There are a lot of great ideas for products and brands out there, but sometimes the difference between success and failure lies in getting the details right and understanding the customers and users of your product. Today we’re going to talk about growing a brand by focusing on the details that matter.
To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Dominic Minogue, CEO of Dirty Water, the world’s first session hard seltzer, and a brand that started in New York City and has quickly grown well beyond, with some phenomenal and awards to match.
About Dominic Minogue
Dominic Minogue is the founder and CEO of Dirty Water, the world’s first session hard seltzer that’s making the beverage industry dangerously refreshing. Dubbed “The Dive Bar Hard Seltzer,” Dirty Water offers a crushable experience that’s not too sweet and not too carbonated with 4.5% ABV, 0 sugar, 0 carbs and only 90 calories.
As a lover of light beer and hard seltzer, Dom wanted to create a beverage that encapsulated the best of both while leaving the rest behind. A great light beer is unobtrusive, crisp and smooth with no frills and no worries about what to get because it’s the same every time. A great hard seltzer offers a healthier choice with less calories, carbs and sugar along with no gluten, however the fruity flavors almost always present a scenario of digging around to avoid an unfavorable flavor or two.
In comes Dirty Water – born a hard seltzer, but identifies as a light beer. One flavor, not too sweet, not too carbonated and just perfect for any occasion.
Prior to launching Dirty Water in 2024, Dom held various positions within the mobile gaming industry that also centered around the values of community and connection. Most recently, he was VP of Game Operations at Rewardify, a mobile games app that rewards players for their love of the game through cash prizes, where he standardized the company’s cash-economy and developed publishing models. He also led product marketing for Applovin’s Lion Studios where he achieved 2.5B downloads worldwide, tested over 1000 games and brought 30+ games to #1 on iOS and Android stores.
In addition, Dom is a food enthusiast and creator with 180K+ followers on TikTok at @dommelier where he gives quick recipes and how-to’s for preparing different cuisines from around the world.
Resources
Dirty Water: https://www.dirtywaterbrand.com https://www.dirtywaterbrand.com
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Transcript
Greg Kihlstrom (00:00)
There are a lot of great ideas for products and brands out there, but sometimes the difference between success and failure lies in getting the details right and understanding the customers and users of your product. Today, we’re going to talk about growing a brand by focusing on the details that matter. To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Dominic Minogue, CEO of Dirty Water, the world’s first session hard seltzer and a brand that started in New York City and has quickly grown well beyond with some phenomenal awards to match.
Dominic, welcome to the show. Yeah, looking forward to talking with you about this. Before we dive in though, why don’t you give a little background on yourself and what led you to found dirty water.
Dominic Minogue (00:30)
Hey, Greg, thanks for having me.
Yeah, absolutely. So my name is Dominic, ⁓ not traditionally from the hard seltzer or CPG space. This is actually my first time doing anything CPG related. Directly before this, was in mobile gaming, actually mobile gaming in the tech space, ad tech space, doing a lot of performance marketing, product operations there. And then even before that, I was actually spending a number of years ⁓ doing styling and merchandising fashion. So a nice kind of like going around the block, ⁓ trying different things, but I always knew I wanted to do something physical.
I didn’t know exactly what that was, but, the reason why I started dirty water was because when I was working in tech, I was drinking a lot of like, you know, your light beers, to unwind from long days of work. But I also wanted to become like a little bit more health conscious. And one of the things I really wanted was almost like a vodka soda that was in the can, right? I love drinking out of cans. love the dopamine effect of cracking open a cold one, but there wasn’t this, ⁓ I would say like vodka soda equivalents to your classic light beers and hard seltzers came out.
thought they were great, but over time I realized everyone’s doing the same thing, which is sweet, tons of flavors, variety packs. I don’t love variety packs because you don’t love half the flavors in there. And so for me, was like, I would love, you know, a something of a hard seltzer equivalent that I could just drink the same way that I enjoy your light beers, right? Call it very sessionable, crushable, easy. And so I was like, you know what? I’ll make it myself. This seems like a product that I really want in the space for me. And I know
If I love it, then I think there will be other people that feel the same way. And so, yeah, I started Dirty Water that way, started working on it in 2022, and then finally launched it this past year in 2024.
