Sweet times in the bitters business: Christa Cotton

Christa Cotton, CEO of El Guapo, caught the entrepreneurial bug early from her family’s business endeavors. Her company’s bitters are sold across the country, but because they are non-alcoholic, she can distribute them without having to deal with varying state alcohol laws. That’s a key ingredient in her recipe for success.

Transcript

Narrator:

Welcome to the Harbert College of Business podcast with your hosts, Sarah Gascon and Currie Dyess. Today's guest is Christa Cotton, CEO of El Guapo, a manufacturer of non-alcoholic bitters in New Orleans. She is a 2010 Harbert Graduate.

Sarah Gascon:

War Eagle Christa and welcome to the show.

Christa Cotton:

War Eagle. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Currie Dyess:

Yeah, we're excited to have you.

Sarah:

How did a girl from Georgia make her way to Auburn?

Christa Cotton:

I grew up in southwest Georgia and I really at the time thought I wanted to work for my family business, which was headquartered in Columbus, so I applied to a few different schools, but Auburn was the closest SEC school, so I didn't really know a whole lot about Auburn. I actually thought the Eagles were the mascot when I first came to do my campus tour, but I quickly figured out that was not the case and I enrolled for freshman year, loved it, and never thought a second about it.

Currie:

You said your family business was in Columbus, so you're kind of a natural at this entrepreneurial thing. You had a model to follow, I guess. What was it that y'all were doing?

Christa Cotton:

I did, so I always say I have a dinnertime MBA. I grew up in a very entrepreneurial family and my parents started a commercial real estate company when I was five years old. So a lot of people would travel all over the summer and go to Disney World or whatever. We traveled every summer to look at shopping centers all over the southeastern United States, so learned a lot. Thought I really liked real estate. That's really kind of how my entrepreneurial journey started. I worked at the real estate company while I was in school at Auburn, but Hurricane Katrina hit my freshman year, so I spent a lot of time in New Orleans helping my parents and Victory, the real estate company, rehab, a lot of commercial real estate properties that had been decimated by the storm and my parents and Victory's specialty is grocery anchor shopping centers.

So if you think about the fact that a lot of these grocery stores had been without power for weeks and months on end, it's a very gross job. All of those freezers and refrigerators had to be ripped out and you're pretty much just renovating a shopping center from the ground up. So the good news is that made me really passionate about New Orleans and wanting to make a difference here. But the bad news is it was just incredibly devastating and sad. I learned a lot about gaps in infrastructure and diversity in the city and opportunities that were available to different groups of people, and it really made me want to move to New Orleans when I was done with school. So then right as New Orleans was getting back on its feet, it was sort of halfway through my Auburn experience and the credit crunch hit in 2007, 2008.

So my dad decided that as a family we really needed to diversify our family investments and he saw an article in the Wall Street Journal about a craft distiller named Seth Fox, and he was one of the first craft distillers in America, and he was based in Atchison, Kansas. And he said, I'm going to open Georgia's first legal distillery since prohibition. And everyone thought it was a midlife crisis. Everybody tried to talk him out of it.

But I ended up spending my last two years at Auburn working with my parents and with Seth the distiller in Kansas to open 13th Colony Distilleries, which is based in Americas, and it's still operational to this day. My older brother Max actually runs it, but that was my job for the last half of college. I had several sorority sisters from Auburn that would help us do drink samples, and it was just a really fun time dream job for a 21 year old. But I really got the entrepreneurial bug early and I worked for different businesses throughout my time at Auburn. And then when I graduated, like I said, I was really passionate about New Orleans and wanted to make a difference here. So I left both of the family businesses and moved here once I graduated in 2010.

Sarah:

What is it about entrepreneurship that you have this passion, desire to kind of pursue?

Christa Cotton:

It's funny, my dad says it's a disease, but I say it's a personality type. You either have it or you don't, but honestly, it's the fact that it's really hard and you have to think on your feet and they say everybody has a plan until you get punched in the face, and that's really what my daily life is like. But it's challenging and I think that it's also extremely rewarding. So I don't know, when I was younger, everybody said I want to be a police officer, I want to be a doctor. And I just always knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur and I wanted to be just like my dad. So it took me a while to work through different businesses and sort of figure out exactly what I wanted to do and where I wanted to be, but it just kind of comes natural to me and I really learned so many lessons at Auburn and then also with my dad around the dinner table growing up.

