Welcome to the Jazz Shapers Podcast from Mishcon de Reya. What you are about to hear was originally broadcast on Jazz FM however the music has been cut due to rights issues.
Elliot Moss
Welcome to Jazz Shapers with me, Elliot Moss bringing the shapers of the business world together with the musicians shaping jazz, soul and blues. My guest today I am very pleased to say is Amanda Thomson, CEO and Founder of Thomson & Scott creators of Noughty, the premium non-alcoholic wine brand. Bought up on a plant based, no sugar diet by her health conscious mother, Amanda’s media career, pretty illustrious it was too, TV and radio journalism and presenting for the BBC, ITN and Sky drew her closer to the world of fine wine and champagne – that sounds good – and in particular to how much sugar and chemicals are so often added. Driven to learn how to make a clean, pure sparkling wine, Amanda left her job, moved her family to Paris in 2010 and studied for a Diploma in Wine at the renowned Le Cordon Bleu School, he says in his awful French accent and in 2016 she launched Thomson & Scott aiming to create a perfect champagne with minimal sugar and chemicals. Three years later in search of greater purity she founded Noughty, a collection of alcohol free low sugar wines. Disrupter brand Noughty is now BCorp certified and vegan and sold across the world with a fast growing footprint in the US which I think began in Texas.
It’s great to have you here.
Amanda Thomson
Thank you, it’s lovely to be here in your fancy studio.
Elliot Moss
Very fancy and you’re a journalist so of course you’d appreciate fancy.
Amanda Thomson
I didn’t get fancy much so it’s nice now.
Elliot Moss
The, the beginning of your life Amanda has, and you’ve said this and you’ve written it many places, has defined who you are?
Amanda Thomson
Yeah I think so but the… I actually am unpacking now because I worked with Americans and they forced me to unpack things. Obviously naturally I’m a Brit so I don’t share anything but I’m working with lots of wonderful Americans so I’m having to get in touch with my emotional deep side which has been shocking for me at my age anyhow.
Elliot Moss
What are they getting out of you? What do they, what do you find yourself saying?
Amanda Thomson
Well just that I was born confident despite the fact that my circumstances should have suggested otherwise. So if I’d gone all in on nature nurture when I was a young parent I would have argued that nurture was like so worth it. Now I would go all in on nature. I think I was born confident and I had a really complicated childhood but I always knew that I would achieve big, big things which for me now to analyse is quite odd.
Elliot Moss
If we didn’t analyse it though for a moment and you talk about how you knew you were going to achieve big things, at what age were you conscious that you were going to achieve big things?
Amanda Thomson
Young because my parents split up when I was really young and my mother was highly emotional and my father was an immigrant and was trying to find his way from Pakistan and they didn’t have more children because of their divorce so they fell in love through aesthetics so it was, they worked at an ice cream place together so it was very much a physical aesthetic relationship. My mother was an English rose, my father wanted to be a pilot, he was very dashing so it was young love but their personalities, they were both Taurians – I’m not that big on star signs but I gather Taurus are stubborn – they were both Taurians and so perhaps that marriage was fated in the stars so I brought myself up to some degree from 3, 4 so I remember just my mind sort of being prepared to do things so I was very independent from very young.
Elliot Moss
And you were given lots of space to have time to think and to have your own thoughts by the sounds of it?
Amanda Thomson
Well it wasn’t so much as space because we didn’t have a lot of money because initially we didn’t really have any money.
Elliot Moss
Or rather lack of attention I guess is what I meant.
Amanda Thomson
Yeah and I, I didn’t, it wasn’t so much nasty lack of attention, it was circumstantial because my mother was trying to work hard to hustle to put food on the table, my father was trying to build his way in the world and, and so I used to have a little grey suitcase and I would go between, I would stay one weekend at my mothers, then my grandmothers, then my father and then that became my father and stepmother you know, but it’s funny isn’t it when you reframe things later but, but those, the visceral memories I have are just that sense of confidence and independence despite the chaos that surrounded me.
