663 JW Wiseman: Founder & CEO of Curious Elixirs
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I am unwilling to give up, that I will start over from scratch as many times as it takes to get where I want to be. You just want to make sure you will get knocked down, but just make sure you don't get knocked out. So your only choice should be, go focus on what you can control. Hi everyone and welcome to the Kara Golden Show. Join me each week for inspiring conversations with some of the world's greatest leaders,

We'll talk with founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs, and really some of the most interesting people of our time. Can't wait to get started. Let's go. Let's go. Hi, everyone, and welcome back to The Kara Golden Show. Today, I'm super excited to be joined by J.W. Weissman, who is the founder and CEO of an incredible brand called Curious Elixirs. And it's a brand that is reshaping the way we think about social drinking and

JW launched Curious Elixirs a decade ago, well before the sober curious movement took off, pioneering non-alcoholic craft cocktails with bold flavors and all kinds of incredible benefits. His mission is to create complex, booze-free cocktails that offer the same sophistication and social experience as traditional drinks, and he's definitely succeeded in

doing that. I absolutely love the product and the brand. So I cannot wait to hear a lot more about Curious Elixirs, not only about the product, but also about JW's journey and building this incredible company and being an entrepreneur. So JW, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Cara. Super excited to have you here. So

First of all, can you give us the definition, the master himself, can you give us the definition of Curious Elixirs? What is the company for anyone who is not familiar with it? So Curious Elixirs are the world's best booze-free beverages. We make non-alcoholic craft cocktails and wine alternatives infused with adaptogens to help your body unwind.

So it's something that you can have while you're hanging out with friends or if you want to unwind after a long day. Something sophisticated, like you said, something that is going to have a beginning, middle and an end to it when you drink it. Like it's got to be a full sensory experience so that you feel like you're getting something that is special, that is made just for you. And it really came out of, you know, my own being a cocktail nerd and really like drinking way too much. And, you know, after one crazy night of 20 drinks,

I woke up the next day without a hangover and I was like, wow, I got to transform my relationship with alcohol. And Curious Elixirs was born. That was well over a decade ago. That's incredible. So...

over a decade ago. And today, there's a lot of other drinks out there. The movement overall, I think, has really taken off, not just in the cocktail category, but of course, in the beer category, non-alcoholic beer and other spirits too. So I'm

How did you decide one day that I've got to go and create these products? Because it was so different. 10 years ago, no one was talking about this. And I mean, it's quite the risk to go and just hang your hat on this idea, especially when no one else is really doing it. I guess being a first mover is really essentially the topic here. So how did you have the courage to go and go and create this?

Well, it came out of a personal need, you know, and personal passion, you know, back in, back in those days when I was first changing my relationship with alcohol, I was the head of marketing for a digital media company called Thrillist. And, you know,

the best restaurants and bars and events going on in your city. And I loved helping these thousands of mom and pop restaurants across the country in like 21 different cities, like to help them get their start. So being in a startup environment already that kind of helped me have the confidence to say, oh, you can get from zero to one. You know, the question is how you get from one to 10. But it came out of a personal need and a desire. I was a big cocktail nerd for a really long time. And

And I asked myself the question after that crazy night of 20 drinks of like chasing the dragon, like, could I make like a non-alcoholic Negroni? Could I make a non-alcoholic dark and stormy? Could I make a non-alcoholic chocolate old fashioned? You know, these are the questions that I started asking myself. I didn't have the answers.

but I had a lot of questions. And that's ultimately why we ended up calling the company Curious, because I was curious about what life looked like with less alcohol. You fast forward a couple of years,

And, you know, miraculously, this term sober curious gets coined and that really put a name to the movement, even though we'd already been like around for a few years, that really helped build up a good head of steam for our little company so that people would be like, you know what? I am interested in drinking less and seeing what life is like with less alcohol. And now we're starting to see hundreds of brands kind of validate this idea. People are really flocking to it and kind of asking themselves, you know,

What do I want my life to be like? Do I want to be eating less gluten? Do I want to be having less alcohol? How do I want to feel? What kind of person do I want to be? And that's really important for people to ask themselves those questions. And I'm just thrilled to see that people are really starting to take action on that, on these questions that we're all asking ourselves.