Currie:

And so you worked at 13 Colony with your family, your brother runs it now, you don't.

Christa Cotton:

Exactly. So I helped get it started and then my sister took over. So she went to call to Charleston and was working in Charleston as an event planner for a hotel. And when I was kind of transitioning out of Auburn and knew that I wanted to get into advertising and work in New Orleans, they needed someone to come in and really step in to run the thing because at this point it was producing cases and they needed a manager.

So my sister moved home from Charleston and took over and she was there for several years. It wasn't until maybe two or three years ago that my older brother Max actually moved back from Raleigh, North Carolina. He worked in sales for several large technology companies and he came back and now he's managing the distillery. But our original team, our original master distiller Graham is still there and I think they have maybe eight employees on the team, but my brother really heads up sales and operations and that is in Americas, but our home base for our real estate company, which is the largest family business and sort of serves as the headquarters and really where a lot of the operations and accounting and that sort of stuff happens is still in Columbus.

Sarah:

Would you say it was a risk for you to kind of venture out and do your own thing and leave your family business?

Christa Cotton:

I was excited. I really wanted to be here. And you're 22, you think you can, you're invincible, you can do anything in the world. My parents were a little bit more apprehensive and disappointed. I think they sort of always envisioned me working for the family business and staying in that world. So when I ventured out, I think they were a little bit more unsure. But I would say now that I've worked for other businesses and then started my own company, and we are where we are today with El Guapo, it's really come full circle and I think my parents know that I made the right decision for myself and they're super excited for what's happening and what's to come, and also really proud of what I've been able to build, which it took us a while to get to that point, but it's really exciting.

Currie Dyess:

So you didn't jump right into entrepreneurship when you got to New Orleans, there was kind of an intermediary step where you learned a lot and got to network. Can you talk to us a little bit about that?

Christa Cotton:

So when I got my diploma and moved to New Orleans, I got a job in advertising and I worked for a local branding studio here in town and worked my way up pretty quickly. I had a ton of experience, but I actually started off as an unpaid intern and worked my way all the way up to the primary account manager for the state tourism account. I managed the day-to-day of the Louisiana Office of tourism, all of their TV campaigns that were shot, their marketing and advertising initiatives all around the country. We did some international stuff that was really fun. But four years into that, I was talking to the team at state tourism and there had been a lot of conversations about trying to have a season of Top Chef filmed here in the state of Louisiana, but they really wanted to make sure that the season was equitably shot around the state.

There's a lot of politics around the state tourism budget versus the city tourism budget, and they really didn't want it to become a show about the city of New Orleans. I ended up working with the Magical Elves production team to plan challenges, do guest lists, figure out exactly where all of this was going to happen around the state, and that was sort of my bridge project away from working in the advertising agency and then sort of working on film and production projects independently as a consultant and then also just consulting in a marketing and advertising space independently. I actually did move back to Georgia, but I didn't sell my house. I was back in Georgia for a few years trying to figure out what I wanted to do, but ultimately I just knew that New Orleans was really home and where I was called to be and the trademark for El Guapo was up for sale.

I had known about El Guapo. I had known about the company because I had started a farmer's market business where we would go around in an Airstream to different farmer's markets and we would sell grocery goods, like very high-end grocery goods that you would get it like a Whole Foods but in smaller markets. And it was really popular, but I was having a hard time figuring out how to scale that. But El Guapo was one of the brands that we had in our Airstream that we were selling. So I'd had a few conversations with the owner and he was really looking to offload the entire thing, but I didn't want to do that if I was going to do it. I wanted to start my own business and I wanted to just get the trademark but pretty much start over on my own, which is what ended up happening.

So I founded New Orleans Beverage Group, I acquired the trademark for El Guapo, and then that was in July of 2017. And from that point, it really took me two years to develop and refine the recipes to get all the FDA testing and paperwork all in order. And then at that point in 2019, I got my woman in business certification. I went through the Goldman Sachs 10,000 small businesses program. I applied for my first supplier diversity deal, so I thought it would take months to hear back. I actually heard back from Costco within a week. I was on a plane to Dallas a week later to pitch my idea of El Guapo and what I had pitched to them was a line that actually didn't exist. It was a mixer line that was ready to drink. So the idea was pour it over ice, add alcohol or add club soda if you want a non-alcoholic cocktail.