Elliot Moss
Journalists often like finding out why things are the way they are.
Amanda Thomson
Right.
Elliot Moss
They’re, they’re curious or they want to fix stuff, they want to write about wrongs that need writing. Where did you fall in. At what point did you go, I need to find out about that or I need to fix that. At what age did that happen?
Amanda Thomson
I just always remember curious so I would ask constant questions. I suppose now in school it’s defined as ADHD you know, I think you know…
Elliot Moss
Everything, everything’s defined as ADHD right now.
Amanda Thomson
…and I, I don’t want to you know negate to the necessity for neurodiverse diagnoses but I believe there’s quite a broad spectrum and I would say most entrepreneurs are going to be somewhere on the lesser or middle or, or high section of that if one had ever been analysed so I suppose constant questions from pretty much coming out the womb, as soon as I could speak.
Elliot Moss
Amanda Thomson is my Business Shaper, she is the woman behind Noughty, and in the US it’s called NoughtyAF. Is it called NoughtyAF there?
Amanda Thomson
It was, that’s the website yeah, Alcohol Free right.
Elliot Moss
Alcohol free absolutely all the way to the bank and back. I mentioned the word woman, I used that intentionally because the industry you are in doesn’t have many women at the helm of, of businesses. Is that true?
Amanda Thomson
No.
Elliot Moss
And if it’s true, why don’t they?
Amanda Thomson
It’s boring actually in this country. I don’t mean I am bored talking about, I mean it’s boring that we can’t move things forward and actually while we’re on that it’s quite interesting my relationship with America because I work between the US and the UK and I fit in extremely well in American business because I’m a visionary entrepreneur, that’s what I’ve been designated to as in…
Elliot Moss
Good title.
Amanda Thomson
…I always look at the big picture and how I’m going to get there and I’m extremely ambitious and sadly for a number of reasons those qualities are struggling to break through with women and a more diverse bunch of Founders in the UK and I also think that we you know, we’ve created a system where Tall poppy syndrome actually isn’t helpful to entrepreneurship you know in this country so there’s a lot kind of to unpack but I guess classic, historical journalist I want to put my money where my mouth is. I don’t have a lot of time but I’m working with Remington College and they had a business studies there because they kindly you know, put some funding behind it so we are working now with state schools I believe you can’t be what you can’t see right so we’re starting as young as we can because most projects in this country it’s, it’s took late I think, if you’re talking to students when they’re either sort of pre-university or you know, if anyone’s got kids they get cynical really quickly. Everyone… kids get cynical younger and younger now so Remington College starts age 13 so you know, if you get them then and actually just start to have them think about profit with purpose, think about leadership, think about entrepreneurship and the intersectionality and really grass roots so you, the big part of it is we start out, we give them a very small pot of seed funding and they have to try to grow it in a very literal sense whether that be car boot sales, whatever and we get them really used to that concept of failure and unpack what that means because of course failure to most people has such a negative connotations and it’s like if you get kids used to the idea that failure isn’t actually what they think it is and it’s a muscle that you can exercise you can really actually transform their thought process to, to some degree across the course of a year we found so that’s what I’m working on alongside trying to grown a global business right now.
Elliot Moss
I don’t think you’re busy enough and as you were talking earlier I thought, yeah also your brain works really slowly Amanda I mean just really slowly. So that, but the serious, the serious point I want to make about the speed of your brain and those questions, when you were a journalist did you sense that this was one part of your journey in life rather than the end point.
Amanda Thomson
No, not at all. I loved newsrooms, I really loved newsrooms. I think truthfully I might have loved to have stayed in hard news. I only ever was there briefly and accidentally. I think that my personality is quite big and I always had a big smile and I was quite demonstrative with my hands and none of that lends itself I guess to hard news, it just doesn’t come across well on TV and the other thing was that I loved radio and my editors in the old days, I’m half Asian, and I was really early in sort of Asian mixed race broadcasting as in you know, I was I guess way before the Michelle Husain’s of the world and you know, but I’m not for a moment suggesting I would have had that career trajectory in hard news because that was never where I was going to end up for you know, a number of reason. I didn’t have the brain for that. But I think that no actually, I loved radio, I absolutely loved it and, and everyone kept trying to stick me on TV.
