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FASHION & STYLE
Fame at 70 Proof
By ALLEN SALKIN OCT. 1, 2006
Correction Appended
JEFFREY Zarnow, rum runner, is somebody in this town.
Clinging to a strawberry-red, pyramid-shape bottle of Starr African Rum, the
two-year-old brand he owns, Mr. Zarnow, 33, ducked into the restaurant Parea last
week to confer with its head bartender, Arin MacDonald. Parea, on East 20th Street,
is adding a $14 cocktail made with Starr to its fall menu, and Mr. Zarnow wanted to
sample it.
The bartender slid an orange and red mixture of raspberry purée, honey, apricot
and Starr, which is made in Mauritius, onto the long sand-color bar, and Mr.
Zarnow, wearing a white suit, beamed. “Beautiful drink,” he said. “Beautiful.”
Before he owned his own rum, Mr. Zarnow’s highest profile occupation was
being a friend of the actor Matthew McConaughey. That was fun, but not so much
fun as his new life sponsoring parties and trying to build a liquor brand, he said,
ducking into a Town Car to head to a charity event, the Fete de Swifty, on East 73
Street, whose hosts included Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Liz Smith.
“Last week,” Mr. Zarnow said, “it was one night I had a party with Bono, one
night with Petra Nemcova and one night with Dazed and Confused magazine.”
Drink up. Just as it can seem that every woman with social ambition is
designing her own handbag or jewelry line, there’s a freshly distilled ticket to social
standing for men — introducing your own liquor. There is the caffeine-infused
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p.i.n.k. vodka, started by a 32-year-old former Washingtonian; Cabana Cachaça,
owned by a 27-year-old former banker; TY KU, a sake liqueur started by two 20-
somethings in a Columbia University business class; and the brands are
proliferating.
Many would-be spirits barons are young or youngish men with disposable cash,
hoping to increase their social profile one fashionably designed bottle at a time. “I
get to travel down to Brazil every month and to Miami and all over the place,” said
Matti Antilla, 27, the owner of Cabana, a brand of cachaça, a Brazilian rum often
used in caipirinhas. “And I’m meeting great people and having a great time of it.”
Mr. Antilla had spent time in Brazil as an analyst with JPMorgan’s natural
resources group. He was drinking caipirinhas late one night at a restaurant in Santa
Barbara, Calif., where he had moved to work for his family’s real estate business,
when it struck him that there was no major brand of cachaça on the American
market.
He got in touch with Nicolas Barquin, whom he had met playing squash in New
York after graduating from Amherst. By April 2006 they found a Brazilian distiller, a
French bottle-maker and a New York label designer and were serving their new
product at a party at Bungalow 8, attended by the actress Jordana Brewster and
socialites like Tinsley Mortimer, Ted Roosevelt V, Amanda Hearst and John de
Neufville, people Mr. Antilla knew from his postcollege days going out in New York.
“A lot of what I’ve done initially with Cabana,” Mr. Antilla said by phone from a
duck-hunting trip in Finland, “is get my friends behind it in New York and for them
to get their friends behind it.”
Now Mr. Antilla sends out e-mail messages to a list of more than 500 similar
“friends that go out,” asking that if they order bottle service at clubs, they choose
Cabana. And when he is in New York he goes out nearly every night to clubs like
Marquee and Bed as a “brand ambassador.”
He has sold 300 cases of Cabana so far in New York, he said. He hopes to
introduce the brand in Miami in the winter, most likely with a party at a club being
opened by a friend, Reinaldo Bibolini, known on the scene as Bibs.
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“I don’t miss my banking days,” Mr. Antilla said.
Besides exotic travel and an entree to clubs, Fashion Week after-parties and
charity galas — which all seem to have a liquor brand as a sponsor these days —
another allure of the boutique spirits business is its low start-up cost. All you have to
do is find a distillery, design a bottle and start marketing, said Brian Sudano, the
managing director of BMC Strategic Associates, an industry consultant. “It wouldn’t
cost you more than a quarter million,” he said. “And you probably could get it up and
running for less than 100 grand.”
The prospect of big markups is enticing: it costs $3 to $5 a bottle to produce a
spirit that can be sold wholesale to bars and liquor stores for $15.
But that doesn’t mean that creating a sustainable business is easy. In the last 20
years, Mr. Sudano said, Skyy Vodka is the only hard alcohol introduced by small-
time entrepreneurs that was successful over time.
He pointed out that Grey Goose Vodka, introduced in 1997 and sold in 2004 to
Bacardi for $2.3 billion (and the holy grail of today’s aspiring liquor moguls), was
started by an entrepreneur, Sidney Frank, who had already tasted success with
Jägermeister, a long established European brand.