Greg Kihlstrom (02:20)
Well, wonderful. Well, yeah, it’s you know, CPG is not not an easy thing to to get into. So, know, we’ll certainly talk about your your success so far and great achievements there. So let’s let’s maybe start with how the brand got started. And you launched in New York City, you know, not the smallest of markets to to start out with, but you chose it for a reason. And can you talk a little bit about that?
Dominic Minogue (02:45)
For sure. Yeah. I think the main reason is because it is my backyard, right? I live in Manhattan. And so now for me being a CPG founder, especially something in the alcohol space, you really do have to be boots on the ground, working very closely with your first accounts, whether that’s on-premise, off-premise grocery stores, whoever it is. And so you really need to be in the thick of it. New York City, thankfully you have a lot of reach to a lot of those accounts very easily just by walking a couple of blocks. And so that was a logical step for me.
I will say though that if I could start over, I probably would not choose New York City as that first target. And the way I describe it is this, know, New York City is the most competitive market in the country. Everyone’s fighting for shelf space. Even though there are tons of locations, you really need to like fight tooth and nail for every single spot, right? And to create, I think a great beverage brand, great CPG brand, it does require penetration and canvassing. And when you think about canvassing, you know, you think about getting into every corner, every block.
Right. In New York city, there’s over 6,000 bars. And so to be able to canvas properly, so people actually do see your product and resonate with it and say, ⁓ it’s quote unquote, everywhere. It’s much harder than say, if I was back in my local hometown with that one strip of bars, everybody goes to that’s like 10 or 12 bars will be so much easier to penetrate that and become the namesake, you know, beverage of that area much easier than it would be to become that beverage here.
Right. And so I would say that is a something that I would have probably done a little bit differently, but again, it is about being in your backyard. And for me, you know, I could speak towards the culture and drinking culture of New York City better than I can anywhere else. Right. And so it was logical to start here.
Greg Kihlstrom (04:29)
Well, and that, you know, to that point, you know, a big part of the launch was about immersing yourselves, as you said, you know, the getting the penetration and immersing yourselves in the communities within New York City. Can you talk a little bit about, how much of that was intentional from the start and how much kind of happened organically?
Dominic Minogue (04:48)
I
would say it was mostly intentional. I would say it’s intentional with hopes of inflection. And I think the great thing about communities, I’m in running communities. I am ten general with arts, music, fashion communities. And I think the best thing is they do cross paths, intersect, and create pockets of really cool people in way different areas. And so for me, example running communities, being part of lot of different run clubs.
sharing my product there, you know, these people aren’t just runners. They are people who with nine to fives with, you know, unique day jobs and who do different things and see different people. Right. And I think, you know, that’s the great thing about every sort of social circle in the city is they do have webs of people that do branch out to other things. Service industry, you know, again, arts, music, really anything above and beyond. so being part of a New York City community means you have reached to so many other communities. So the intention of
penetrating within specific communities was always the goal, but seeing how it’s grown past into other different communities that have reached out for partnerships or wanted to do things, that is kind of beyond my wildest dreams.
Greg Kihlstrom (05:59)
Yeah, yeah. And so to kind of to that point, beyond the consumer, you reaching those different consumer audiences, another key aspect of the brand success is that this idea that dirty water is a bartender’s BFF. So can you talk a little bit about that and, know, just how important is this aspect of the product and the brand?
Dominic Minogue (06:19)
Yeah, think there’s a couple of ways to build a brand, especially in CPG and alcohol. One is building it with off-premise and having that big visibility, a lot of physical marketing, digital marketing, and being on every end cap of every grocery store. I would say that’s the post-COVID approach to a lot of beverage brands. But realistically, the way you grew brands back in the 90s and before is becoming the beverage that you’re seeing on-premise, on scene at every single bar, every location.
But aside from just being at the bar, one of the things is you want to be able to have advocates at that point of sale. Right. And so for me, those advocates should be the bartenders, the people that will sell it because they’re going to be giving suggestions. They’re going to talk about, you know, what the product’s good for, which products are best for certain situations. And so creating a product that, you know, can speak towards the way that a bartender likes to drink or kind of fits their menu right. so dirty water itself, it is a very light, clean, easy beverage.
Ways that helps a bartender is it’s a single flavor. So when you think about bringing in a competitor that may have like five or six different flavors, it’s either you bring in all of the skews, right? In which case, just to suffice someone who may want, you know, a mango or a black cherry. But the issue there is you may be left with certain flavors that are not selling, in which case those are taking up shelf space, or you bring in one or two skews and then the person doesn’t like mango or they don’t like black cherry or they don’t like lemon lime.