Elliot Moss
I love radio too and luckily you’re here with me and it’s Jazz Shapers and she is going to be coming back again, that’s Amanda Thomson my Business Shaper in a couple of minutes. Right now though we are going to hear a taster from the Mishcon Academy Digital Sessions which can be found on all the major podcast platforms. Mishcon de Reya’s Emily Knight talks to Charlotte Yonge, a Fund Manager at Troy Asset Management about why women historically invest less than men and what’s being done to change it.
You can enjoy all our former Business Shapers, lucky you, on the Jazz Shapers podcast and you can hear this very programme again if you pop the words ‘Jazz Shapers’ into your very own personal favourite podcast platform. My guest today is Amanda Thomson, CEO and Founder of Thomson & Scott, creators of Noughty, the premium non-alcoholic wine brand. So this gentleman, Alexandra Prenney?
Amanda Thomson
Penney.
Elliot Moss
Penney, good. Thank you. He was your man in 2010 in Paris, they must have looked at you and I want to talk about this theme of disruption and gone, ‘there’s this person that wants to do something different with champagne, why would she want to do that, that doesn’t fit please stop’.
Amanda Thomson
Yeah, yeah I mean I’ve, but then I think that, now I look back, macro has really defined my life and I think that what I’ve always tried to tell people is that if you’re going to do something really different then mostly people will be negative initially because it, it, I don’t know if it scares them probably. I think that anything particularly in industry like the wine business and, and you know, let’s take that as it’s the one we’re talking about specifically, it’s steeped in history and I’ve always seen great wine makers as artists. I, I was always a wine nerd. I wasn’t, I still am a wine geek I mean for me, great wine is actually great art so that’s a whole other podcast, I won’t be invited on but um, but the point being I think that I was never afraid…
Elliot Moss
Welcome to the podcast on, what did you call it?
Amanda Thomson
Wine as art.
Elliot Moss
Wine as art. This has gone slightly left of centre but we don’t mind because we’re very flexible here on Jazz Shapers.
Amanda Thomson
But, but to get back to the point, I think that you can’t be afraid to realise that if you’re making people uncomfortable you might be doing something really big.
Elliot Moss
Well this is, I, so I looked through your life and I think she took the family to Paris, she stopped being a, a journalist having interviewed Tom Cruise and various other famous people, that just wasn’t enough. She decides to disrupt the industry. I think you like discomfort a lot. Is that true?
Amanda Thomson
No I don’t love discomfort, what I love is that little bite point when you realise that you have a lot of white space to do something in the world that’s going to matter. So historically I was always focussed on social injustice, and I mean any sort of inequity I find deeply frustrating and I’m also aware that talk is cheap and so when I see white space where I can make a huge difference, that is where I think I get really excited and now I know when I’m long gone and dead, my legacy will be that I made the world a better place anytime anyone had a bottle of Noughty, they’re making a health choice without thinking about it and for me that is huge, literally huge, that’s game changing in the world so that is what I find exciting.
Elliot Moss
I’ve watched a few interviews of yours and you bemoan the fact that people forget that the industry is all about taste, taste, taste, taste, it’s about the liquid. How have you got into, because one thing being a wine geek, it’s very different when you get into the manufacturing, the creation and the art of creating wine. How have you become good at this?
Amanda Thomson
Well I think it was my training at Cordon Bleu. In fact it was because blind tasting was my sport and those you know, I don’t know if any of you listeners have you know, just watched those sort of documentaries or films whatever and you go through all the steps with wine and whatever and for me it actually fit my personality beautifully studying wine in France because it was a romantic thing and cerebral thing tasting, it wasn’t this whole kind of how’s the acidity, is it medium, medium plus I mean you know, I would make the world’s worst Master of Wine. I know some of them, they are marvellous, it’s a bit like law and Tort right, I’d make a terrible lawyer because I couldn’t remember all the facts so I can’t remember anything but I’ve got an amazing palate I have learnt so going back to my obsession with taste, and I would say to anyone who asks me who wants to come into as we say in America, the beverage space – you know, it’s liquid, beverage, drink, wine, taste. I think that we get a bit carried away in the modern world with marketing first, marketing, marketing and then I would say isn’t marketing just sales and then you know, all the marketing teams around the world get upset but liquid, yeah. I mean how can that not be everything initially if you’re creating a drink?
