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 is Luke Boase, Founder of Lucky Saint, the alcohol-free beer brand. While a financial analyst, Luke was as he says, “blown away” by the excitement of entrepreneurial startups. He sought to create his own business and was drawn to the maligned alcohol free-beer market. Against the advice of many, and despite having absolutely no experience in the industry – always a good start – Luke spent two years working with six different brewers in three countries with a singular mission to overcome the preconceptions of alcohol-free lager and build a better tasting, aspirational brand. Lucky Saint launched in 2018 and they are now sold in over 7,500 hospitality venues, including 77 – yes I said that – 77 Michelin starred restaurants and their very own Lucky Saint pub in Marylebone as well as over 4,000 grocery stores across the UK and they were welcomed as the British Beer and Pubs Association’s first alcohol-free member. Lovely to have you here, Luke.
Luke Boase
Lovely to be here, thanks Elliot.
Elliot Moss
I mentioned that Luke Boase had no experience in this industry and having had many clients over the years when I was in advertising where we were advertising beer and stuff, that’s a thing. Tell me why Luke Boase was interested in an industry that he knew nothing about apart from probably the desire to drink occasionally, which we all have.
Luke Boase
I think the first thing I got really interested in was startups in their own right, having affectively spent my career like looking at big businesses and, and always felt like it looked more interesting to be in the business rather than on the outside looking into it.
Elliot Moss
And why was that? Why did you think it would be more interesting, out of interest?
Luke Boase
It just felt more engaging to be doing something about the strategy, like trying to do something with a business rather than just sit on the outside and figure out whether they were making good decisions or not. It was sort of because I was an analyst basically at a few different fund management companies and your job is to assess from the outside and try and figure out and you’re always on limited information and then you meet the management teams and it always, it just looked way more fun being on the other side of the table.
Elliot Moss
People that work in jobs, includes me, have a certain relationship with risk and generally, entrepreneurs have a different relationship with risk. What was your relationship with risk at the time like? And what is it like now? Because that’s…
Luke Boase
Yeah, I’m, I think I’m just pretty comfortable with risk. As long as you understand what the sort of the upside and the downside is. I guess, the bit that got me really, really excited was when I discovered there was a… after like big corporate, I discovered there was a whole world of startups and I met two Founders of a technology business, it was like concept stage tech business and it was they were going to change the world and they were so excited about what they were building and I remember really clear remember meeting them and just my kind of eyes got opened to this incredible world of like passion and belief and like drive that they had to build something and I thought god I’ve got to, I want to be sitting in that chair on the other side of the table, it looked way more fun.
Elliot Moss
More emotion.
Luke Boase
Yeah, more emotion, more excitement.
Elliot Moss
More connection by the sounds of it.
Luke Boase
Yeah and just like having more, more impact, the stuff that they were doing would actually, you know would have a proper impact and…
Elliot Moss
And then you get to low no beer.
Luke Boase
And then I get to…
Elliot Moss
The natural thing to go to obviously after that start.
Luke Boase
So I had a, again there were a few ideas that kind of came and went but the one I could never shake off and the one I got I guess like that really sort of emotionally attached to was this idea of reinventing alcohol-free beer because when I first started thinking about this in 2016, it really was, it was the worst category. You’d apologise if you had to order it, you know, you’d hide what you were drinking and that all inspired the fact that really the proposition of alcohol-free beer is amazing. For the right consumer on the right occasion, you know, what a great proposition but in reality I wasn’t even a consumer of it because there wasn’t a beer that was good enough to bring me into the category.
Elliot Moss
Which of course meant the next step was Luke Boase decided to find the beer and create a beer that was good enough to be introduced to the category and we’re going to find out lots more about exactly what happened then.
Luke Boase is my Business Shaper, he’s the Founder of Lucky Saint, it’s the, is it non-alcoholic or low alcohol? It’s 0.5%, what’s it technically called?
Luke Boase
So we call it alcohol-free.
Elliot Moss
Alcohol-free. Good, thank you, that’s the nomenclature we should use. So we are the point saying I didn’t have a beer, people were apologising for the alcohol-free beer that they were about to order, enter stage left the man who doesn’t know anything about the category but is about to go on a quest, and you did, to find the right people to help you make this beer that you wanted to drink.