Eric Schmidt, the research director of the Adams Beverage Group, which tracks
the industry, said, “There have been more than 600 new hard liquors introduced in
the past four years, some by big players, some by small, and few will succeed.”
One hurdle for any new spirit is the faddish nature of cocktails. One month rum
drinks are all the rage, and the next there is a thirst for herb-infused vodkas. Even if
a liquor is versatile enough to remain in favor on the club scene, it still has a long
way to go to become a nationally known brand, which requires being picked up and
supported by a distributor, the largest being Southern Wine and Spirits, which
operates in 26 states.
Distributors may agree to carry a new brand in a few regions, but unless it is a
novel product with lots of marketing momentum, it is likely to get lost in the huge
number of brands the company sells, Mr. Sudano said. “If you go into hot clubs in
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New York City and get a lot of people to support your brand, then go into a
distributor, they’ll say, ‘Sure, we’ll take it.’ But they don’t put focus behind
something unless it’s really hot.”
Until that happens, it’s night after night of promoting your brand locally at clubs and
parties.
David Mandell, 32, goes out almost every night in New York to promote p.i.n.k.,
the caffeinated vodka he introduced in May. Last week he was at a p.i.n.k.-sponsored
party for the film “Shortbus.”
“A week and a half ago we did Kelis’s surprise birthday party for her husband,
Nas, at the Canal Room,” he said.
Mr. Mandell, the former chief of staff to the Federal Aviation administrator in
Washington, experienced his “aha!” moment one night early in 2003 at Skybar in
Los Angeles, where he was on a business trip.
“I was consuming an energy drink mixed with alcohol and said to a very good
friend of mine, who is now my C.F.O. and C.O.O., ‘why can’t we take the characters
of the energy drink and just add it to the alcohol without adding any of the calories
or carbs?”’
For the next two years, Mr. Mandell spent nights and weekends overseeing
p.i.n.k.’s development. The name is an acronym, but Mr. Mandell will not say for
what. Mr. Mandell projects that by the end of 2006 the company will have sold
about 10,000 cases of p.i.n.k., which comes in a frosted white bottle with a pink hue
and retails for $40.
To make it in the liquor business, it helps to have spent one’s early 20’s as a
Wall Street Turk, dropping hundreds of dollars for bottle service at nightclubs and
getting to know bartenders and club owners. That would describe Courtney and
Carter Reum, former investment bankers who plan to introduce VeeV, a flavored
hard alcohol early next year.
“This seemed like the best thing for our age in life, our skill set, our contacts,”
Carter Reum, 28, said by telephone from Los Angeles, where he and his 25-year-old
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brother are doing nightly market research by going out to clubs. “We’re our main
demographic.”
It also helps to have celebrity friends who know other celebrities. “If you’ve been
in Jamie Foxx’s bedroom, you’ve heard of us,” said Mr. Zarnow, the purveyor of
Starr Rum.
Starr sponsored Mr. Foxx’s Oscar-night party in 2005, and Mr. Zarnow
subsequently heard from a mutual friend that Mr. Foxx keeps a bottle of the rum on
his bedroom mantelpiece. “You can’t pay for that kind of publicity,” he said.
Despite the crowded and competitive playing field, there have yet to be any Al
Capone versus Bugs Moran-type run-ins on the dance floor of Bungalow 8 between
would-be liquor kings. But some sniping has already surfaced.
“Cabana is not too good,” said Steve Luttman, the owner of Leblon, a rival
cachaça that was unfurled during Fashion Week last year with a flurry of 19 parties
in seven days. “The product is relatively poor quality in nice packaging.”
Mr. Luttman, 41, had been working at LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton,
helping the multinational liquor and fashion giant introduce new brands. On the day
after his 40th birthday he quit and started Leblon. “It’s the ultimate midlife crisis,”
he said. “Instead of buying the fast car or getting the blonde, I started my own liquor
company.”
While some ambitious entrepreneurs dream of reaching the top of the ladder
like Skyy, others seek only a handhold on its first rum-soaked rungs. Douglas
Loughran, 30, was working as a manager for a company that owns liquor stores in
Colorado. Missing his native Philadelphia, he quit, returned home and worked as a
mechanic and then as a tree remover.
One night at a Nepalese restaurant he spotted a bottle of Khukri, a dark rum
sold in a glass bottle shaped like a Himalayan dagger.
Mr. Loughran discovered no one had the United States import license for
Khukri. He negotiated with the distiller in Nepal to import it. His first 300 cases