Elliot Moss
So marrying the romantic, the cerebral and then going into the technical where you actually go, so now, and I know your first kind of go was no sugar and there’s that venture over there with Skinny and then we move on.
Amanda Thomson
It was champagne.
Elliot Moss
Champagne. But then the, the next thing is then saying no alcohol but I still want it to taste brilliant because this is the body shop insight which is, it may well be good for you but if it isn’t deficatous forget it. It’s the equivalent in wine which is it’s got to taste brilliant. How deep have you gone into the chemistry of all this?
Amanda Thomson
So I go deep in the sense that I work with makers that do their thing brilliantly as I did with my champagne maker the same.
Elliot Moss
Is the journalist in you pushing, pushing, pushing for I’m going to find the person who really is the best at this or do you trust…
Amanda Thomson
Oh no once I build a relationship I’m extremely loyal so if I find someone who’s great at something and they keep being great at something I’ll stick with them but equally I’m always looking to innovate so it’s not a game of how can we shuffle the cards, ultimately of course it I’ve got a BCorp certified company I shouldn’t technically ship wine around the world so Rome wasn’t built in a day so obviously America’s my biggest market you know, one might guess at some point I might collaborate with an American producer right so it is not, it’s really finding the right people that I can grow with and so going back to your original question, I think that what most people looking in miss about successful founders and entrepreneurship is I would argue most of us have an extremely high level of self-awareness and we go, what are we good at, right I’m visionary, I’m great at palate. Loads of other things I’m horrendous at so how do I fill in all of my gaps to have brilliant people around me who are great at all those things and that is how I believe you create successful founder lead businesses. You know, it’s as if as a founder you can be amazing at everything and I, I am often shocked that some founders try to be because you never can be right. Life’s really short, you can’t be amazing at everything, it’s just not possible right.
Elliot Moss
Unfortunately true. Final chat with my guest today, Amanda Thomson coming up and we’ve got some music from the wonderful Snarky Puppy, that’s in just a moment don’t go anywhere.
I am with Amanda Thomson, just for a few more minutes. The big thing for me is changing habits and I lived in India many years ago and we were trying to change people’s habits with regard to washing clothes, so moving them from scrubbing and using all the implements that in India were very common and even in the 90s and probably in the noughties, moving them to washing machines and everyone talked about the Habits Change programme. In this context the habits change programme is pretty big. The normalisation of a non-alcoholic wine – which tastes good – as well as the alcoholic wine and just switching at certain points and all that. How do you crack that nut because the problem with being early is that you’re early and the problem with being late is everyone else is doing it. Where, where does that sit with you?
Amanda Thomson
I think that for me it’s about the integrative piece and because we’ve never fought in the NoLo space we say we’re a wine brand that’s non-alcoholic, we take an agnostic position to alcohol, it, there’s no fight that I need to have so it’s… if we think about any habits and why we rail against them it’s usually because we can’t get our heads around them and there’s often something negative in our minds about them so I’ve almost eliminated all of that kind of stress, it’s like just try, try it if you like it.
Elliot Moss
So you’re a lover not fighter?
Amanda Thomson
Right and I think that there’s so much, so much anger in the world isn’t there you know…
Elliot Moss
Don’t get me started.
Amanda Thomson
…and, and, right. And everything’s so binary and, and we’re completely not binary and everyone’s like, oh my god you still drink wine Amanda, thank god and I am like…
Elliot Moss
Yeah.
Amanda Thomson
…you know, do what you like but we’re here to blend into your everyday drinking seamlessly, just see if it tastes good.