So the beginning stages, you mentioned you were in a totally different industry. So you're at Thrillist. You were dealing with restaurants, but very different still from actually going and creating a product, a company as you have. What was the first step?

that you said, you know, was it a business plan? Was it, you know, figuring out what you were going to put these drinks in? Was it figuring out how many SKUs? What was kind of those early days of Curious Elixirs like?

The first step was really talking to my existing business partners. My brother and I had opened a whiskey bar while I was at Thrillist. So I was in the hospitality industry already. And so when you live in a big city and you have access to public transportation or taxis, you can drink an awful lot and still be highly functional. And that's one of the things that I did was I started asking some of these people in the

what do you do when people come out and ask? And they're like, oh, I make them a bitters and soda. Well, I got really bored with bitters and soda very quickly. And one of my friends, you know, had been sober and in AA for a few years. And I asked him like,

Hey, what do you drink when you're not drinking? And he's like, well, I drink a ginger beer. And he's like, if you're lucky, they have a ginger beer. And that is like 60 grams, like six zero grams of sugar. And, you know, as I started exploring, I also, you know, I left Thrillist, still had the whiskey bar. I had made my own growth marketing agency called Good Business. And I was working with companies like Daily Harvest, you know, superfood smoothies and soups.

helping them go national and other clean food brands. So I started learning about adaptogens. I learned about refined sugars and what they do to the body. And so I said to myself, if I'm going to start tinkering with these and start making these things in my kitchen, which is what I did, then I need to make them with kind of like a wellness mindset, you know, have them from the beginning, try and make them as clean ingredient as possible. Because I knew that once we get further down the road,

That you're going to need to have these without like a bunch of funny ingredients in them, you know, like keep the artificial stuff out. And that's what was really the hardest part, you know, is making something that's delicious without, you know, using artificial stuff. So I was talking to people, I was talking to bartenders, mixologists, restaurateurs, and also just tinkering in my kitchen. You know, I started to learn more from herbalists and things of that nature as well.

And, you know, it's 100 conversations to kind of like get going. And you have a lot of people tell you you're nuts. And my answer is like, are you nuts enough? You know, that's really what you have to be in order to start something. I love it. So how many SKUs did you actually launch with? We launched with one SKU, you know, and the plan was to, you know, as you might see from our

line up now, there's Curious number one through nine. And we launch one new Elixir a year because we've been around for 10 years. And Curious zero, which will be our 10th Elixir,

will take us back to the beginning. So we'll have curious zero through nine starting in May, no starting next month. So that's going to be really interesting to see how we go from one skew and constant iterative testing. Like I read every review that comes into curious elixirs.com and we try to make our drinks better and better and better over the years because I feel like our recipes are never over because

Because as long as we focus on making the world's best versions of what these drinks are, then we don't really have any competition. We're just competing against ourselves. So you've really focused on bars, restaurants, market overall, as well as direct-to-consumer. And you and I were talking about you haven't really gone towards the retail side of things. You're in some boutique businesses. But...

How difficult was that to convince, especially 10 years ago? Maybe it's gotten a little bit easier, but still, maybe a lot of bars and restaurants are thinking, we can just do this ourself. I mean, why would we do this when, you know, here you are putting an incredible non-alcoholic drink together for them, and so many people are coming in. I mean, it's...

Super great, but you still have to educate people and get them to say yes. So how difficult was that? Oh, hugely difficult in the early years. It's gotten easier and easier. There's been a couple of inflection points around that. You know, like my partners in the whiskey bar, they totally didn't get it. And they even said, you know, in the beginning, they're like, you know, I may be missing something, but I sell alcohol.

