Founders of canned cocktail brand Moth on their overnight success

When Rob Wallis and Sam Hunt landed their first order at Waitrose, they couldn’t believe their luck.

The school friends had only launched their canned cocktail drink company, Moth, two and a half years earlier and were still in the process of securing a round of investment.

Fast-forward two years and Moth is one of the most popular ready-to-drink cocktail brands in the UK.

It’s been a whirlwind for the duo, which has seen them go from hand-bottling cocktails to making their products available in 2,000 stores across the country.

The pair seem a mixture of thrilled and bewildered at their overnight success.

Rob and Sam, both 28, have known each other ‘for ass years’, they went to school together before they both ended up at York University.

“Caring for people with food and drink has been a big part of our relationship and our lives,” says Rob. ‘Cooking together at the university, hosting… if you don’t have a lot of money, nothing is as nice as having people over and being hospitable.’

‘You come home on a Friday night and you have a can of beer or a bottle of wine in your fridge, but you couldn’t get a cocktail that easily. Why couldn’t I get an Old Fashioned as easily as a can of beer or a glass of Sauvignon Blanc?

“We just couldn’t find it. I sent Sam a Facebook message and said I wanted to start a company that makes the perfect Old Fashioned in bottles. He sent back the immortal reply, which I’ve screenshotted somewhere: “That’s actually not a terrible idea.”

From there, Rob and Sam launched their first company Buveur, hand-filling and labeling cocktails in a glass bottle. It secured them a spot in Selfridges, eventually leading to supplies at the Ritz, but it still wasn’t what the friends had envisioned.

‘You see the little problem that we keep talking about a can of beer and a bottle of cocktail…’ says Rob. “It was one of the things we’d always said, easy as a can of beer… but we were in a glass bottle.”

After painstakingly building the brand for two and a half years, the duo switched to the current version with a range of canned drinks.

But then the pandemic hit and so many of their partners were forced to close that the pair had to sell through Amazon.

A surprising success

The ready-to-drink cocktail market had largely gone under the radar before the pandemic. There were canned gin and tonics on offer, but the hard seltzer trend seen in the US had not yet made it across the pond.

The pandemic has completely changed the rules.

“I wish I could say we knew it was coming and we did everything we could to be ready… but that’s not true,” says Rob. “We were there at the right place at the right time and that meant we could have the conversation with Waitrose, which changed everything.”

Overnight, Moth had grown from a small brand led by best friends to a rollout in 200 Waitrose stores across the country. They were the most cocktails Moth had made in the past two and a half years.

“We said when we rebranded: either this will work and we’re ready to scale or it won’t work. We said to ourselves: it’s not the failure that kills you, it’s the great success’, says Rob.

Sam adds: ‘Everyone says you have to plan to prevent something going wrong, but I think a lot of startups fail to plan for success.’

For two entrepreneurs who say they have little knowledge of business, they strike a mature tone when it comes to the market.

Their ‘plan for success’ meant they focused exclusively on Waitrose for the first year, which resulted in Moth becoming the second largest ready-to-drink brand in the upmarket, behind only drinks giant Diageo.

Now Moth can be found in Sainsbury’s, Tesco and even on British Airways flights. There are eight cocktails in the range, including the French 75, Aperitivo Spritz and Pina Colada, which were launched last October and complement the existing range of Negroni, Margarita, Espresso Martini, Old Fashioned and Mojito.

“The goal is really to become the market leader in premium ready-to-drink,” says Sam. ‘[We want to] becoming a house brand like FeverTree, growing that brand and watching consumers come to know and love Moth. It’s incredibly rewarding.”

Rob adds: ‘It’s unreal that people know who we are who aren’t our mothers! I remember walking down a road in London and seeing one of our old fashioned tins left on the side of the street. I think I took 100 pictures!’

‘We made a product for us’

The duo has managed to make their mark in an industry in which they actually have little experience.

While Rob spent some time working in the upscale hospitality industry as a bartender, Sam has a background in film and television.

Moth is now the ninth most popular ready-to-drink brand in the UK, surpassing White Claw hard seltzer, according to Nielsen figures.

What did they do well?

The pandemic has certainly helped catapult premixed cocktails into the mainstream.

Moth is on the pricier side – a can costs £3.90 for 125ml, almost double the average £2 – but being the cheapest on the market wasn’t what they set out to do.

“Delight was at the heart of it. And we have to convince consumers to pick it up without a marketing budget,” says Sam. “It was on a supermarket shelf and went, well, everyone is colorful, we’ll be black and white.” Everyone else is in big cans, we are in small cans. All others are shiny, we will be matte.’

Do they see themselves as disruptors in what is quickly becoming a crowded market?

‘I think there are two kinds of entrepreneurs,’ says Rob. “There are people who just have an idea, and there are people who think there’s a niche in a market that needs to be disrupted, like Harry with razors.

“We’re not, we want to build a product that we’re genuinely proud of, and actually it turns out that it’s the right time and the right place.”

The demographics they sell to has probably been a major factor in their success. The friends admit that millennials are their core market, though they say the gender split is fairly even.

But how much disposable income will this group have in the coming months for almost double the amount of an average canned cocktail?

Moth’s founders insist that growth continues at lightning speed and that they are enjoying their biggest Christmas ever in the industry, but they know they need to diversify their revenue stream.

They’ve teamed up with grocery delivery start-ups like Gorillas and Zapp, again popular among millennials, and recently launched a direct-to-consumer offering through their website.

However, where they think they can make the most impact is in the hospitality industry.

“There is a personnel crisis and we think we can help,” says Rob. ‘For an overworked team asked to serve cocktails, [selling Moth drinks] actually makes that easier and faster for the team, and therefore the client, and is a huge opportunity.

“We’re kind of on the fence about what we’ll see this year. But I think there are a lot of people who buy Moth who wouldn’t [usually] buy a canned cocktail.’

Their humility and innovation is a breath of fresh air in an industry dominated by large multinationals.

They may have been in the right place at the right time, but the duo managed to tap into this market before some of the bigger players did.

With a small team, their flexibility means they can work quickly and be much more responsive to what people want to drink.

This is part of our new series looking at companies disrupting industries that traditionally lack innovation.

We’ll be looking at some of the most exciting companies in industries we encounter every day that want to do things a little differently.