And this was before there was a big boom in alcohol free craft cocktails and different mixers, like there weren't a whole lot of these on the market, and we were really focused on the quality of the ingredients and having a clean label. We don't use any colors or dyes or high fructose corn syrup, any of that stuff. I made these recipes up in my kitchen when I figured out I only had a week to go to Dallas, got on a plane, went to Dallas and pitched it, and they had told me you won't hear back for six months to a year. So just you come for the day. It's really casual, don't worry about it. Well, they bought it on the spot. So first lesson in business is don't pitch something you don't actually have. So that was in, I think August of 2019 and we had 90 days to get all of the FDA paperwork, the ingredient panels, the recipes, all of that together.

My team did such a great job. We got it all together and we did our first two Costco demos and test implementations here in the New Orleans store the week before Thanksgiving and the week before Christmas in 2019. So we passed all of their metrics with flying colors. They put us in as a Costco success story, and our buyer in Dallas actually gave us a 24 store supplier diversity deal, which was every Costco in Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana. I was so excited. I really thought I had it all figured out. Flora's, education was paid for, it was all good. I didn't need to worry about anything. I didn't really qualify for very much financing at that point because we were still a really small business and didn't have a track record. And I was very determined to do as much as possible without relying on my parents or my family.

I didn't take even a penny from my family to do this, which my parents say I'm stubborn. But I think it really helped me in this journey because I was just so determined to do it on my own. I took out a very high interest loan. It was all I qualified for. We manufactured enough pallets to open the first six to eight stores and we had stuff in distribution. So the following spring, we were supposed to start at the end of March and I was in Charleston for the Charleston Wine and Food Festival with my mother, and we were at dinner and my Costco buyer called and said, "I'm so sorry to do this to you, but we can see in our supply chain where there is a shortage and a run on toilet paper, so we are removing all of your pallets temporarily to place toilet paper in all of these stores. So good luck to you."

And I thought she was kidding. But then the next week, the great toilet paper shortage of 2020 became a thing. So she wasn't kidding. I found out that, but we had already taken out this loan and we had already manufactured everything and food has expiration dates, and I was really scared we were going to end up having to file for bankruptcy. So I came home from Charleston feeling really defeated. We pulled everything that was already out for delivery back into our warehouse. We talked to our team. Then all of our barn restaurant partners around the country closed. Then school was canceled. I had a daughter, Flora, and she was I think one at the time when all this happened, maybe like one and a half. So she's at home climbing on my back. I'm looking at bankruptcy websites to figure out what our options are.

We figured out pretty quickly during the shutdown that our website numbers had increased exponentially and we were trying to figure out how to capture that traffic and then monetize it so that we could at least have some revenue coming in the door. Because before this 70% of our business was wholesale and distribution, and we had a website and we had an Amazon storefront, but we weren't really focused on direct to consumer. So we looked at our recipe blog and we started linking the ingredients in every recipe back to our website, which looking back on it, we had a blog and we weren't even linking the el guapo ingredients to the website where you can buy it like not smart, duh. So we fixed that. I spent all my time making new recipes and putting things online, and what we really figured out was the very stressed out parents we're sitting at home looking for recipes and they were willing to spend whatever it took to get that delivered to their front door because there were a lot of restrictions on where people could go.

So our website traffic is really what saved our business. We ended up having our revenue in April of 2020 go up 882% higher than April of 2019. And 92% of that revenue came from direct to consumer. So all of Costco's inventory ended up selling out through our website. We were able to pay the loan back that we were so worried about. We had laid off all of our employees when the Costco thing happened, and we ended up calling them back three days later and saying, "Just kidding. We need everyone to come to work right now." Because food is an essential service. And we were allowed to stay open as this started happening. And as we were getting more and more orders and trying to figure out how to do this, it was also a completely different process because before we were focused on shipping cases and pallets out, and now we're focused on shipping individual bottles or maybe a few bottles out at a time.