Right. And so, you know, you’re fighting two different currents, but with a product like dirty water, that’s so clean, so easy. ⁓ it’s a single flavor. So it doesn’t take up ton of shelf space and it’s great because you could modify it. So I love it with, ⁓ like over ice with bitters and you could use grapefruit bitters, orange bitters, aromatic bitters to kind of change the flavor as much as you want. And you could do a splash of cranberry. You could do so many different things to make it a different flavor profile. If this person wants it.
and they want something light like a hard seltzer. So I think that’s a great thing. aside from that, the beverage by itself is a great, I would say, after shift beverage. as soon as you’re done with a shift at an industry bar, you get a dirty water and a shot, which is sort of a ritual for post-shift drinking for bartenders and service workers.
Greg Kihlstrom (08:41)
So the versatility of the product for lack of a better term has really been key. Was that by design? Was that a happy finding throughout the way? how did that kind of come to be?
Dominic Minogue (08:56)
Versatility
was a happy finding, 100%. But I guess it is sort of by design because the one thing I wanted when creating the product was it to be something very sessionable, right? The way you can describe other hard seltzers, for lack of better term, is a palate killer, right? Because when you drink something like a black cherry or a mango, for example, the flavor, you can’t have too much of like a black cherry flavored thing because that flavor builds itself over time.
There’s so much artificial flavor there because they want you to taste that is black cherry. Right. So, you know, the flavor builds, it becomes tart over time and it kind of becomes like filmy almost over your tongue. Where for me, I want it to be something where you could sip it. The flavor almost like goes away instantly so you can keep drinking it and not get that sort of buildup that you would maybe with other drinks. So by design, it was very light. And to get to that point, it had to be something that was very close to flavor neutral.
with notes of other things. And so because of that, it ended up being this thing that was so light and clean and you could add in like other flavors. And that was, again, with talking with bartenders and saying, and having them try and they’re like, I tried it with this thing. It was amazing. Or I tried it this way. I tried it this way. And so getting all these findings by, you know, giving it to people who are bit like experts in the space and then finding ways to modify it, which, you know, usually with another.
product you can’t because it is so flavor forward.
Greg Kihlstrom (10:24)
Yeah, yeah. Well, and to me, that speaks to really understanding all of your audience, you know, not just one part of the audience, but the full, you know, it’s understanding what the bartenders are looking for and need, but also obviously looking for what the end consumers need. how much of that went into the the initial like marketing and rollout of that was kind of thinking about those two audiences?
Dominic Minogue (10:50)
Oh, absolutely. I would say I had like sort of a triangulation of sort of the people that I wanted to target. One was definitely your service worker, the people that the bartenders, the bar managers, everyone within that hospitality space. The other demographic I would say is your post grad. So the people that may be ex-fraternity, ex- sorority, people that are still ingrained in like, say, I would say session drinking culture.
⁓ so people that are going to these places that maybe it’s like a three hour happy hours or three hour, all you can drinks. Right. And so they’re the ones that are consuming large volumes of these products. and those are somewhat of tastemakers within their own right. Like you’ll have those one or two people in every friend group that are bringing like the new things to the parties. Right. And then the third one is being those, I would say more of the influencer socialite tastemakers of New York city. being in the New York city zeitgeist of, of like the cool restaurants, cool.
people, cool social circles. And even though that is a much smaller audience, I would say that they do have that trickle down effect where like, you know, over time, the things that they drink, other people will be drinking too.
Greg Kihlstrom (11:57)
Yeah, so I want to talk a little bit more about building the brand itself. I mean, we talked about the audience and some of the early successes here. Dirty Water is known as the dive bar hard seltzer. Can you talk a little bit about, you know, that that part of the brand and how it got to be defined that way?
Dominic Minogue (12:14)
Yeah, you know, I played around with a lot of terms in the beginning. The light beer of hard seltzer was like one that I tossed around a lot early and which I thought did align with people. But at the end of the day, I am not a beer. So I don’t want to be kind of like, you know, especially if certain people don’t love beer, then that kind of, you know, leaves people like with a certain connotation. Right. And so I think my product, it’s nice because beer drinkers who hate hard seltzers like it and then hard seltzer drinkers who miss drinking a beer also like it as well.