Elliot Moss
Is that how you run your life Amanda do you think? Are you an integrative type of person, in other words you do go with the flow because again…
Amanda Thomson
No. I’ve got extremely strong opinions but I’m also heartbroken that most of the interesting bits of life for me happen in the grey and we’ve lost the art of debate and you know, conversation when we disagree on things because we all stick in our homogenous worlds. So I am going to let everybody fight it out about non al this, that and the other and investors all want to pile into my business, it’s great that I don’t need the money but I don’t need to have any of those public fights because I’m just doing what I’m doing which is building the world’s first premium non-alcoholic wine, Noughty that will become a household name. So I am very singular about that so that fight I don’t care for.
Elliot Moss
And that focus that you have from a business sense, is that the focus that you’re comfortable with when you’re not working, I mean do you not work?
Amanda Thomson
Not really and that’s a different podcast and a different problem but, but most founders who are…
Elliot Moss
No but I mean listen that’s not, yeah so it’s a common…
Amanda Thomson
Most founders who are successful at a certain level yeah, they’ll, they’ll have the thing they tell you privately versus publicly. So no, and this is why when I am talking to new entrepreneurs and I am mentoring people, I always say, ‘what do you want to achieve’ and they say to me, ‘what do you mean’ and I say, ‘I want a household name that when I’m long gone people will remember and I want to change the world’. Now not everybody has to do that right. If you want to have a lifestyle business that put’s food on the table and feeds your kids, brilliant, all of the above are relevant. The sacrifices I will be making if we’re going to put them in inverted commas as ‘sacrifices’ are going to be much more drastic than the ones if you want to build a lifestyle business and have a side hustle.
Elliot Moss
And I guess just before I ask you your choice of music before I let you disappear, my sense of you is you’re compelled to want to change the world. This isn’t a choice in a way.
Amanda Thomson
Yeah I mean not in like a, a dark sort of way.
Elliot Moss
No, no, no of course.
Amanda Thomson
But in a really positive way. I think that the further on the journey I get, I am extremely competitive, extremely and the hilarious bit of that is I’m often bad at things so I am competitive even at things I’m bad at so I am terrible at tennis but I will be furious that I don’t win but I can really play.
Elliot Moss
Got to follow through, your head’s not down when that fore arm happens, I know it already Amanda.
Amanda Thomson
My tennis coach once said to me, I once had one and he’s like, ‘Amanda I really like you but I feel like I’m wasting you know, you’re giving me all this money and I feel like, you’re hand eye sucks’. So, so you know, yeah I now know what I am capable of with this business and so that’s when it becomes even more exciting and you double down even harder.
Elliot Moss
It’s been great chatting to you, thank you so much for being so open.
Amanda Thomson
Pleasure.
Elliot Moss
Just before I let you go, what’s your song choice and why have you chosen it?
Amanda Thomson
Well this song, we’ve gone deep, we haven’t done the fun stuff, this was Cannes, this was Cannes Film Festival um, I met my husband at the Cannes Film Festival, that’s definitely another podcast and this is before, this is kids – this is before social media – and um this is, this was a classic track, Quentin Tarantino, Dusty Springfield, I mean what a moment.
Elliot Moss
Dusty Springfield with the iconic Preacher Man, the song choice of my Business Shaper today, Amanda Thomson. She talked about if you are doing something different then the chances are it will be negatively perceived and that’s not a bad thing. White space, that’s where she gets excited the chance to do something where there’s space to do it. A high level of self-awareness is critical, be clear what you are good at and get people to do the things that you’re not good at and I love this, the sense that she’s now aware after all these years of what she is capable of and it makes her want it even more. Brilliant stuff. That’s it from me and Jazz Shapers, have a lovely weekend.
We hope you enjoyed that edition of Jazz Shapers. You’ll find hundreds more guests available for you to listen to in our archive, to find out more just search Jazz Shapers in iTunes or your favourite podcast platform or head over to mishcon.com/jazzshapers.