Luke Boase
Yeah, yeah, just literally started thinking about who I could reach out to, who I could connect with in the brewing world and find a brewer and it was pretty chaotic. I mean, I was still in, I was still in a job so I was doing that from, on your sort of question about risk, I wasn’t just like, an idea and then quit, it was, yeah I ended up spending two years working with six different breweries in three different countries, trying to figure out how to brew.
Elliot Moss
And what kept you going in that time, Luke because that’s a, that’s a lot and as you said you were managing a day job and yet the eyes were still looking for this solution. Why were they still looking? Why didn’t you just say, ah, well that was a good idea but I can’t be bothered?
Luke Boase
I don’t know, I just think I’m quite stubborn and just kept going and sort of belligerently just kind of carried on and then I guess sort of struck gold really. Reached out to a brewery in, in Germany who I knew brewed amazing lager – and this was always about lager for me – and then they also had the technology to brew alcohol-free beer and it was just one of those, I remember it so clearly, it was a Tuesday in May of 2017 I guess and I sent the CEO a cold email, and I’d sent a lot of cold emails by this point to breweries all over the place and anyone, anyone who would listen and most of them go unresponded to and I lied, I said I was in Germany and I was, I was passing on Friday.
Elliot Moss
I just happen to be outside your offices.
Luke Boase
Yeah, exactly.
Elliot Moss
Which you were.
Luke Boase
Yeah, in the middle of nowhere. And he responded literally in two minutes, I got an email back and he said, yeah, sure, pop by at 1.
Elliot Moss
Why do you think he responded?
Luke Boase
I mean, I do, there’s been a few of these like, these outreach things that happen and I think that’s part of trying to make businesses and startups work as you have to like find ways to make connections with people and kind of build rapport and the sort of the art of the kind of engaging approach which is enough of the short enough, punchy enough, enough emotion, enough fact and then, I don’t know, a bit of lucky anyway, it, for whatever reason it landed, it obviously landed in his email at a moment he was looking at his computer.
Elliot Moss
And also the fact that you’d said I’m round the corner, because I’m here anyway and I’d really like to talk to you about this. You’d put yourself there, physically.
Luke Boase
Yeah.
Elliot Moss
You’d decided in your research that that was one of the breweries you wanted to look at, so that wasn’t just chance that you were able to say I’m outside your door.
Luke Boase
No, thinking about it like that, I mean I wasn’t.
Elliot Moss
Rather than can we have a chat and I’m sitting here a few hundred or a few thousand miles away, it wasn’t like that.
Luke Boase
No. No, no, it was like I’m going to come, I’m coming.
Elliot Moss
I’m coming. So you went and chatted to this fellow, you then start to have further meetings with this brewery and you then work out how you’re going to make this thing delicious.
Luke Boase
Yeah, and I was in, with hindsight, that was a really smooth process but in reality, it wasn’t, it took, it took months and months and months but we did get there and we made good progress and I knew, I did know from the off that we just started a really good point from in development where dealing with good results from the get-go which is always encouraging.
Elliot Moss
And let me just ask because there’s a sort of, there’s home economics and then there’s the science of making taste wonderful, you’re not a scientist, I think you studied languages at university and all that, and you’re a creative person obviously, how did the non-scientist get his head around all these different things that were going on or was it more about I’m just interested in the taste, you work out the process or did you start to become a bit of a nerd?
Luke Boase
I guess over however long it’s been now, seven years, seven or eight years, I’ve got more and more knowledge on beer and brewing but I did start at a point of knowing absolutely nothing and researching it on Google. That was the basis but yeah, the reason you go and work with the best people you know is the general thesis like, can we get hold of the best breweries, the best brewers and…
Elliot Moss
Then you go from there.
Luke Boase
And go from there, like I’m, to be honest I think that’s true with everything, I’m, you shouldn’t be the best at everything in your business, right, if you’re the best at everything then you haven’t hired the right people around you.