You know, so if somebody comes in and they want something non-alcoholic, I make them a lemonade. Well, what we make is not lemonade. What we make is not soda. We make things that these bars and restaurants could only make if they devoted hundreds of hours and multiple years to making these. Because, you know, when we were first starting, you know, if you want something that's like bitter or if you want something that's smoky, you have to make a custom alcohol-free extract in order to do that.

No bar restaurant has the equipment to do that or very, very few if, if at all. And so the conversations have gotten easier and easier as the smart ones, like the top five to 10% of restaurants have kind of wised up to the fact that they can make more money by offering world-class non-alcoholic drinks. That also don't take their bartenders five minutes to make, you know, as someone who, you know, owned a high volume whiskey bar, um,

You don't want to be having something that takes six things off the rail and mixing. That's going to lose you money, especially with labor costs being where they are. So what we do is we make it super easy to have a ready-to-garnish drink. You know, you don't have to add anything except the garnish and ice to our drinks. And that really completes the flavor profile. And I'll give you a perfect example of like,

the types of places that are making more money now. Like Blue Note Jazz Club, one of the most famous performance venues in the world here in New York City and Greenwich Village. And their general manager, you know, he got...

by one of his own employees at their holiday party. And a sober employee of his said, we've got to be doing better for our sober guests and for guests who are drinking less. We're leaving money on the table. And he's like, really? And then he looked at it and he sought us out. And then once he had Curious on the menu, he went from $0 to over $10,000 a month in incremental revenue just selling Curious elixirs.

that's a lot of money for a place that is, you know, not a couple thousand people in the, in the venue that they have a capacity of 300. So that's real money that places are just leaving on the table. And now the smart ones are really starting to get it and they can't just make some of these complex drinks easily. You know, that's why we focused on making things that are very specific. Like any bar restaurant can make a fancy lemonade with a fancy garnish and, and,

sell it for, you know, 10 to $12. Anybody can do that. But are people going to come back for that drink a second time? Are they going to get two of them? No. So that's where they're going to lose people because people want to go back to a place where they know that they're going to have something spectacular, you know, something that's both familiar and also nourishing and hopefully makes their body feel good too. That's one of the key differentiators for us is we have things that like subtly support the body, subtly make you a little bit more connected to your people when you're hanging out.

So is there a runaway bestseller of all of your SKUs? It depends on the season, you know. Like in the summertime, you'll see something like Curious No. 4, our Sicilian Spritz. That one will do great in the summertime. Yeah.

Yeah. And then surprisingly, though, even things like Curious No. 9, which is not a wine, it's Curious No. 9, but it's our Rosy Rosé. And that one has been doing well. We just launched that last May. All four seasons, Sparkling Rosé is selling really well.

Didn't really expect that. But I think it's also because we have a million plus customers all over the country. And if you're buying something in Phoenix, Arizona, it's a little bit warmer down there. You might want to have some sparkling rosé any time of year. So those are a couple that do really, really well. So you have a...

pretty nice direct-to-consumer business. You talked a little bit. You had some experience in direct-to-consumer. How different is that business versus selling into Blue Note, for example, for you or for any entrepreneur? Any sort of lessons? And would you do it again? Would you start it earlier and really make sure that that's taking off? Because I would imagine people are starting to see your brand when they're going into...

these restaurants and then, you know, they're interested in getting it at home. So it's a natural thing for you to sell those as well. But I, I'm so curious. I think we would do it a little differently if I were to do it again. I think we would start working with distributors a little bit earlier. If I were to do this again, we were self distributed for the first nine years of the business. And now we have a few distributors across the country, but we're still learning. You know, we have a lot to learn in that space.

And when I was first researching this, you know, over a decade ago, it was clear to me that so many beverage brands start and they go with a retail first strategy. And I was like, okay, let's do the Warren Buffett thing. Let's, let's do the opposite of what everybody else does. Let's go direct to consumer first. And that's also what I knew how to do, you know, like how to do that. So I knew we could be successful at it.

And we made subscription a really key part of our business because from my experience at Daily Harvest, I knew that that was going to keep money flowing in.

