Firestone Walker's 805 Finds Gray Area
In late March, MyBeerBuzz tipped Firestone Walker’s hand that they were working on a non-alcoholic version of their best-seller, 805. Thanks to the TTB label approvals being public record, Twitter and I got this early sneak peak. A few weeks later, CMO Dustin Hinz brought the topic up during a great interview on The Full Pint podcast. Then last week, Brewbound fleshed out a lot more details of the story. But I have some thoughts of my own about 8Zero5 which, like the newest can in the series, isn’t just black and white.
Last week I wrote about how investing behind a platform for a family of brands could pay big dividends in the long term. Continuing that theme wasn’t my motivation for putting together today’s post, but halfway through writing it I realized that I was saying a lot of the same things.
Spend Money to Make Money
When the prospect of building a new brand comes up in my own work or with industry peers, it’s rare that 805 doesn’t come up in conversation. There’s one key word that always drives my point: Investment. I can’t recall many craft beer brands that invested so heavily and confidently at the onset of a brand’s creation, perhaps even outspending their early margins from sales in an effort to expedite the brand’s awareness and association with California culture. From a distance, 805 always felt like it had a long-term mindset, not different from a start-up company whose business model prioritized growth over profitability in those early years of establishing a core foundation.
This is how Athletic Brewing, a fitting example in this case, has been able to grow all the way to a Top 10 craft brewery since opening in only 2017. With significant upfront investment, the company could afford to prioritize marketing the NA occasion and lifestyle, with a hope of turning the corner on profitability later in its lifespan. By over indexing on advertising early, 805 rose all the way to California’s #1 selling craft beer and its not even close. Sitting just outside the top 10 of all beer brands, the Golden Ale trails only the top imports and usual suspects in the Domestic category.
Lifestyle
The term Lifestyle is broad, but that’s kind of the point. It can be tricky to explain outside marketing circles, but you also know it when you see it. A lot of 805’s early spend went toward establishing the aspirational feeling and moments that Firestone Walker wanted to associate with 805, through beautiful lifestyle photography which found its way onto billboards and other media throughout the state (and beyond).
Evoking the Central Coast lifestyle from so many angles, each linked together through one common aesthetic, would allow 805 to climb its way into ubiquity and contribute toward the company’s goal of being a C̶r̶a̶f̶t̶ California Brewery. Despite the exceptional quality and forward-thinking approach that Firestone Walker puts forth with their IPAs, that category will always face limitations due to the intensity, ABV, and price. The liquid inside of 805 however, and this positioning in their core market’s lifestyle, removed the ceiling on where the brewery could go in the future.
Extending into White Space
The sheer scale that 805 had built, combined with the exceptional growth and premiumization of Mexican Lagers in California, led to an opportune extension into a “Cerveza” with Lime. The brand’s black & white aesthetic and original 805’s usage of black as its primary color meant a white label was the obvious fit for the second member of the 805 family. Clear bottles, instead of tinted brown, further distanced Cerveza from classic 805. More importantly perhaps, these changes positioned it with the color and packaging scheme that drinkers of the two category leaders, Modelo Especial and Corona, are accustomed to.
When the time came to create the branding for 805’s non-alcoholic version, if you think about it, the only color left would have to fall in between the black & white. Before putting deep thought into it, I questioned whether the non-alc packaging shouldn’t have received the white treatment already committed to Cerveza a few years prior. Shouldn’t black (OG, w/alcohol) be the opposite of white? But then as I thought more about how the 0 in 8Zero5 falls in the middle of the brand name, the logic of gray/silver works perfectly.
I can’t say the extent to which Firestone Walker was considering competing with Mexican Import brands and in the Non-Alcoholic space when they created the vague but powerful 805 brand. Regardless, overinvesting in its early days helped them fight for and win space in categories that reach the broader population. The massive foundation provides an incredibly important head start when joining categories like Import and NA this late in their ascension 📈. But with 805’s black & white aesthetic, and 8Zero5 now occupying the gray area, have they played their final 805 card? Or will the brand need to introduce color in order to ever extend any further? 🤔
A silver bullet 😏