Elliot Moss
Absolutely. Wise words and put simply too. Much more from my guest, Luke Boase, coming up in a couple of minutes. Right now, we’re 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 Victoria Pigott and Dr Rebecca Newton, Organisational Psychologist and CEO of Coach Advisor discuss the impact of women in positions of leadership and on boards.
You can enjoy all our former Business Shapers on the Jazz Shapers podcast – there’s over 500 I think now – and you can hear this very programme again if you pop ‘Jazz Shapers’ into your podcast platform of choice. My guest today is Luke Boase, Founder of Lucky Saint, the alcohol-free beer brand. So, you’ve taken me through the, we’re going to create something delicious, you create the something delicious and that’s all very well and good but then you’ve got no distribution and you’ve got no one that’s heard of you, you’re without you knowing, 24 months away from a pandemic, what happens next? What does Luke do, now that he’s got, it’s like the secret source, he’s got the secret source but no one knows about it.
Luke Boase
I guess, yes, so the beer came first, so that was job number one, like is it possible to brew a beer that’s good enough to bring people into the category and then job number two was, well is it possible to build a brand that will make people feel positive about that decision? And so worked with an amazing agency to build I guess do the brand identity.
Elliot Moss
How did you find that, that group again because your background is in, you were an analyst and all that, how does someone go about getting those “best people around you”?
Luke Boase
Like total luck.
Elliot Moss
I thought you were going to say well I did a rigorous process, I analysed the market, I saw fifteen different agencies. No.
Luke Boase
No, my leaving do from my old job was in a random pub in Paddington. I walked in, I saw a guy on the other side of the pub, a guy called Jack who I recognised who is a friend of my wife’s, so I went over and I said hello and it was a bit like what are you doing here and what are you doing here, and I said well it’s my leaving do, I’m going to set up a non-alcoholic beer brand and he was like oh you should, you should chat to Jono and Stu, I’m freelancing at this agency called Otherway, brand creation is their real passion.
Elliot Moss
And you went, alright then.
Luke Boase
And so he connected me and I met Jono the next week and it literally went from there.
Elliot Moss
And when you meet people like that, and then this obviously they’ve become the people that have got behind this and they’ve created, I don’t know, they’ve created something pretty fantastic. At what point, how quickly do you know, yeah, they get me because you’re, it’s vulnerable at that stage, there is no one in your circle. Are you instinctive about that or is it something else? At what point do you realise you’ve got the right person?
Luke Boase
It’s really like on your own, it’s a solo Founder, that stuff is really hard because trying to figure out if you’re on the right track and you sort of just have to run the process. I think I did know, I mean in that particular instance I know they presented four different routes in and looking at the four routes, it was like well there’s definitely something in here, it’s like I broke the rule on, they’re always, the view is always like don’t sort of try and like mould the routes together.
Elliot Moss
But you did. Anyone that says that, it’s just not true, never seen a number of routes, of course there’s something, if there’s something there, it, don’t lose it.
Luke Boase
But mainly it was just about people, I think they, as an agency they just have this amazing, they’re just quite commercial and sort of practical in how they approach stuff and have really good insight that drives so one of our things was always about premium positioning and so Jono’s quarterly challenge to me is like have we got enough gold foiling on our, on our labels, on our you know on the POS, all this stuff so is it like are we continuing to like remain premium?
Elliot Moss
Does that sense of balancing, the kind of the client lure, the consumer experience with the commercials, with a distinctive brand positioning, all those things are quite balanced, they’re nuanced. The way you think about stuff, do you start with, what do you start with, I guess? You know, because there’s obviously there’s the making money bit in there and then there’s the experience bit making in there and then there’s the kind of how much am I going to invest in making that work. Where does it go in terms of the thought process for you?
Luke Boase
Gosh, I mean when it came to like commercial was actually the last thing that was always sat at the bottom of the list in like brand creation and actually like because everything I always think as a startup consumer brand, most of the marketing that you do is within the product so you don’t have any money for like media or anything like that so everything from like gold foiling labels to the bottle, I remember, well I remember being very shocked when I discovered the price of our bottle versus a standard bottle.
Elliot Moss
I take it that means it’s more expensive. Little bit more.
Luke Boase
A little bit more.