And cash flow, you know, cash is like oxygen to a business. If you don't have cash, you're out of business. And we don't have any investors. We don't have any venture-backed funding. So, and that's something that is really tied in with our mission of transforming how we drink socially. I felt like we could either, we couldn't serve both masters. If we want to serve the mission, it can't just all be about money. We have to make money in order to achieve the mission, but we have to put

the 20, the 40, the 80 year mission first. And that is really why we've done it that way. And it's been interesting to see how some of our bets have really paid off really well.

But to your question, we definitely would have started with more distributors earlier if I were to do this again, because like one of the distributors we have in Michigan, for example, incredible partner, you know, and they've been really helping us get into restaurants and into our first kind of retail environments into like some of the upscale supermarkets and stuff like that as experiments.

And it's selling really well there. And that's something that we wouldn't have been able to just do by ourselves with like a scrappy team of, you know, 20 people.

That's so interesting. So what has surprised you about, I guess, sort of the journey of building a physical goods product company as you have? I mean, you had been in the media industry, very different, very complicated as well. So you clearly are a glutton for punishment going back into an industry, going back down to the bottom and starting again to go and

build something incredible. But what have you learned that's kind of surprised you about the physical good space that maybe when, you know, a friend comes to you and says, oh, I'm going to go start a beverage company. What do you say?

I say to them, do it, get started now, you know, like don't, don't delay. We have, you know, I don't know about you, but I have this inner critic in my head that is, you know, constantly second guessing, you know, what I want to do. And it's important to listen to that inner critic, but I've learned that that inner critic is just trying to help me be better really, you know? And I think that's one of the things that surprises me. And I say this to people when they come to me and they're like, I want to start, um,

you know, a beverage business, there's a woman who I mentor a little bit and she came to me a few years ago and was asking like, Oh, Hey, would you have any advice? And I was like, reformulate your product now and make it clean ingredients. And that is something that I wish she had done three years ago. They're doing it now. And she's like, you know, you told me to do this and I wish I had followed your advice three years ago. So my advice is do the hard work upfront and

Make it exactly how you want it to be and make it as clean as possible. Because 10 years from now, people are going to be, if you're successful, people are going to be like, oh, they did it the right way. And they have a reputation for being the best.

That I think is the best way to keep yourself separated from everybody else in the market. Cause I'm kind of surprised by, well, there's hundreds of non-alcoholic brands out there, but maybe 1% of them are clean ingredient lists. That's pretty surprising to me. So just, just because something is non-alcoholic doesn't mean that it's good for you. So I encourage everyone to like read their ingredient labels, be a curious person and also ask yourself how you feel after drinking or eating something.

Your body's going to keep the score, right? It's going to tell you what's going on. That's awesome. When did you know that you had a business that was going to make it, right? Founders are constantly, I think, competing against themselves, right? So they hit these goals. They set another goal, right? And there's this constant...

relationship, maybe it's that voice in their head, but it's this, they don't stop, right? It's never kind of good enough. So, which is hard, right? And it's consistent across so many entrepreneurs and founders that I read about or interview on the show as well. But when did you know that, okay, we've got to do this? I'm all in, it's going to make it.

You know, it was actually very early and it was even before we launched our Kickstarter. It was watching Martha Stewart speak at Summit Series. And I've been toying with this idea for a while. And somebody asked Martha the question, was there ever a moment where you doubted yourself, where you thought the chips were down and, you know, you thought things might not work out? And without hesitation, she said, nope, never, not once.

And her unbelievable courage and her confidence, it struck me like a bolt of lightning that I could borrow that. I could borrow that. I was like, this is what I've been wanting to do. I've been getting in my own way. This business is starting now. It's time to go. And I knew then that it would be a success. How many people do you have in your company now full time? Full time, about 20. And we have about 30 people who work on it total.

