Who owns grey goose company

Then Jimmy Buffett was drinking it. Then it was the hottest beer in America. With Jager, we saw we were getting large orders because the LSU kids were drinking it.

Then there was the newspaper story in the Baton Rouge Advocate. When Sidney Frank saw this, he flew into action, assembling a team of hot chicks, dubbed Jagerettes, and dispatching them to New Orleans bars to hand out photocopies of the story. Frank also slapped up eight new Jagermeister billboards in the area. We thought this was the pinnacle of cool.

All over the country, Jager shots became a revered symbol of buck-wild partying, and the brand remains one of the hottest in the industry, growing at 40 percent a year.

First, you should be aware: You transact much of your business from bed, wearing pajamas and smoking a cigar it is written into the prenup with your second wife that you are permitted to smoke cigars in bed. When not in bed, you wear a bow tie at all times. Also, you maintain a phalanx of full-time golf pros, at a cost of perhaps half a million dollars a year, simply so you can watch them play the game.

To the business at hand. Because the microbrewed-beer craze is giving way to a new age of sophisticated cocktails. Dot-com dollars are begging to be spent ostentatiously, at expensive nightclubs. Herein lies opportunity. As you lean back in your golf cart, watching another perfect chip shot bounce up onto the green, you ponder the fact that the premium vodka right now in is a brand called Absolut.

No , you think, chomping your cigar as you watch a foot putt roll straight into the cup. This was the great insight of Sidney Frank and not only him: The makers of Ketel One vodka had the same basic idea. Frank could see that there was a product missing from the shelves. The markup amount was pure profit. In this story, the name came first—as it so often does when image is the paramount concern.

These were German white wines that were briefly hip but faded into oblivion. It may also be that Frank liked the name because he already owned the worldwide rights to it.

So they met with cognac distillers, whose business had slowed. The stills were switched to vodka, and at last there was an actual product. But why France? For Grey Goose, the brand was about unrivaled quality. It uses water from pristine French springs, filtered through Champagne limestone.

It looks fantastic up behind the bar, the way it catches the light and Frank made sure to give the bars big, 1. It sure looks expensive. Never forget the influence of the bartender. It was named the best-tasting vodka in the world by the Beverage Testing Institute in Granted, this pronouncement can and will be doubted. But it was nonetheless touted relentlessly in a series of Wall Street Journal ads. And now the most important piece of the story—the twist that brings it all together: Grey Goose costs way more than other vodkas.

Waaaaaaay more. So it must be the best. Pause for a reality assessment: Certainly, Grey Goose is a very good vodka. The FDA definition is pretty narrow. At an elemental level, there is no difference. Grey Goose is about quality because Sidney Frank said it was about quality.

And said it to the right people. Grey Goose is distilled in Picardy, France, but not because of any specific regional interest. As vodka is made by stripping alcohol of most of its congeners and funky flavor compounds, it can be made almost anywhere.

But Frank chose a place specifically against tradition — as in, not Eastern Europe. He wanted a vodka American consumers would immediately associate with luxury. The wheat for Grey Goose is grown in Picardy and distilled there, before being sent to Cognac for filtration. It was pretty much smooth sailing for Grey Goose from the beginning. Just a year after its initial release in , it was named the best tasting vodka in the world by the Beverage Tasting Institute.

When Grey Goose first launched, the brand specifically shipped bottles out to bars in wooden crates as opposed to cardboard boxes like most other liquor brands. Part of the reason Frank invented Grey Goose was that he saw the success of the Absolut brand, which was priced highly for its time.

Frank realized he could do one better. How to out-luxury a luxury brand? Grey Goose Vodka was distilled from thin air in the summer of as a concept with no distillery, no bottle and no spirit. Eight years later, with sales somewhere north of 1. This gave him the confidence, financial clout and distribution muscle to take on Absolut.

Crucially he gave consumers a reason why. No one had heard of this obscure institute until full-page ads splashed its name across the Wall Street Journal. Other factors included the bottle design that looked great back-lit in a bar, the fat margins shared through the supply chain and the careful seeding of the brand into the right spots.

Celebrity endorsement was also key, not least the appearance of Goose Cosmos in Sex and the City. But maybe the biggest factor was simply the price.