Elliot Moss
But you went you know what, that’s going to make it stand out, that’s what we’re going to do.
Luke Boase
That’s going to make it stand out, exactly. Our D2C packaging that we were discussing…
Elliot Moss
Direct to consumer.
Luke Boase
Direct to consumer packaging is you open it up, it’s this amazing, like you open up the box and it’s this amazing sea of blue and in there there’s a little story card which is gold foiled and has this like lovely, so you know that’s the, that is the, those are all the touch points that you have.
Elliot Moss
And actually, and that’s, and that I mean we’re going to come back to this but I think that is, that is the point isn’t it, what does it feel like to drink this beer, what does it feel like to touch the bottle? All those things you’ve been thinking about which I think is a really good bit of advice to take away if you’re thinking about starting your own thing.
The journey and of course when, when you talk about the journey over the five years, the six years, you know you’ve lived and breathed it, it’s like it’s tiring and I look back and I go yeah, looks good, yeah you’ve got a beer, you’ve got a pub, I mean it’s all looking tickety-boo, easy, funded, no problem and of course you know that the reality is different. How have you managed to make the most of the people that have come on this journey with you? Just tell me a little bit about the ebbs and the flows because from the outside it all looks very glossy and very easy but I assume that that’s not the case.
Luke Boase
I’ve definitely got a selective memory on this stuff, I think you just, I think you have…
Elliot Moss
For your health.
Luke Boase
For your health, you forget about the stuff that was hard. Once you’re over it, it’s like oh well that wasn’t that bad. But in general we’ve been really like we have been, we’ve been really lucky, we’ve had great people around us from investors all the way through to the team, our Board.
Elliot Moss
You say lucky but you’ve chosen them, I mean they’ve chosen you to a point.
Luke Boase
Yeah, we’ve managed one way or another, I guess we’ve sort of managed to connect and hit it off with, with people who’ve ended up being like amazingly helpful so Ben Bilboul who was, he founded an ad agency called Karmarama. He now sits on our Board and just after we’d launched he offered some work by Karmarama to I guess figure out a little bit how we sort of not explode the brand but build the brand out beyond just the sort of identity and the bottle.
Elliot Moss
Yeah, it’s got to live and breathe outside otherwise it gets no traction.
Luke Boase
Yeah.
Elliot Moss
It’s not enough being the product.
Luke Boase
And we ended up, the result of that afternoon that we did them that we did the nun campaign which was shot by Rankin.
Elliot Moss
Oh right, yeah.
Luke Boase
Which was like an amazing coup.
Elliot Moss
It’s coming back to me now, I remember the nun campaign.
Luke Boase
There were two photographs that Rankin shot of this very striking nun holding a bottle of Lucky Saint and it was just this, it’s a very arresting pair of images and we still have the nun and it’s still the, you know, it’s still like probably our most distinctive asset, so yeah, that came out of just yeah connecting with Ben and hitting it off and he believed in what we were doing and then…
Elliot Moss
And then you found others, other kind of people along the way that have also believed and have also invested and what do they bring apart from the money which is one thing, what else are they offering you?
Luke Boase
Yeah, I always think it’s easy to say this with but…
Elliot Moss
The money doesn’t matter.
Luke Boase
But it sort of, but it sort of doesn’t like you can raise money from anyone but raising money from people who can help is transformational so we’ve got James Murphy and David Golding who founded another ad agency, Adam & Eve, being able to go to you know people like that and they’ve done, they’ve done work for us with their new agency, NCA, just having their brain power on this stuff is, is amazing. And then we’ve got our biggest investor is JamJar which is the Innocent founders.
Elliot Moss
And I think John Wright’s been on the programme a few years ago, is one of those.
Luke Boase
Yeah, and having them as investors, they’re, because they’re Founders and they’ve lived the journey, all the way through all of the phases of the journey…
Elliot Moss
They know what they’re doing. But they really invest in purpose driven businesses so, we’ve seen, I’ve read a lot about the Mental Health First Aid work that you have got behind the campaign that you’re very interested in. Beyond that though, what is the, what do they define is the purpose of this business and what do you define as the purpose because I think that’s a, you know at the end of the day it’s a non-alcoholic beer or no alcohol beer.
