business long enough to build a brand of significance,” says Jones. Plus, having to wait for the still to arrive “actually forced us to slow down and think … what is this business actually going to be based on?”

The upshot was the business’ four pillars: focus, excellence, simplicity… and gin.

First batch funded

Mackenzie pivoted from a career in the wine business to work out how to make distinctly Australian gin. Gregor pounded the trade turf to extract mission critical intel while forging relationships and buy-in. Jones channelled his strategy background to explore what Four Pillars would require to distil both business growth and brand growth – and how to create a flywheel to energise both engines.

He’s a big believer in flywheels over funnels, i.e. simultaneously spinning a “series of cogs or plates” versus linear processes while “scaling intimacy” over standard broad reach. In other words, applying craft to product, process and relationships while simultaneously doing the same with marketing.

“Probably, if you're building a substantial business, a lot of your growth and success is going to be based on things that aren't brand. It's going to be based on having an incredible product, distribution, the right partnerships – all those things,” he says. “But somewhere along the line, emotions and storytelling and bias and these human aspects are going to come into play. What does that bit look like? So we had time to think about those things.”

A few months later, with brand name, bottle and label design set and the beginnings of a story, they sought more funds.

“We became what I believe is the first gin brand in the world to launch through crowdfunding,” says Jones, seeking $75 a pop in return for a bottle of the first batch of what would become Rare Dry Gin.

At that point, the only negative feedback from crowd funding platform Pozible was that “you’ve got to have a cheaper reward” or risk eating up the cash. Jones disagreed – getting people to stump up hard cash and and putting product into their hands “became a really powerful proof of concept that we were able to leverage in meetings with Dan Murphys”.

Plus the fundraise served twin purposes.

“Before we launched the Pozible campaign, we only had nine of our 20 investor slots filled. Five days later, we had 19 out of 20 filled and five panicky emails saying ‘please leave that last slot open’,” says Jones.

“It was fascinating to watch what happens when 307 people buy 420 bottles of gin. It's not material compared to all the money we needed to raise to build a brand – and yet it sent the first signal to this wider audience.”

High noon at Dan Murphy’s

After gatecrashing the first meeting with Dan Murphy’s, Jones was pretty much barred.

“We'd now got some samples, so all three of us go to Dan Murphy’s along with James France, the founder of our wonderful distribution business, Vanguard.  I didn't get invited to many meetings after this, because I said ‘We will continue to sell direct, and we will continue to pursue those sales with vigour. And trust me, every one person who buys direct from Four Pillars will send 10 people into a Dan Murphy’s’.”

In the end, he was on the money.

“It all started with a community of those 300 people, but very quickly that direct database was into the thousands.” Since then, it has scaled to “about 75,000 people who are part of what we call Wilma’s list, named after Wilma, our first still – named, in turn, after Cameron's mum.”

D2C lift-off

With just a few thousand direct customers, batches didn’t gather dust. They rolled out the door.

“We could say ‘we just soaked shiraz crates with gin’. ‘We just took Cameron's mum's Christmas pudding recipe and distilled it’. ‘We just had Zoe Foster Blake's team from Go-To Skincare in and we've made a Four Pillars Go-To gin’. We had a community of thousands of people very quickly that we could activate and excite, give them first access and sell batches out,” says Jones. “The first batch of Bloody Shiraz as lasted four days. I don't think the second batch made it through the first 48 hours.”

The opening of the Healesville distillery in 2015, adding a physical footprint to its digital DTC business, was the next gear in the flywheel.

“It became bricks and mortar. We were getting 80,000 people through those doors very quickly.”

With subsequent expansion, including into Sydney’s Surry Hills, that number is now closer to 200,000 – with direct relationships driving loyalty, advocacy and hard commercial upside.

Volume-wise the business does about 80:20 retail distribution to D2C. “But from a margin point of view, you’re looking more like a 50:50 business,” says Jones.

Martech holdouts

Despite the direct business underpinning earnings, Four Pillars didn’t splurge on tech to automate, optimise, personalise and wring out every last drop.