So brand new process that we're trying to figure out. We ended up hiring a few out of work chefs that we were very close with to help bottle products because we were still doing everything by hand. And we actually ended up buying shipping containers and putting them in the backyard at our building because we only had about 1800 square feet and we needed social distancing requirements to be met so that we could continue to stay open. But we also needed space to put all the empty bottles because we were having to make so much more than we'd ever made before. So we are filling up full FedEx trucks, just trying to figure out how to make all this happen on the fly. And we ended up tripling our total revenue after a really rough march. Really crazy and chaotic April, our sales were still a lot higher, but on a yearly basis we tripled our revenue that year and we've continued to grow exponentially from there.

So wild ride, lots of twists and turns, so many lessons learned. But since Covid hit, we've quintupled the size of the business. I've done two fellowships, one with the James Beard Foundation. Being a James Beard fellow is something that is very prestigious, but also the group of women that I was with going through that program are near and dear to my heart, and we still keep in contact. And that's been a lifeline through me as I've gone through this as well as the Tory Burch Foundation. Tory herself has been extremely helpful on this journey, and so has her team. I've met so many amazing founders through that program that I'm still really close with today. And then I went through the Idea Village, which is a local accelerator, which is mainly focused on tech, but they do help you kind of get your ducks in a row.

And I really credit them with teaching me a lot more about the funding landscape and what my options were. So this time last year I raised a little bit shy of $1.2 million, and we ended up moving from 1800 square feet into 32,000 square feet, which is a crazy jump. But last week, Seth Fox, the distiller from that Wall Street Journal article forever ago was actually here in New Orleans, and he set up my first fully automated bottling line here in our new space. So it's very exciting. I painted the manufacturing floors pink, which I don't think my team was too thrilled with, but I love it. It's been a really fun journey and I'm proud to be one of the only female food manufacturers in the state of Louisiana, and we're doing really well. We have a really strong partnership with World Market. Our products are now available in 50 states and five countries, and we have a lot of really exciting projects coming for 2023.

Currie:

It's an amazing story. So you've taken part of some really highly competitive programs. You mentioned the James Beard Fellowship and Tory Burch Foundation. How did you get involved with those? How important has the participation venue, you've quintuple the size of your business and it's really impressive.

Christa Cotton:

Thank you. So when I got into Tory Burch, I knew that I needed some help getting my ducks in a row because you know what, but there's also going to be gaps in your learning. And when you're a really small company, you can't afford an expert in every area. So Tory Burch, the foundation program and the Fellows program had been recommended to me by a few different people. So I actually took the business plan that I had made in Goldman Sachs 10,000 small businesses and used that to apply. I didn't really think I would get it because I didn't do a ton of extra work other than what I'd already put together through Goldman Sachs to apply. And when they called me back, I was shocked when I got a second and third interview with their team. But we were supposed to spend two weeks in May of 2020 in New York with Tory's team at their headquarters.

And obviously that never happened. But being in that Tory Burch cohort was one of the best things that ever happened to me because it was 50 women from all around the country with very different businesses, but all just trying to figure out how to survive. And our whole goal was just make it through Covid and then we'll figure it out on the other side. But you have to be able to get through this period and still have a viable business in order to have a shot when things get back to normal. We're still all very close. A lot of us still talk regularly. And there's actually a few different founders. There's one who's a wedding planner in Birmingham, and she's one of my closest friends out of the program, and she's an Alabama fan, but we still love you Neely Butler, you're awesome. She went to Alabama.

But the connections and just the things that you get out of stuff like that, the comradery is really important and especially when you're going through something as stressful as Covid was on all of us personally and professionally, most of us are mothers. We all have small businesses. That was really just a lifeline for me. And then the James Beard Fellowship, they have a program called Women's Entrepreneurial Leadership, and that is the fellowship that I did. That was helpful because it's very specific to food and beverage. So it's all restaurateurs, chefs, I was the only product in my cohort, but there are other products that have gone through in other years and they sort of make connections between all the different years. But it's very helpful to have people in your category as well because not only do they have maybe some new connections that can help you out, but just the expertise and knowledge.

And you also have a friend in every city that you visit. I travel a lot. We were actually just looking as a team at all the places I've gone this year and where we're planning to go next year. I've gone to 22 states, four countries and DC this year. And for one mom with a four year old, that's a lot to take on. It's over a hundred flights. And I'm starting off January with five countries and six states. So having a nationwide network and not just a network in the South has also been a really important part that I've gotten out of these programs that I've participated in. And the Idea Village, when we tripled the sales, I literally was looking at my bank account and then looking at the purchase orders that we had and we'd gotten like a six $60,000 purchase order.