Luke Boase
I guess it’s two part, our stated purpose is to inspire the world to drink better, which is, has a couple of really important bits in it for me so, one is the inspire bit is all around creating an aspirational world around Lucky Saint, like this shouldn’t be a less than proposition, so this shouldn’t be you know a zero version of a full strength beer, this is about celebrating the proposition and, and then drinking better is all about we’re not saying you should only drink alcohol-free, we’re saying, we’re advocates for moderation and we should drink great quality. So that’s our, our kind of stated purpose. I guess more broadly like we are and the bit if you look at JamJar investing in purpose driven businesses, we’re fundamentally trying to improve the state of the nation, you know the health state of the nation.
Elliot Moss
And you stopped drinking didn’t you, or you drink very little, just as a way of kind of clearing the head and all that but I think that’s carried on from the time you did that a few years ago, is that right?
Luke Boase
Yeah, I mean so I did Dry January in 2018 and then I did three months and then I did a year and then by that stage I’d, I’d sort of dealt with almost every occasion from weddings to festivals to nights in, nights out and you figure out that most of the time it’s not the alcohol that you’re looking for in an occasion but I’ve never set myself any rules because I feel like you shouldn’t chastise yourself for having one drink, you should celebrate the fact that you didn’t have five.
Elliot Moss
Stay with me for, on that note, stay with me for my final chat with my guest today, Luke Boase. And we’ve got some Hugh Masekela coming up as well, that’s in just a moment, please don’t go anywhere.
Hugh Masekela with the energetic as usual sound of him with Maseru. Luke Boase is my Business Shaper just for a few more minutes, these are the, the golden foiled minutes that we’ve got left in 2023 here on Jazz Shapers, of course a few more days before the New Year but for me, this is it. We talked about purpose and you mentioned very eloquently what yours is for the business, the mental health piece that I alluded to very briefly, tell me why that has become such an important thing and I love the thing that there is this notion of Mental Health First Aid, what’s that about and why is it so important to you?
Luke Boase
It was kind of two things that came together. The first was Mental Health First Aid England is an organisation that is seeking to get 1 in 10 people in the UK workforce Mental Health First Aid trained, so exactly the same as physical First Aid, it is giving people the tools to know what to do if someone is at crisis point with their mental health and we wanted to do that as a business, we actually, we were a team of 30 at the time and we, we actually did, we were doing a third of our business so there were 9 of us that did the first course with an amazing guy called Harry Corrin and as we were doing the course…
Elliot Moss
I think he lost his father at the age of 12, is that right?
Luke Boase
He did and he opens the training with the story about his father and it was one of those moments where literally it was like someone had punched you in the stomach when the story that he told culminated and we went on and it’s a two day training course and it was very intense as a team. On one level it’s actually very bonding as a team while it’s very challenging but the other thing that was going on in the background was that in all the breaks between the sort of sessions, myself and really Emma, who is our amazing MD, we were talking about how could we do something more than just training 9 people in our business and we very quickly came up with this idea of we’ll train the rest of the people in our business so that’s great but what about if we trained people in our customers, so we obviously work in hospitality a lot, what if we could put someone in every pub that we work with, you know a Mental Health First Aider, so that essentially the initiative that we started with Harry, so we now train as part of our, I guess as part of the support that we give our customers is that we’d love to support them in delivering Mental Health First Aid, so Harry will run the sessions and we will invite them and we, you know, hands up, it’s an expensive course and we can’t afford to put 1 in 10 people within our customers, businesses, through Mental Health First Aid but what we can do though is start this wave, this wave because if you take like one example, we trained one person in one of our wholesalers, it was so impactful for them, they took the initiative to then get 1 in 10 people within their organisation trained.
Elliot Moss
It’s brilliant and what that says to me is that the purpose of this, this beer, if you’re talking about making people healthier in a way, you know, and it’s the connective tissue that you get through drinking or through enjoying those moments so that the empathy that you have, I mean the whole issue as we move into this Christmas period will be for a lot of people, it’s going to be really hard and that is the way it is, it’s all year round but especially when you’re meant to be having a good time and I think you putting people in there and having a world which is far more empathetic and is trained is a fabulous thing. Just tell me, sorry, go on.
