‘I’m a big believer in manifestation. If you don’t believe, you can’t really achieve’ – Gray Whale gin co-founder Marsh Mokhtari speaks to Global Drinks Intel – Part I

You had no previous experience within the alcohol industry.

That was a definite pro, because we put things in our gin that weren’t being put in gins, like seaweed and almonds. I came at things almost from a chef background.

Being a fish out of water also allows you to take big swings. Uber is a great example, taking on a taxi industry that felt like it had been around forever.

Now we have some grey hairs, though, and we know what works – and what doesn’t – in this industry.

When did Gray Whale launch?

It took two years for us to figure everything out. I learned how to distil – I have a medical physics degree and I used to host a show called Extreme Chef on the Food Network! We ended up not setting up a distillery: We didn’t have US$2m to start one, and we felt our focus was better put into the brand than in a physical factory.

What scale did the brand grow to?

In our first two years of research & development, we had a very ‘open-source’ approach, visiting lots of distilleries and speaking to lots of founders. We were told if we sold 500 nine-litre cases in our first 12 months, then we were doing okay. A thousand cases meant you were a unicorn.

We launched in April 2018 and within six months, we got a call from one of the biggest strategics in the world. Then another one. Then, nine venture capitalists started calling.

That first call was from Diageo, asking how we’d captured 3.5% of California’s gin market in just six months. We didn’t have access to this data, so I didn’t know we’d achieved that! All I knew was we’d hit 1,500 cases in our first six months.

I put that down partly to concentrating only on California to start. We’d been told that if you get into a state and can’t physically support it, you’ll end up with product just sitting on shelves. You’ve got to earn the right to go into new states.

We believe in focusing on your superpower and using it often, and outsourcing everything else. I concentrated on sales, while my wife was still full-time at her advertising job. Six months in, we hired one brand ambassador – a 6′-4″ surfer/bartender with long hair and an outgoing personality. He embodied the Californian lifestyle positioning of Gray Whale.

The second state we went to was Connecticut, to see if people were only buying our gin because it had a map of the west coast on the bottle. Connecticut’s small enough that if you mess things up there, then no one’s going to really care! In about five months, we’d captured 6% of the state’s gin market.

When we fully exited in May 2024, Gray Whale was the number one ultra-premium American gin in the US. In the space of 12 months, we’d gone from two states to 50 and to nine countries very quickly after that.