Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Brad & Tamara Bridwell. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Alright, Brad & Tamara thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Naming anything – including a business – is so hard. Right? What’s the story behind how you came up with the name of your brand?
We converted an old horse/utility trailer into Phoenix’s first pop-up So-Bar, or a bar focused on creating craft, complex adult beverages without alcohol. We both have long standing careers in ending homelessness (over 35 years combined) and started this project as a way to expose the sober-curious and non drinkers to the world of alcohol replacement products and great mocktails. To “nix” something means to remove it and since we are removing alcohol from great drinks, it made perfect sense to name our So-Bar “The Nixer” and it allowed all sorts of playful replacement words traditionally associated with booze. Mixed drinks are Nixed drinks, Mixologists are now Nixologists and so on. The funniest part is that we learned that a “nixer” in Ireland is a side job, or otherwise known as “moonlighting” in the United States. So the name kind of has a double meaning referring to removing alcohol and the fact that we developed the whole operation “on the side” of our careers during the long pandemic period.
Brad & Tamara, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
At the start of the pandemic, Brad went from approximately 100 flights a year for his career down to zero. At the same time, the number of alcohol-based drinks consumed in a day went up, as it did with many. After deciding something had to go, he decided to use the pandemic time at home to get that problem under control through treatment and stop drinking altogether while Tamara became increasingly sober-curious wanting to explore life without alcohol. Brad had always loved a good beer but had lost his ability to enjoy them in the height of his bout with alcoholism due to the bloating that leads to that ever dangerous switch to hard liquor. After about 4 months of sobriety, he started exploring non-alcoholic beer options only to find that they had come a very long way since the days of O’Douls with intentional makers like Athletic Brewing Company, Well-Being, Partake, Sober Carpenter, and many more. Every type of beer is available in NA versions. The algorithms from searching NA beer started to feed information on wine replacements, spirit replacements, exciting new elixirs intended to replace alcohol, and so much more. So we started ordering all these different products and playing around with them. The problem was that this market primarily exists on the Direct to Consumer online industry and we quickly realized we could go broke just trying things out. We couldn’t order samples, it had to be whole six packs or bottles, and usually more to avoid outrageous shipping costs and it just wasn’t sustainable for someone wanting to explore the space without spending a fortune and still not knowing how to use most of the products, especially against the cheap accessibility of the alcohol industry. It’s just plain easier to keep drinking alcohol than it is to access replacement products. So we decided to take our experience and bring these products to market in a fun, accessible way for people exploring the space to be able to affordably access, learn about, and taste before they start spending larger sums to fully replace or considerably augment their drinking behaviors. We knew that we would eventually resume normal work patterns and needed flexibility in how and when we operate, so we found an old horse/utility trailer and converted it into a bar right on the street in front of our house! That got neighbors interested and garnered incredible local support we still enjoy today and we launched The Nixer in January 2021. It’s been so fun to see people’s reactions to tasting these complex adult beverages in our #noshirleytemplezone often questioning whether there is truly no alcohol. We continue to operate on nights and weekends at public and private events, but our next phase is to find other passionate people, who have full-time focus, to become turnkey operators of Nixers all over the valley!
How did you build your audience on social media?
Our primary social media presence is on Instagram. Tamara is in charge of all things social media and has built a following of over 6,000 in just a year. She has had to learn it along the way and spends great time selecting the exact photos that will make the board and posts stories for everything else. You can watch the data patterns of what times your audience is more engaged and use data to inform your strategy, just like she does in her policy-level work to end homelessness on a daily basis. She has found that the best pages have a theme and stick religiously to that theme and thus is very discerning about what her board looks like. People love beauty, beautiful drinks with beautiful backgrounds with the occasional educational materials is what it’s all about for us and that strategy has seemed to work well. Most of our following is local and organically grown which suits us as we want, not only people interested in the sober-curious space, but those that can actually experience and try it out with us.
How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?
Having regular careers that generally pay well we were able to fund the initial seed capital through our own cash flow and we kept things minimal. Rather than going out and buying some kind of food truck, we just found an old horse/utility trailer for $1,000 and put our own sweat equity into its conversion spending about another $1000 on the way. Product and all the ancillary supplies were the most cost prohibitive simply because they had to be purchased in bulk and there are no “well” products in this industry, every product is a premium product. Having no vendor credit starting out, we dedicated one personal credit card to the business and that at least gave us 30 days to sell some before having to pay that off and keep moving. We did make the mistake of getting excited about customers wanting a brick and mortar location and ran heavily down the path of opening one without playing that tape all the way through. We took on a little family debt to do so, but ended up stopping as we realized that even with an employee, we would be way too chained to a space and couldn’t negotiate that while maintaining our careers that we love. That was a mistake, and a costly one, we learned that you have to know what you can and can’t do in opening a business, especially a side hustle. Our goals to grow this venture is through turnkey operators that can work them full time and hopefully, eventually open their own brick and mortars!
Contact Info:
- Website: www.thenixer.com
- Instagram: @thenixer
- Facebook: @thenixerphx
Image Credits
B&W: Mike Logan