Luke Boase
There was, yeah, the sort of the thing that because there is this natural link between drinking more moderately and positive mental health, the thing we’d never sort of managed to do until we kind of got together with Harry was I guess frame it in the right way because this is about taking positive steps on mental health. It was so enlightening for me around we have positive and negative coping mechanisms for dealing with stress and a negative coping mechanism is drinking.
Elliot Moss
And let’s just quickly jump because we’re going to run out of time unfortunately, the pub, talking about positive things and people standing around and having fun and talking to each other and connecting and so on and so forth, what’s it like being a publican? You don’t look like your average pub landlord, I must say, Luke.
Luke Boase
Is that a good thing?
Elliot Moss
I’m not judging, my friends who are also pub landlords, I’ve got a couple but this is, this is a different version.
Luke Boase
I mean, the idea for the pub was originally borne out of like we needed an office.
Elliot Moss
My excuse for opening a pub is I need an office. I mean, I’ve now heard them all.
Luke Boase
And it was, I mean that was what it was originally borne out of and that was well let’s rent the room above a pub and then it, as all these things, good things do, it snowballed into something much, much bigger and it’s become, so our belief as a brand, so the belief that sits above everything that we do is the greatest reward of drinking, is the social connection, not the alcohol and so we wanted to create an inclusive pub where we could live and breathe that belief. So the pub is in Marylebone, it’s called The Lucky Saint and we’ve got the whole building so we have the ground floor is a going concern pub that serves drinks of all ABVs, so all of the regular beer, your Guinness, your Camden Hells, like you’d expect to find, as well as Lucky Saint, and an amazing low alcohol and no alcohol range of drinks across wine, beers, spirits, cocktails etc.
Elliot Moss
Amazing. And it’s your office.
Luke Boase
And then we have the office upstairs so it’s a, you know it’s a home for the team where we can build culture.
Elliot Moss
This the kind of thing that when I was in the advertising world you would have gone, “And what you’re going to do is have a physical manifestation on the high street” and they would, everyone would have gone yeah, right, but actually because you’re surrounded by those kinds of people, you’ve gone, well that is what we’re going to do.
Luke Boase
Well yeah, it is, so that’s the you know one of the words we use, it’s like the physical manifestation of our brand, it’s where you can see what does, how does the Lucky Saint brand translate into hospitality? You know, what do the interactions look like on a human level?
Elliot Moss
I’m just jealous here. I’m looking at this guy and he’s gone and done stuff which is just fun, it’s all the things that you know when I was a very young person we talked about brands. Credit to you for doing this, you’re only five years into the journey, it sounds like you’ve got a lot more to do. Thank you so much for spending some time with me. Just before I let you go what’s your song choice and why have you chosen it?
Luke Boase
So my song choice is Rolling Stones, You Can’t Always Get What You Want. I saw the Rolling Stones when they played at Glastonbury a few years back, favourite song of mine and Olivia, my wife’s, and it always, for just sort of like linking into the Lucky Saint bit, one of our values is get lucky and this for me kind of encapsulates the reality of like some stuff does land on your plate but invariably you’ve got to go and figure out how to make it happen.
Elliot Moss
You Can’t Always Get What You Want by the Rolling Stones. Blues Artist of the Year at the Jazz FM Awards 2022 and the song choice of my guest today, Luke Boase. He talked about being stubborn and belligerent and boy is that important and has been to most of my guests in 2023. He talked about finding ways to make connections, he just turned up at the brewery in Germany and look what happened. Best people, critical to every entrepreneur I’ve met in 2023, you’ve got to surround yourself with them. Smart investors, find those investors who do more than just give you the money and that can help you. Framing, he talked about framing things in a positive way and again that’s been a big theme for 2023 for all of my entrepreneurs, you’ve got to think about the way to positively position something and finally, and I love this for Christmas as you think about it and the New Year, the greatest reward of drinking is social connection, not the alcohol. Great stuff. That’s it from me and Jazz Shapers, have a lovely break, I hope you’re taking one, keep healthy and we’ll see you in the New Year.
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.