I'd never had one that big and I didn't even have the money to finance being able to make that order. And on a whim, late at night at home, I think for Thanksgiving or maybe Christmas on my computer, there were 15 minutes before the deadline to apply for this accelerator. And I literally took screenshots from our website that showed the analytics of how much it had grown and said, "I don't know what I'm doing. Please help me." With the screenshot. I gave a pitch, it's so embarrassing. Gail Benson's, main money manager in town who I didn't know who this guy was at the time, but he listened to the pitch. Looking back, I should be so embarrassed that I did this, but all of these very important esteemed business people probably thought I was crazy, but they also took pity on me and they let me into a tech accelerator, and I was the first food manufacturing business that they had really spent any time with.

But I think they saw the growth. And when you looked at my website, it literally said plus 19,000% as the amount of traffic that was coming through. And they were like, "How is this even possible?" I think they either thought I was crazy or I was making it up, but when they really started looking at it, they were like, "Okay, we think we can help her." So I went through that program to really figure out my financing, and the best thing they did for me was pair me with mentors that have been there, done that, and were able to look at where I was in business and not be scared by it, but actually see it as an exciting opportunity. So I always talk about Corey Tisdale, he's still my primary mentor and I love him so much, but he founded Barbecue Guys. He's an LSU grad, don't hold that against him, but Barbecue Guys is the largest purveyor of grills and equipment on the internet.

So they rival with Amazon, but he had sold that business right before I applied for the accelerator. So they paired him with me and I remember being embarrassed letting him into our 1800 square foot, it's like a Creole cottage on the Mississippi River. We've had two possums come in, we've had snakes, you name it, it's like a little swamp people, but also food manufacturing. So you never know what's going to be going on. But I let him in the door and he literally was like, "We can make a business out of this." And I really feel like even though he's an investor and a mentor, he's a partner and a friend who's been able to sort of help me. And it really is incredible. And some days still when I walk in, it doesn't even feel real when you walk into our new building, it's night and day from where I was even 18 months ago.

And so much of the credit of that goes to the mentors and the people around me who have really helped get me to this point. And another thing I want to say is that Auburn invited me to speak at the Women's conference this past March, and I came to Auburn and the keynote speaker was Michelle McKenna, and she was the first CIO of the NFL. And I was really impressed by her story and her speech, and I reached out to her later and I came back to New Orleans, and at one of the first events I was going to the next week, Corey from Barbecue Guys was there, and I kept saying, "Oh my gosh, I met this woman. I think she's amazing. I really would like for her to be one of my mentors. I don't have any female mentors. They're all men. How do we get this person involved?"

And we kept talking and he kept sitting there and he was looking on his phone and he was "Christa, she's on the board of Barbecue Guys.", which is the company that he founded and is still on the board for. So it's like funny how all these relationships somehow intersect and connect. And I tell him all the time, all roads lead back to Auburn. But it's funny, they have a little banter back and forth now about Auburn and LSU. But Michelle, I met her at an Auburn event and I just think she's incredible.

Sarah:

Yeah, that's so cool. What a great story. So let's talk a little bit about your products. They're non GMO, alcohol free, gluten free, soy-free. Why did you decide to go that route?

Christa Cotton:

Well, when I was working at the distillery, one of the first things that struck me being 21 and knowing nothing was how difficult it was to distribute an alcoholic beverage. A lot of the laws are still antiquated. There's three tiered distribution, there's no vertical integration. So you can either own a liquor store or a restaurant and have a liquor license. You can own a distributor or you can be a producer, but you can't do two of the three or all three of the three. You got to pick your lane. Then you have to have a different relationship with a distributor in every single states. So as you grow, you're having to find different distributors. And when my parents started, it wasn't all that hard because there was no craft brewing or craft distilling industry. They actually took cow milking equipment and reversed engineered it to make it their first bottling line.

There was no small scale production available, and that's how Seth the distiller came into play. He knew how to take this equipment and modify it and make it work. When my parents were going at this, it was easier to get distributor meetings because the market wasn't that crowded. Now there's thousands of brewers and thousands of craft distillers, and it's much more difficult to make your product stand out and then also get a distributor meeting and move your brand forward. And you have to do that in every single state.