“Short story, we didn’t invest heavily in martech. We worked for a very long time on Campaign Monitor, firing out emails. We didn’t have automated flows. We didn’t send you offers for your birthday. We didn’t notice when you hadn't purchased for a while and send you a nudge. We didn’t do abandoned carts,” says Jones.

That remained the case even when Lion took a 50 per cent share, though Jones said martech building block assembly began “at the back end of Covid”. Meanwhile, it recently launched a loyalty program.

Has the tech made a difference? Jones offers a qualified response.

“I think some things work … We certainly see uplift from things like abandoned carts … Many of us abandon carts accidentally because life got in the way. We send a lot more emails these days with releases than we used to, because we know that all of us are human, we miss a lot of emails. But equally, we don't automate the language,” says Jones. “And we are very conscious that our storytelling in our emails and our flows needs to reflect the possibility that someone is opening every single one.”

Old school CX

Though initially eschewing martech, Four Pillars did invest early in “a really schmick customer experience handling system”, says Jones.

“That made it easier for us to more accurately get back to people saying ‘where's my package’, or ‘I got a notification from the courier but it hasn't shown up’ or whatever it might be, and connect the dots behind the scenes. Because we really wanted to respond to every comment, every email,” he adds.

“If we get a negative email, it still always comes to me – I respond personally. So even as we started to try and get sharper about converting the database, the most important thing was how the emails made people feel – not how it made our finance director feel when they saw another 20 per cent uplift because of abandoned carts or whatever.”

Jones says that’s the whole point: The craft that goes into the product must be reflected all the way through the customer experience – even when things go wrong.

“You have to be careful what you wish for. There are plenty of brands out there that none of us feel strongly about. We can read a bunch of articles that say ‘forget about brand love’ and that marketers and advertising people always overstate the relationship we want to have with brands – and for the most part it’s probably true,” says Jones.

“You and I won’t lose much sleep if we get an email from our insurance company, telco, or bank saying, ‘Hey, we're shutting our doors so you have to move on’. We would find it irritating that we have to change passwords and change accounts, but fundamentally, it wouldn’t cause us any emotional loss.

“And yet there are a few brands – you finally find a pair of jeans that you just love and that fit perfectly, you love the customer experience or the brand ethos – that if they were to move on, you would you would feel disappointment, you would feel loss. I think if you can build one of those brands, it's a wonderful thing. But with that blessing comes a bit of a curse, which is people take things more personally,” says Jones.

He gives a Four Pillars example.

“We used to feed our spent botanicals to pigs – local pure-breed Berkshire pigs. So we were growing gin pigs with a local farmer. They were very happy and – trigger warning – delicious pigs and we would partner with chefs that we loved in great restaurants around Australia to host gin pig dinners. But when we sold out, or from cities where we didn’t take it, we would get hate mail. On the one hand you are like, ‘why are you so angry?’ But on the other, I sort of feel flattered, because you wouldn't get this angry about a brand that you didn't care about,” says Jones.

“I think it comes back to that notion of how you handle emails and socials … You've been invited into people’s homes to have one of these rare roles – a brand that actually means something to them. You've got to treat that with respect,” he says.

“Maybe you can't be as cynical and calculated and automated with how you then try and sweat every dollar from them as you might be if you're a more vanilla business.”

Respect = retention

Respect cuts both ways – and mostly shielded Four Pillars from rage following the full Lion buyout.

“I have a folder in my email called ‘nice emails’, and there were three days that I just filled that folder. The first was the day that we sent an email to out whole database about the Lion 50 per cent deal. The second was a big apology I had to send when we really stuffed up expectation management about how quickly we could get hand sanitiser to people – and if you remember that time, people were really freaking out.

“The third was the day when we said we've been fully acquired – and the torrent of positive emails that came back on each of those occasions was just overwhelmingly moving. I think [that’s because] we built such a trust-based relationship with our customers. We told them everything, we owned every decision at every stage.

“I think also we took people on the journey of ambition. So for every email that said you're a sellout, you're now owned by the Japanese – and of course, there were a few of those – there were literally dozens of emails that said just look at the thing you've built, and what a proud Australian success story,” says Jones.