That's awesome. Are you only in the U.S.? Do you have international business as well? Only in the U.S. right now. We are testing out some things to Canada. And, you know, similar to the kind of like the distribution, you know, thing where we're

where it's like, I need to learn a lot more, we'll be looking for good partners in those other countries in order to people who just know their country inside and out and know the food and beverage space. Because we're never going to know these countries the way that they do. So right now we're really focused on

continuing to evolve the product line and which is pretty much you know almost set like we've almost got our 10th SKU out there but then we've got to refine and then we have to take it across the world

I was interviewing somebody the other day, and I asked him the question of how many SKUs he had. And he had been talking about how he had to do SKU rationalization and really look at it. And I'm like, but how many SKUs do you have? And he's like, oh, 270. And I was like, wow, yes. I was like, come on. I said, do you really need that many? And anyway, we...

We launched into that whole conversation. I thought it was fascinating. So do you think you need more, more SKUs in a line of products? Or, you know, there's also this thinking that sometimes too many SKUs is, I guess what I would say is the consumer will always say,

What else do you have? Right. Like, but I think at some point, you know, what's the Steve jobs said? Like you tell your consumers, you don't necessarily ask them. It's the luxury playbook, right? Dominate the customer. Yeah. And, you know, we love listening to our customers and they certainly want more flavors, but I try to think of curious elixirs as almost like trying to create the perfect non-alcoholic drink list.

We probably don't need to have 50 different drinks on there. You know, probably like a dozen will be good. I think we will probably need to have a couple more. But there may be ones that we cycle in and out over the years. You know, I think that our core line of curious is zero through nine will be our core line. And then we might have a few others that come up over the course of the next few years. But I don't think we need to have that.

dozens and dozens. We just need to have a really good tight list. It's kind of like the paradox of choice, right? If you have too many options, people know what to do. And then they're less satisfied with what they get. So my thinking is have a good, tight, curated menu

And that's enough. And that we make it very specific, make it things that bartenders can't create on their own, you know, that because then it solves a problem for them, too, because we're here not just for the end consumer, but we're also trying to help these restaurants and bars, comedy clubs, theaters and business networking events, you

festivals, trying to make all these places, make it easy for them to have a world-class non-alcoholic option like Curious behind the bar. Because what it does is that's how you change culture.

When you, you know, at the artist after party for Coachella last year, they asked us to be there to have curious elixirs behind the bar because they specifically wanted adaptogen, adaptogenic non-alcoholic options because the artists were asking for it. That means that something's changing and we have to pay attention to that so that hopefully two generations from now, when people are going to a wedding, they're going to be able to

People can just have like a glass of champagne or they can have a glass of Curious Elixir number seven. And it's not a big deal. It's like expected that people are going to be drinking whatever it is that they want. And they're not just quitting one specific thing that has been told to them by their parents generation. So what are you most excited about for Curious Elixirs in, say, the next few months?

Oh, the thing I'm most excited about is the Great Curious Cocktail Party. This will be the third year of doing that, which is on May 14th, 2025. It's a Wednesday night. We're throwing 100 parties in 100 cities all on the same night. So that's what I'm excited about. It's going to be the biggest Sober Curious gathering on the planet. It'll be a constellation of celebrations. So that's going to be really fun. And we've done it the past two years. And

It's just amazing to see what people come up with because, you know, some people are throwing a, you know, a backyard barbecue in Nashville, Tennessee with singer songwriters playing guitars. And then other people are having a Bollywood movie night in Brooklyn and other people are having a bonfire on the beach in San Diego. But they're all drinking curious and they're all toasting to their own choices when it comes to alcohol. And I just think that's fantastic. I'm really excited to see what people come up with this year.

I love it. So JW, thank you so much for the incredible conversation. You're doing some amazing things with Curious Elixirs and such a great company that you've built. You should be really proud. So it's really, really terrific. And if you have questions,

not tried Curious Elixirs, I hope that you will head over to CuriousElixirs.com. Also ask for it in your local establishment. And you're doing such an incredible job. You also have a podcast too, The Stay Curious Show, which is also very terrific. So everyone needs to tune into that too. So thank you again for coming on and thanks everyone for listening. Thank you, Kara.

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