So if you go the alcohol free route, you actually can distribute yourself, which gives you the opportunity to be direct to consumer, to have a website, to ship it to your customers. And you can do that in a direct wholesale fashion to bars, restaurants, and retailers. But ultimately, it does make sense and it's more advantageous for your company to take advantage of the three-tiered liquor system because you can sell it to more accounts and your customers can save on shipping. So you're playing both sides of the system. But I've really used that to my advantage. So for instance, in Georgia, my parents have a relationship with Empire, which is who we ended up signing with. So last year when we shipped our first shipment to Empire, which side note, they placed their first purchase order three days after Hurricane Ida. So Hurricane Ida blew off a third of our roof, but we still got their order to them in less than three weeks. I was so proud of that.

Amazing. We have a great team.

Currie:

Good job.

Christa Cotton:

So we ended up signing with Empire because we wanted to work with them. We wanted to be able to use the synergy between the distillery and myself. We are separate companies. I own 100% of my company. I do have a stake in the distillery, but I don't manage it, operate it, have anything to do with the day-to-day. So signing with Empire, we went from having a dozen accounts across the state to having 130 within a few months. Having a distributor behind you is awesome because they have the logistics and the trucks in place to do shipments to all these places, usually once or twice a week. So you're able to just increase your velocity and increase the number of places that you're working with. So that's how distributors play into it. But currently, El Guapo is in 50 states.

We only have distributors in about six of them. But the goal is for us to have liquor distribution in all 50 states eventually. It's just a slow process to get there because you have to have the traction and also the bandwidth to manufacture enough product to be in all of these places. And because we have partnerships with big box retailers like World Market, we do a lot with Whole Foods. We've done projects in the past with Neiman Marcus and Costco as I've talked about. You really have to make sure that you're scaling your manufacturing at the same pace that you're growing your sales because if they get out of balance, it can be really hard to have continuity in your supply chain and making sure that you can fulfill all the orders that you're selling. So it's a lot of plates to be spinning at the same time.

Currie:

I can't imagine. El Guapo could be considered in the luxury category for bitters, right? And that is because of the high quality ingredients that go into your products. What are some of the biggest challenges you faced building out your robust supply chain, and how did you overcome some of those problems?

Christa Cotton:

So when we were small, it didn't really matter because you could buy a few pounds of something and that was enough to get you through. And you could do one batch of a product, and that might be all you made for the entire year. And as you grow, you have to have multiple suppliers that can provide the same quality of product. And we're so focused on quality of sourcing that can be a little bit difficult. For instance, with pecans, that started with just my uncle. I grew up in rural Georgia. We have a lot of pecan groves, and there's actually more pecan groves in the three counties around my hometown than anywhere else in the world. So working with my uncle seemed like a great fit. But then as you grow and now we buy, I think we're at like 5,000 pounds of pecans a year is our current purchasing power.

So he can't give us all of that. So having to diversify suppliers, but figure out people that have the exact same product and quality of product is something that we learned in this process during covid. But it's the same thing for strawberries. Anything we buy, we have 250 different raw materials that we use. So whether it's fresh fruits, vegetables, herbs, nuts, seeds, flowers, fruits, there's a million different things that we use. Finding sources and having dual sources for products that are consistent has been one of the biggest lessons. But because we are at the top of the market, we really still focus on quality. That's our number one thing. So we want to have the best sourced and the best tasting products that you can buy, but we really also care about our customer service. So those are the three pillars that we focus on.

And supply chain has been the hardest thing to figure out. I feel like we have a really good handle on our raw materials and our ingredients, but it's also been really difficult with glass manufacturing. A lot of the glass is produced in China. There've been a lot of topics and conversations about this. I'm sure a lot of the listeners have heard about this in the news over the last two years. So we're really spending a lot of time interviewing different glass factories in Mexico. I spend a lot of time in Mexico City right now really talking about glass.

