Hello, and thank you for joining. I am Melissa Travers, Director of Community here at BevNET Inosh, and I am pleased to welcome you to the Nombase Podcast. Don't forget to check out nombase.com, BevNET's platform built for the CPG community.
It's where you can find episodes of this podcast and so much more. For food and beverage brands, airline partnerships are equal parts marketing, logistics, and experience.
Getting on board means navigating procurement, compliance, and forecasting challenges, but when it works, the exposure can be massive.
From craft coffee and curated stacks to ready to drink cocktails, airlines are curating experiences that reflect regional culture and brand storytelling all at 35,000 feet.
One of the best examples, Straightaway Cocktails didn't just put their drinks on a flight, they built a true partnership with Alaska Airlines that continues to evolve and offer new opportunities.
Joining me is Cy Cain, co-founder of Straightaway Cocktails, who will share how this partnership came to life, the operational and financial realities behind it, and what other food and beverage entrepreneurs can learn about using airline
collaborations to grow their brands. Cy, thanks so much for joining me on the Nombase Podcast. It is great to have you here.
Thanks, Melissa, for the invite. It's thrilled to be here.
I will also thank you for all of the fantastic Straightaway Cocktails that have been at, I think, every single BevNET event and party that I've ever attended, especially in the Negroni's. You make such an outstanding product.
And just to kind of orient our audience here, you're a vertically integrated brand, is that right?
We chose that path 13 years ago before we got legal seven years ago. That we were going to pursue the highest levels of craft, of building cocktails that we could.
And that approach means that you're going to use all of the inputs that you can build yourself and or partner with other makers and other farms up and down the West Coast or in the East Coast in some instances to pull those ingredients together.
And then we just wanted to make sure that we had our hands on everything that we produced. We won't make whisky. We don't make tequila.
We don't make mezcal, obviously, but everything else, all of our own liqueur, amaro, vermouths are all made in-house. Our bitters, our orgeots, our flernums, everything else that we can produce in-house, we do.
And that's a fairly unique model for sure.
Well, it certainly makes for such an amazing product, such an amazing beverage. And I'm sure that has so much to do with all of Straightaway Cocktail's success. Straightaway is in the big chains like Total Line, Independent Stores, Costco, Target.
And then early 2023, Alaska Airlines. Can you tell us a little bit about the Alaska Airlines partnership?
Yeah, we have been thrilled to be on board. We're coming up on our three-year anniversary in January. Beyond Alaska, they have been an amazing partner.
They're a fabulous airline, and they are so good about partnering with local producers. And we are just honored to be a part of the lineup and the passenger experience.
3:32
Airline Partnership Vision
So you wrote Alaska Airlines into your business plan years before you even launched Straightaway Cocktails, is that right?
Yes.
Yeah. Yeah. It just felt like it made too much sense.
If we're going to build this brand of cocktails that are already batched, it makes it a lot easier at altitude to have a great drink.
Then playing mixologist or the top of your laptop or your book or your meal, that drink should be produced and made for you and just ready to sip the same way wine or beer is on the flights.
So what is it that made you see airlines as such a key for strategic growth, for straightaway cocktails? Were you on a plane and wanting a cocktail and thinking, this will be such a big part of the business? How did that all come together?
I mean, I'm always wanted a good cocktail.
So wherever we're not getting one, I'm always thinking we should have one there. From our perspective and my perspective, particularly on that front, it just felt like something that was overdue.
Cocktail culture is so ascendant and it's not like once we get on a plane, our behaviors and what we favor changes when we're on the ground.
And so if we're pursuing a great cocktail on the ground, going to great bars and restaurants and enjoying one, it sure felt like we should have availability to that on the flights as well. And thankfully, Alaska agreed and aligned with that thinking.
But we really like being a solution versus hoisting our proposition on anybody. We want this to always feel like a win-win. And are we helping to elevate an experience?
That's what we live to do, hear it straight away. And no pun intended on that with the airline talk around elevation.
But it just felt like a natural fit that this would be an opportunity for us to round out the experience of passengers flying back and forth across the country.
5:32
Securing Alaska Partnership
And how did you connect with Alaska Airlines?
You know, I wouldn't necessarily think that they're the kinds of folks who are walking around trade shows and the, you know, the folks that you would normally intersect with at all of the normal events. How did you connect with them initially?
Yeah. So like you mentioned, I had written into our business plan two years before we launched that we would partner with Alaska within the first three years of the business.
Once we opened doors December 4th, 2018, six weeks after we opened and we got through the holiday, I sent my first note to Alaska to say, hey, I'm sure you've never heard of us, but we're right down the road here in Portland.