“You don't get that by chance. You get that because you've built that relationship over time, with honesty, with transparency. Stuart [Gregor] taught us to value every relationship. I've always wanted us to value every interaction online – and I think those good chickens come home to roost.”

Brand, luck and execution

To underline the power of walking the talk on brand and CX, Jones paraphrases behavioural psychologist Matt Johnson.

“He says a strong brand means you get to play the game of business on easy mode. I think it's such a great way of summing up what Four Pillars did. Ultimately, we played the game really well. We made cracking gin. We built great relationships. We treated people well. We built great culture. We ran a really slick operation. We did business well, but we built a brand around it. We built trust and emotion and loyalty.”

Equally, Jones acknowledges that timing and luck were also on their side.

“There was an absolute momentum behind gin. There was an opportunity and there were reasons why it hadn’t exploded in Australia as it had in other markets. With the right combination of good luck, good judgment at times, good strategy at times – and I think really, above all, great gin and great execution and great energy.”

Ultimately, he says, “Execution is all that matters in this world. There are no prizes for big ideas. There are prizes when big ideas turn into great things.

“But anyone who tells you that they've had a business success and there was no luck involved is a bit of a dick.”

Repeating the trick

The world has changed in terms of building a brand from scratch – the old growth hacking playbook now a relic of its time. Yet Jones is convinced Four Pillars – and other committed start-ups – could repeat the trick.

“Could that model be replicated again? One hundred per cent. It’s the combination of really doubling down on the differentiation and exceptions of your product, of then really prioritising telling the stories of what makes your product different – and being the curator and the journalist of your own stories. Using novelty and innovation and collaboration and partnership to constantly create new news, to earn media and drive social media, and to then package all that up in physical brand experiences,” he says.

“Are those things that can work today as well as they did then? One hundred per cent. Do they work differently? Yes. Do we need to pay for different things? Yes.

“If I was launching Four Pillars today, would I be thinking about influencer marketing in the same way that I was thinking about social media then? Absolutely – and I'd be looking at the fact that the majority of budget in influencer marketing is now being spent on influencers with fewer than 20,000 followers. Because just as with social, quality is trumping quantity."

Which is where he differs on some of the proponents of mass, always-on reach.

“Intensity and intimacy are more important than just awareness and mass shotgunning of messaging. Finding people, communities, that are of influence and of significance, I think, is the ball game. So I think there are lots of replicable lessons.”

Post-Lion plan

Now Four Pillars has to repeat the trick internationally while keeping its culture, ethos and hard-wrought customer relationships under new ownership. Jones sees plenty of runway domestically and overseas – and says Lion hasn’t tinkered with a successful recipe.

The founders opted to go with Lion partially because it was a beer company rather than a spirits multinational that might have attempted to “fix us … they were potentially going to come in and try to learn from us, whatever limited things they could learn from three people having a crack.

“But also we could see that they're a business that valued the Australian market,” he says, nodding to its treatment of Stone & Wood and Little Creatures. “So there's shared value, and they allowed us to really run our own race.”

After the brewer took a 50 per cent stake in the business in 2019, not much changed, says Jones.

“It didn’t really affect us: We had a board, they had two members, I chaired the board. We really used board meetings as an opportunity to tell them what we were doing, what we were going to do, and then have a drink.”

Meanwhile, when Covid hit, “it meant we had a big brother standing behind us if needed”, says Jones. “The good thing was they weren’t needed. We made decisive decisions early. We took cost out the business. We lost no staff for the 12 months of Covid. Not a single person was made redundant. Every single casual staff member was still given shifts.

“We did pivot to making hand sanitiser. We did double down on direct to consumer. We kept the gin innovation going. We made some amazing gins. But we also we took all paper out the business. We said people before paper.”

When Lion took full control in 2023 – reportedly taking the total acquisition fee to circa $90m, though Jones bats away attempts to confirm it – he says there was “a moment of integration”. But he sees it as a reverse engineering.