It's not the sexiest topic, but it's important in trying to get as many of our supply relationships on this continent is a big focus for us. But a lot of these factories also have two and three year wait list to even get on their radar to be able to get your supplies made here. It can be really tough, but it's something that we're paying attention to and it's something that we're trying to make progress on every day. And we have a really, really great supply chain person on our team, Lauren Roth. And a lot of this falls on her shoulders, but it's a weekly conversation that we have where we're updating what we have in inventory, what our problems are and what we're working on so that we can make sure we're always moving forward and not running out of what we need in the meantime.

Sarah:

Can you explain your process of partnering with companies or groups like World Market, Whole Foods and some of the hotels and resorts?

Christa Cotton:

Sure. So I feel like everything is sort of a symbiotic relationship. So in the hotel world, usually what happens is there's a bartender who likes us or heard of our product, or they went to their friend's bar and they tried it, and we'll send samples and then strike up a relationship. They open a direct wholesale account and then all of a sudden we're shipping it to them. So great example is The Inn at Little Washington in Virginia, they're world renowned resort. They have a PBS special, they have an incredible team, a great bar program, and they're just amazing to work for. And they're also very inspiring. If you ever go to The Inn at Little Washington, when you watch what they do and their love for their craft, it's like everything I stand for and everything that I love. So it's like a perfect marriage of a relationship because we're just so in sync in our mission and our ethos.

In a situation like that. They have two cocktails on their menu currently that are using El Guapo products. And their customers will come in, and these are not inexpensive hotel rooms. I think their average room rate is about 1500 to $2,000 a night depending on what time of year you're going. But their customers will come in and eat at their restaurant or have a drink at the bar, and they love their cocktails.

So they're asking their bartender, what did you make that with? And when they see El Guapo on the bar or the bartender tells them about our brand and our story, they go to our website, they purchase it, and they have it shipped to their house. So it's this continuous circle of our customers are also our Salesforce because they love us so much and they believe in our brand. So they put us on their menu, but then they are also telling their customers about it, and their customers are able to buy from our website and have it shipped to their house because we're non-alcoholic, and we went a different supply chain route than most bitters that are on the market.

So that has really worked well in our favor. Another thing that has gone well for us is the fact that I have so many of these relationships from Top Chef and a lot of the original chefs from my season on the show are now clients, and they really gave us a lot of credibility before we deserved it. So whether it's Nina Compton here in New Orleans, she placed second and she uses us at both of her restaurants to even chefs that I didn't have a strong relationship with or didn't know through the show, but have been introduced to by James Beard founders or people that were in my fellowship cohort or have just met through different work events. A lot of them feel a lot of comradery with what we're doing and our similar background stories. And that has been able to really propel our brand forward in ways that I didn't expect when I first got started.

Sarah:

So what's your next step? What's next for you? What's next for El Guapo? And then how can our listeners keep up with your story and contact you?

Christa Cotton:

So next for me, I have been asked repeatedly over the years to consider a distribution deal with the UAE, and I've always said we're really busy. I don't have time for that. It's Covid. I don't understand that. It's too far away. Why would I do that? I've thrown every excuse I can throw out there. But as it turns out, liquor is tightly controlled all throughout the Middle East, but there is a big market for bitters and a lot of demand for products like ours. So I am going to Dubai in Oman in January, which I'm really excited about. Also a little nervous. I've never been to the Middle East, but I know I'll learn a lot. I know I'll meet some incredible people. So I'm excited to go to the UAE and explore distribution opportunities. We've already been in discussions with different businesses and the UAE government, they are the liquor distributor of the Middle East, so you work with the government if you get your product placed.

So I'm excited to go to Dubai and to see everything there. But we're also going to market in Dallas and market in Atlanta. So if you have a business and you want to sell our products, you can always reach out to sales@elguapobitters.com. It's the best way to reach our sales team. And if you want to follow our story @elguapobitters on Instagram and TikTok, and then I am @ hurricane_christa, I feel like that perfectly sums up my life, but I really try to keep it really real on what's going on with the business and then also me personally, but you can follow both the brand and then me as a founder on Instagram and TikTok, and yeah, that's how you find us.

Currie:

Christa, thank you so much for your time. It's such an incredible story, and our listeners are going to really love everything that you have to say, especially the business aspects.

Sarah:

Thank you for your time. War Eagle.

Currie:

War Eagle.

Christa Cotton:

War Eagle. Thank y'all so much for having me.

Narrator:

Harbert, inspiring business.