I think we have a proposition that would be really interesting for your guest experience and was persistent in the inbox and to their credit, they responded and within the first six months, had us up for a meeting in Seattle to talk.
And again, kudos to Alaska to your point. They're really busy. They have a lot of different things going on.
And for them to make the time to respond and set up time for us to state our case was pretty exceptional. That's part of what makes their culture so exceptional.
And who is that key decision maker at Alaska Airlines? Is it someone who's in charge of the commissary? Is it...
Who is it that you talk to at Alaska Airlines when you want to start a partnership like this?
You know, I just did my due diligence on their org chart and who would be the most logical person to reach out to first. And thankfully, they responded and message received, and we were able to get that conversation started.
And Alaska Airlines is famous for working with other Pacific Northwest brands. I saw Stumptown. Do you...
What are some of the other brands that they partner with?
Stumptown's an amazing one. They've been partnering with beer brands and wine brands from the West Coast for a really long time. It's been something that's a known entity.
There's another craft distillery here in Oregon that's been on board for some time as well out of Central Oregon. And so they've had a long history of it.
Right now, if you board a flight, you're going to experience Stumptown Coffee, our next door neighbor here in Portland, and just down a couple more blocks is our good friends at Salt and Straw. Those are on the flight there on the flights as well.
And our neighbors to North Filson have joined the experience as well with their blankets that you can now have on the flights as well. So it's a pretty amazing lineup of local maker brands here in the Northwest.
It makes me really sad that I live in the East Coast and rarely need to buy Alaska Airlines.
8:20
Overcoming Partnership Challenges
What did Alaska Airlines need to see from you when you were in that due diligence process and kind of deciding the details of your partnership? What did they want to see from you before they committed?
Yeah, it's a great question. And actually it was not, you know, paved in stone that this was gonna happen. And when we first launched, we were a bottled cocktail brand and we added cans, some cans, we added six, seven months after our launch.
But our original pack format that was the most workable on the airline was a 50 mil pack format. It was glass and just wasn't enough liquid. It was a little too expensive.
It was way too heavy. All those extra bottles being on board. So the concept and the construct of having a properly batched cocktail available on the flights was there the whole time.
They aligned with that early as an idea. The liquid they felt like was right there and stellar and what they wanted. We just didn't quite have the right pack format yet.
And the early days of 100 mLs really in our experience up until about 3 or 4 years ago, the sourcing of those cans was really difficult. Mostly, they were produced overseas even in China and some of the QC quality pieces weren't there.
For those cans, we only think about liquid, we think about pack format second. And so it was less important to us to be in 100 mL pack format until we felt like we were aligned with a producer of those cans that met our QC standards.
And so we sat it out. We looked at those cans before we launched as well. We just didn't feel good about the sourcing of those until we felt like we aligned with the factory that met our quality standards.
And so once we sourced that and figured out those cans, that's when it was go time and the years of talking back and forth kind of finally got consummated and we were off to the races.
So how long were you chatting with them before the launch?
Yeah, so I did reach out six weeks after we launched. So that was in January of 2019, and then we boarded January, 2023. So it was a long cycle.
No one projected a pandemic rolling through the global scene and planes were grounded for a while, right?
And then there was just a hesitancy too, coming back online about, you know, the experience people were having in the flights, and let's make sure that we're not over serving people.
And it just, there were so many different things that happened over that period of time. And so even though I planned on, you know, in our plan, we had said in three years we'll be on Alaska Airlines.
It was really four years into it that we got started with it. So I'll take it any day of the week.
I still think that's awfully close to your vision. Were there any other details around the pack size or the packaging itself that had to change for the airline industry?
Yeah, I think, you know, the service size was just too small in that 50 mil for sure. The price was too high.
They have factors that you really have to think about, like drawer heights, how big, how much space they have on that plane, how much space they have in their kitchens when they're loading the product on the planes.
And so, arriving at that tin, that really compact, strong, sturdy, lightweight pack format was a giant unlock. And it's just the right, it's a robust serve of cocktails for sure.
It's a 3.4 ounce can, and so you're getting a proper cocktail size in there, which is amazing. And really everything about our old-fashioned, that's out to be about a single shot, a 50 mil shot of spirit.
So you can have two of our Palomas or two of our Margaritas at one time, the same way you would have a doubles of Tito's or Buffalo Trace, right?
So I think over time, there's just been a lot of evolution for everybody, and we're all learning this together. This is net new for Alaska, it's net new for us, but yeah, it's been really fun to kind of end.
