We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Ben Branson. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Ben below.
Ben, appreciate you joining 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.
My family have been in agriculture and timber for over 300 years, a nine generation legacy I am very proud to continue and my four current projects have all been born out of this lineage and relentless pursuit of solving problems and doing things differently with a love for nature and an insatiable curiosity. None have started as business ideas!
Seedlip (the world’s first distilled non-alcoholic spirit) was born from my experiments with herbs, a little copper still and a book from 1651 called The Art of Distillation and then realising there we no good things to drink if you weren’t drinking alcohol.
SEASN (our pair of cocktail bitters 0.0%) began in my garage in 2017 because I was asked to create some recipes for the World’s 50 Best Bar Awards and all the cocktail bitters contained alcohol. Making over 80x different plant extracts was an amazing way to taste nature and put my cooking school certificate to good use!
Sylva [aged non-alcoholic spirits] takes my love of trees and process to the extreme, discovering how much flavour is actually in wood by creating a pioneering distillation and maturation process to produce strong liquids you can sip as an alternative to whisky.
And lastly my media-led neurodiversity charity, The Hidden 20% is all about thinking differently and exposing the truth that ADHD/Autistic/Dyslexic brains are not broken or deficient, they have significantly shaped the way we live our lives!
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
My name is Ben Branson, I’m 42, a father of three daughters, husband, nature nerd and autistic inventor. I started the non-alcoholic drinks movement in 2015 with the launch of Seedlip, the world’s first distilled non-alcoholic spirit. I took this from my kitchen to 35 countries, 3 offices and over 7.5k of the best bars, restaurants, hotels and retailers in 3.5 years.
The non-alcoholic category is now worth over $25bn. I also launched the first range of non-alcoholic aperitifs called Æcorn and have recently launched my next two independent ventures; SEASN a pair of award-winning, delicious plant based 0.0% cocktail bitters to transform your mixers or cocktails with just three dashes which available in the US.
Sylva, the world’s first non-alc distillery and maturation lab making small batch aged non-alc spirits with grain and wood from our forest to celebrate trees and champion sipping slowly. Available from Zero Proof.
Following my own Autism and ADHD diagnosis I founded a neurodiversity charity last year called The Hidden 20% aiming to break the cycle of shame, suffering and silence for neurodivergent people by using media to educate and change perception. We have built a community of over 150k people and our work reaches 3 million people a week in 120 countries via digital media and our award-winning podcast.
The goal of this new series is to give small business owners and creatives a place to connect with, learn from, and get inspired by their peers.
How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?
My great-grandfather was knighted in England for his services to agriculture and philanthropy. He was an inventor, engineer and entrepreneur. He left me a bit of money when he died and i used this to start Seedlip. Then some family invested and then I raised investment through an accelerator called Distill Ventures which was funded by Diageo [the world’s biggest premium spirits company]. My new ventures are funded initially by me and then we have brought in angels and a family office and actor Kit Harington and are fundraising currently for SEASN and Sylva.
Alright – let’s talk about marketing or sales – do you have any fun stories about a risk you’ve taken or something else exciting on the sales and marketing side?
My hero is the genius chef Heston Blumenthal, owner of The Fat Duck, a 3 michelin starred restaurant in England, awarded world’s best restaurant a number of times. All my dreams came true when I found myself on a video call with him, then invited to dinner with him, then sitting down for a meal in The Fat Duck with my wife and being served a Seedlip Cocktail, then an Old Fashioned they’d made using Sylva and SEASN and then being presented with gummies the chefs had made of Sylva that tasted like the most amazing adult cola bottles. And then all my worlds collided when Heston agreed to support our charity and be a guest on The Hidden 20% podcast to talk about his ADHD and bi-polar diagnoses. They say don’t meet your heroes, I say do!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.sylvalabs.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sylva.labs
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61564734420499
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/pollen-projects/
