A trial period with bottle shop chains Dan Murphy’s and BWS has been a roaring success to date for Gold Coast-based cocktail mixer maker Mr Consistent, with even more stores starting to stock the startup’s products every day.
Founded just last year, Mr Consistent makes premium quality cocktail mixes using fresh Australian ingredients, designed to be mixed with just one type of alcohol.
Finding a thirsty consumer base during lockdown periods in 2020 and 2021 exclusively via an e-commerce channel, Mr Consistent and its founders have since gone from strength to strength, resulting in drinks giant Dan Murphy’s and BWS taking an interest in the company.
To date, co-founder Jarrad Bell tells Business News Australia that the company’s trial with the two bottle shops has beaten expectations, with 38 Dan Murphy’s stores and 34 BWS shops now stocking the group’s products across Australia.
“We’ve seen some real success in the last four to five weeks,” said Bell, a co-founder of the company alongside Jeremy Davidson and Michael Sebire - winners of the 2021 Gold Coast Young Entrepreneur Award in the Startup category.
“It’s still a trial period, but we’re seeing amazing success and repeat purchases as well as people loving the product. They’re adding stores by the day.”
All stores involved in the trial period for Mr Consistent have to stock the brand’s Margarita and Espresso Martini products, but many have also opted to sell other mixers like the Cosmo, Sours, Stitch Up and Sangria bottles.
While clearly a boon for the brand’s bottom line, Bell said he is just pleased consumers will be able to get the mixers more conveniently, as currently the only option customers have is to buy via the Mr Consistent website or seek it out via boutique stockists from their stockist map.
“I think the best thing for us is literally the accessibility to our product,” Bell said.
“We kicked off with e-commerce and there’s obviously shipping delays around Christmas…so honestly the best part is it being more accessible to people.
“They can go down to their local where they would buy a bottle of tequila or their bottle of vodka. It just makes life a lot easier and makes the customer a lot happier.”
Mr Consistent’s success with large alcohol retailers comes ahead of the brand significantly scaling its operations, with plans currently in motion to open a production facility in Burleigh Heads that will 10x its output by January.
Not bad for a company that has been manually hand-labelling their bottles until today, according to Bell.
“There’s days where you kind of sit back and go ‘Oh this is amazing’, but we’ve definitely scaled up quickly. We’ve gone from 40 staff a month and a half ago to about 105 staff currently,” Bell said.
“We’ve only just got a labelling machine - we’ve been hand-labelling bottles for 18 months.”
As for the future, Bell says fans of the brand can look forward to new products in the new year, as well as potential collaborations with some of Australia’s largest music festivals. In the meantime, a Black Friday surprise is imminent, which Bell hopes will delight connoisseurs of Mr Consistent.
“All the profit and all the money we make is going back into building this production facility and being able to grow our business,” Bell said.
“We’re making sure we are setting the pathway for the next two to three years.
“We want to do the US. We’re already in Singapore. All the promises that our sales team and our commercial team are out there making, we want to fulfil.”
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