We recently connected with Amanda Thomson and have shared our conversation below.

Amanda, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

I wanted to party without the alcohol. I was obsessed with good Champagne so for me the perfect Champagne with the cold bubbles, the pop of the cork, that first glass – denoted the start of a special moment shared amongst friends or team mates.

I recognised that, whichever way we cut it, we all need less alcohol in our lives. We can’t rely on using alcohol as a crutch and drink it so often. The question was, could I recreate what I loved about fine Champagne but without the alcohol? That was the idea, the concept.

Like a lot of founders, the idea is often the easy part; it’s the execution that’s downright tough. I soon started to realise perhaps why no one had done it before! Not because it was not a good idea but because it was damn hard to make beautiful alcohol-free wine.

I remained focused and positive about the fact that there must be many millions like me around the world waiting for the gap to be filled. I took inspiration from what happened with the alcohol-free beer market globally, which had exploded beyond all recognition. But the wine industry hadn’t even scratched the surface. So, all on my shoulders was this this idea that if I could crack alcohol-free wine then I would be the world leader. That was what became all-consuming.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your background and context?

I grew up in a divorced family. My parents split when I was quite young and my father was an immigrant. Looking back, I think it gave me very good early start in the necessary skills of entrepreneurship. Everybody talks about resilience and I think we often talk about its necessity but it’s almost like you can’t force resilience upon people; you usually have to have had pain points often in your life that leads to that resilience.

I find that, with a lot of entrepreneurs who I’m friends with or I talk with in the founder world, tenacity is a key core characteristic. Perhaps we were all born with that – I question whether that is nature rather than nurture. Either way, tenacity is a skill that you need in abundance when building a consumer brand from scratch.

My vision was always very clear from the beginning. It was how to enable everybody to party without the alcohol and by “party” I was referring to that Champagne moment, the special moment in the evening. It was about creating liquid that was really delicious and special and gave me the same feeling that I get with a fine Champagne. That was always the driver for me.

It was the building blocks leading to making that vision happen that I needed to find. The vision was there. Many of us have great ideas, but most people don’t act on them. That’s really all that separates us. If the good idea you have is sound, then all that separates the idea from being an actual business is the ability and will to act on it.

Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?

My reputation was purely and simply built on having incredible liquid. In the drinks business and particularly the wine business, taste is everything, literally everything. That sounds like an obvious thing to say but I am continually shocked in the drink world by people launching perhaps well-branded bottles or cans and not really paying enough attention to the pursuit of perfection with the liquid itself.

For me, taste is everything. I stand by that. With Noughty I was equally obsessed with branding, but I don’t think you should ever launch a drinks brand if you don’t have that obsession with taste. That would be my key advice and the reason that people are falling in love with Noughty across the world. My precision and obsession with the liquid comes through when they take their first sip. At least that’s what I hope always happens.

Any fun sales or marketing stories?

Early days I had my heart set on America. For most ambitious consumer brand founders in London, America is always on our minds. It’s historically a very tough territory to crack and the American drinks market is notoriously hard to break into. I had a very early-stage opportunity to bring on a distributor in Texas, the state that is arguably big enough to make or break a brand on its own!

I scraped together the finances and persuaded my team that I needed to go to Texas for one meeting. Now let me just say upfront, from a sustainability point of view, we now know how we all view airline travel. Obviously, I would recommend doing that meeting on Zoom. But I needed to be in that room to break the bread or taste the liquid as it were. After that meeting, the distributor came on board and launched us in the US. So the gamble was huge because if I’d gone to Texas for one meeting and not signed a deal, that would have been an expensive failure. Luckily it worked.

How did I feel? I felt obsessively focused on doing the deal. I think that adrenaline and passion drove me forward. That came through in the meeting. Of course, in business, as in in life, we never want to appear needy because being needy is not attractive. So, you always must temper that obsession of making sure you get the deal done with making sure you get across the fact that they would also be lucky to represent your brand!

Contact Info:

• Website: noughtyaf.com
• Instagram: @noughtyaf
• Facebook: Facebook.com/noughtyaf?
• Linkedin: linkedin.com/thomsonandscott

Image Credits
Events images: Craig Fraser Sparking bottle shots: Thomas Rohde Amanda Thomson shot: Moritz Steiger