How Fawn Weaver Built Uncle Nearest Into a Billion Dollar Business
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I’ve been obsessed with the story of how Fawn Weaver created Uncle Nearest Whiskey this week.
Why?
I’m fascinated by how people create heritage brands in a small amount of time (check out Buly 1803 for another example).
TLDR: Fawn uncovered a historical truth that built the Tennessee whiskey industry in America and built it into a billion dollar company.
Here we go!
NY Times publishes an article in 2016 - Jack Daniel’s Embraces a Hidden Ingredient: Help From a Slave
In the picture an African American is sitting next to Jack Daniels. Odd for 1904.
When you get the uncropped photo, as Fawn tracked down, he’s center stage.
If you don’t have goosebumps then unsubscribe. This isn’t just a biz story, it’s history.
So who is it? Turns out that’s George Green, a son of Nearest Green who was the fist master distiller for Jack Daniel’s No. 7 distillery, their first distillery (No. 7 was the number assigned to Daniels distillery for government registration).
Yup. The most famous American Whiskey owes its iconic flavor profile to Nearest Green.
I’ve been diving through videos and what I’ve put together is that in Africa they used to make spirits out of sweeter items than rye and they used charcoal filter to purify water. Put your hands together, rye and charcoal filter and you have Tennessee Whiskey…
Fawn Weaver, after seeing the NY Times article, tracked down the back story and created Uncle Nearest Whiskey as a tribute to the man who started it all. She’s using it as a platform to show people how to build wealth and help the next generation. Since 2017 it has been America’s fastest growing whiskey brand and is on track to do $100 million in revenue this year.
Honestly I can’t do the story justice. So check out these links for interviews for the back story and the progress since then.
Highlights:
Fawn had a good family but left home at 15 and tried committing suicide twice by 20.
Fawn did everything different than what was advised.
She didn’t land one state and work on the adjoining. National media’s not interested in local stories, so she wanted to go national by year two.
When they ran out of stock Fawn invested $1 million in advertising. She thought people would go into stores and ask for it, the scarcity marketing worked and when it was back in stock sales took off.
Fawn believes you need to own the land to own the brand.
Uncle Nearest is on track for $100 million in revenue this year and estimated at a $1.1 billion market cap.
What Could You Do?
Okay, so I love this space. Buly 1803 created a luxury perfume brand and sold it to Louis Vuitton in seven years by building a brand on one of the first perfumer’s in Paris.
Fawn did the same by building a brand on the story of a forgotten member of the spirit game who created an entire niche of Whiskey.
So what could you do? This one is hard, it takes research. But if you can find a brand with a story there’s a chance you too can create a brand built on history.
There’s money everywhere.
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