“We actually worked with them to build the spirits business to dock Four Pillars into. So instead of docking Four Pillars, a craft gin business into a beer company, we said, ‘let's help you build that’. We encouraged them to invest in our distribution partner, Vanguard. So now we have the Four Pillars gin business, and Vanguard, an Australian spirits distribution business – two pieces.

“Then we said, ‘why don't we build a global spirits entity?’ So it's a B2B company called Four Corners Global Spirits, and that is the spirits holding company that sits fully owned and within Lion,” says Jones.

“That is the business that now has an ambition to bring the best of the world to Australia [importing other brands of spirits] – but over time, take the best of Australia to the rest of the world.”

Going, or going global?

With the other two founders exiting the business, will Jones, now mainly working in a consulting capacity, be around to see that vision realised?

“Over time, you know, it's not for me to say. But will there be an opportunity to acquire or build other Australian assets to take to the world? I think Australia deserves a global spirits business.”

He reels off Italy’s Campari, Bermuda’s Bacardi, France’s Pernod Ricard and Scotland’s William Grant as yardsticks.

“Why can't Australia have a great spirits company as well? So that's what hopefully Four Corners can be with Four Pillars as the cornerstone.”

For now, by volume, Four Pillars is running about 70:30 domestic to international. Jones sees plenty of local growth by converting the “risk averse” gin buyers that stick to brands with centuries of heritage. “But you know what? They would enjoy a Bloody Shiraz or a Red Dry Gin and tonic or a Spiced Negroni more than their current gin. So I think there's still plenty of market to reach there,” he says, citing Stuart Gregor’s mantra of “the importance of winning at home” above all else.

“Equally, the bigger growth opportunity is overseas,” per Jones, though he’s now treating Southeast Asia “as a wider home patch.”

The brand has had big success in following Australian travellers through airports and into bars at destination cities. There’s long-term ambition to crack the US, mainland China and India, but Jones acknowledges the dangers of being “seduced by enormous markets where you don’t have a right to win”.

“We're pushing in the United States, but my goodness, that's a challenging environment to operate in. So I think Asia is probably the next frontier of really meaningful growth.”

Metrics of success, failure

Regardless of geography, Jones underlines the importance looking beyond traditional marketing metrics to drive and gauge growth.

“First of all, I don't want to sound like the arrogant arsehole who says measurement doesn't matter, because of course it does. We've all got to show that we’re doing things that are working … So I'm not for a second dismissing the importance of accountability metrics.”

Caveat logged. But Jones underlines that some key growth factors cannot be measured – and are often overlooked for the things that can be.

“We’re sitting here recording this [podcast interview] in Sydney. If we didn’t have other things to do we might go for a drink at The Ivy afterwards. If we did that, we’d be in an environment that Justin Hemmes and the Merivale team have curated very, very carefully. They've made material choices, and at some stage, they've had a choice to make between a cheap material and an expensive material. On the whole, they're choosing the expensive options. But they will never be able to measure the return on the investment in that expensive marble bar.”

Jones cites Australian cosmetics firm Aesop as another example of a firm that understands intangible value – and executes on it.

“Aesop can never measure the return on the care they take around the sensory elements of an Aesop store, how beautiful it feels and smells. The fact that when Aesop launched fragrances, they started spraying every bag of skincare with a fragrance and handing it to you, so the smell of that fragrance followed you home, and weeks later, you're like, ‘I need to buy it.’

“You can't measure the impact of these things, you can't measure the impact of generosity of experience. But what you can do is have a theory about how all these different pieces – nudges, influences, levers – how all of them are going to act. If you have that theory, and you execute against it, you can then ask yourself, if that was true, what things would I be able to observe, and what things would I measure to give me a sense that this is working?”

Selling theory over hard metrics within big corporates is no mean feat, Jones acknowledges, “but it’s easy to spot when it’s not done right.”

“We see the system at play when things are going downside. We've got to be careful to then also have the confidence to do these things well and then trust that is what's moving the needle. It's not just your highly measurable digital marketing campaign. It's not just your clicks that are moving the needle. There's these other soft, subtle, intangible things that are making a difference,” he says.

“If we only execute strategy including the tools that are measurable, we're leaving half the tools in the toolbox – and that's probably not playing the game.”

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