And so the dive bar hard cells are sort of encapsulated the whole idea of like unpretentious classic enjoyment. Right. And I think like that idea of like easy drinking really comes with that sort of dive bar feel of like no frills, super simple. When it comes to kind of like defining the brand itself for me, because it is a single flavored product and single skew, I really do want to build sort of this like, I would say this heritage brand almost think about like the old guard of like
light beer drinking. You have Miller, Coors, Bud Light, PBR, and like, you know, all of these are brands that were built in late 1800s, early 1900s. And there hasn’t been like a new brand to kind of sit along the shoulders of these giants in a very long time or ever actually, especially nothing from the hard seltzer space. Everything that helps out seltzer space is going in a different direction of like, you know, branding and visibility. But in terms of like being sort of this classic Americana drink,
And that’s what I wanted to be was like sort of again, classic heritage Americana kind of building the brand towards that direction. Eventually, you know, like in a number of years, saying, let me get a dirty water or let me get a dirty the same way that they would any other beverage.
Greg Kihlstrom (13:56)
Yeah, so I mean, it sounds like you definitely did a lot of homework to to launch initially, you know, did a lot of work to build that brand initially. How do you stay connected to to customers to make sure you’re continuing to deliver and innovate where innovation is needed and all that?
Dominic Minogue (14:16)
Yeah. So I would say it’s definitely, definitely manual. ⁓ a lot of late nights. so I would break my day into like two different parts. I would say my morning is my admin stuff. whether it’s emails, operation, new production, anything like that. then early afternoon is sort of like cold outreach. ⁓ whether that’s going around to bars when they’re first opening, talking, trying to find a manager, beverage director, whoever it is. And then the evening I would say is my surveying. going to.
existing bars, talking with bartenders, becoming bartenders friends, sharing the product, getting people’s feedback. Uh, and I would say those are like the three different portions of my day, um, aside from managing a team and X, Y, Z. But, um, yeah, I would say I’m always looking for product feedback, feedback from bartenders. What, what are they hearing? Cause they get the feedback the most right out of anybody. Um, especially like, cause if someone talks to me, like they may be a little bit more biased because they’re talking to the founder. like, oh, you know, it may not be.
Completely like truthful or whatever it is, but talking with bartenders they’re getting the honest feedback all day all day in the night
Greg Kihlstrom (15:18)
Yeah, yeah, that’s great. So, you know, as we mentioned already, you know, the brand’s been very successful from a growth perspective, from industry rewards and recognition, as well as media coverage. How do you measure the brand’s success?
Dominic Minogue (15:32)
For me, would say there’s your traditional KPIs like ⁓ case volume and new account opens and all of that. But then there’s the soft wins, which is what I really love because I think even though my brand is growing, it’s still very early. Still so early where it’s like, there are days of doubts. And sometimes people say, I don’t like this product. But then you get these things of people saying,
I love this product so much. It’s helped me. I’ve been gluten free for so long. I miss this feeling of like, you know, drinking what feels like a light beer, but it’s XYZ. I’m putting all my friends on it. And like, I still find those wins way more meaningful than case volume because case volume, you know, that will change exponentially over time. Right. Even these early wins too. It’s like, ⁓ you know, certain places are doing X amount of volume, which is amazing. But for me, like the momentum and what keeps me going is these people finding love within the product.
and these like one-on-one conversations. That’s, I think right now still where I find the most enjoyment and most pleasure out of finding wins.
Greg Kihlstrom (16:36)
Yeah, that’s great. Well, Dominic, thanks so much for joining today. I’ve got one last question for you. I’d to ask this to everybody. What do you do to stay agile in your role, and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
Dominic Minogue (16:49)
Yeah, I think there’s so many ways that you can continue to build a brand, whether it’s, you know, doing content on social, reaching out to individuals, reaching out to customers, reaching out to, you know, B2B. And I think for me to stay agile, I’m not someone who second guesses themselves too often. So I always try and, if I think about something, go out, do it, try it, MVP it, get feedback. Maybe I did something wrong, learn for next time.
I think just doing that over and over again and becoming eventually comfortable with doing and trying new things has helped me a lot. I’d say trying new things is always refreshing because you become so ingrained in a daily routine that the new thing becomes something that’s invigorating. Greg, thanks so much for having me.