There's been, of course, a lot of challenges figuring this out together, but we feel like we've arrived in a really good spot collectively.
What are some of those challenges that you've worked through with Alaska Airlines over the course of this partnership so far?
Yeah, this is new, right? That we batch cocktails on flights is a new novel construct. Beer and wine have been served, and spirits have been on airlines for, I don't know how long, but a really long time.
So forecasting is challenging, like how much, how many cocktails are people going to drink when they're presented with a cocktail option, when we know how much pills are in, you know, people are drinking. We've got all that data.
It's for everybody, for Alaska, for the airlines, for Straightaway. That is something we're going to have to test and learn on together.
And so we had to go through a year of forecasting and re-forecasting and figuring that all out until we settled on kind of what it felt like in airline terminology is a take rate. So how often are people opening a can and drinking one on the flights?
And so we've also learned a lot about airline vernacular and how they think about things too. It's made us a better operator. And just having a really robust open dialogue has been very important, I would say, for both sides.
But yeah, I mean, there's been a thousand learnings. One of the biggest ones after that was getting forecasting right for sure.
When we were preparing for this discussion, you were listing off some of the things that can get in the way of take rate or velocity. For example, if you have a short flight and there's turbulence, there may be no drink service.
What are some of those things that get in the way of airline passengers getting that cocktail on the flight that you just might not think of if you're more used to either an on-premise or a retail environment?
You know, it's really normal if you walk into a bar or a restaurant, that you open a menu and you take a look at what's on board. It's been really interesting since we partner with the airlines.
I've just been watching passenger behavior and my own behavior, human behavior when we're on those flights. And where we might have been in the past as passengers grabbing that seat back menu and looking at it, we're now more on our phones, right?
And so even understanding our own behavior and how it's shifted, just because you're on that flight and you're even in that menu, doesn't mean folks know that you're on that plane.
And so I think it takes a long time to build that new behavior with the passenger and we look for other ways to prompt and let folks know when they're getting on board that there's going to be a cocktail offering on those flights.
But that's an interesting nuance that we would not have anticipated for sure.
So how do you counter that? How did you get passengers to know that Straightaway Cocktails were a delicious option for their flight?
I think a big part of our evolution of the brand, when we first went on the flights, you know, if you're a flight attendant in an FA team, your primary responsibility is safety and guest experience, right?
And so food and beverages is an offering, but it's not going to be the number one thing on the flight attendant's minds.
And I think over time, us building a deeper relationship with the flight attendant crew, helping educate them about who we are and what we do. And I think Alaska has done a really nice job of that.
We've had opportunities to do trainings and meet with their teams up in Seattle to just kind of help them understand the why. You know, who is straight away? Why are we on the flight?
How does it make your life easier? And offering cocktails to guests and passengers. There wasn't really a shortcut.
Time was the biggest. And relationship building was really the biggest, most important part.
We also, which I'm sure we'll get to in our conversation later, too, but we won an RFP with the Port of Portland and opened our tasting room, our pop-up tasting room experience at the airport. And that's a hub city.
And so you'll get the flight attendant crews passing through. They can see us, they can talk to us. Of course, they can't have a sip when they're working.
But if they're off duty, we can talk to them and they can have a sip and try it. And so I think all of those things have, it's been a tapestry of weaving education in with passengers.
We've done that through social media work, we've done it through advertising, we've done it through pop-up events to make sure that folks know that we're on those flights.
Our airport location has helped, and I think over time, Alaska and Straightaway have done a really nice job of helping position that for the flight attendants to understand, hey, this is an offering I can tell my passengers about.
17:02
Airport Kiosk Brand Building
I've not covered the Straightaway Cocktail's kiosk in the Portland Airport.
It was another time when I wish that I lived on the West Coast versus the East Coast.
Was the kiosk in the airport something that you had planned on when you were planning the airport partnership, or did that come after you launched with Alaska Airlines?
That was one of those, you roll with your punches like you don't know if you get in the business or not get in the business ultimately is a positive thing, right? You kind of come at it from an assumption like we really want this business.
It means a ton to us. And if we're pushing everything we can to get that business across the finish line. And we actually went, we were a year into our brand and there was an RFP at the Port of Portland.
We submitted, we were just way too young, way too early as a brand for them. And they loved us. And like, come back and see us when you guys have just matured a little bit more and grown a little bit more.
It was one of those things had we done that and had we won that RFP and built that out, I'm not sure we'd be sitting here because again, we rolled into a pandemic. We would made that investment and early spent that capital on having that space.
And folks weren't going to the airport for nearly two years, right? So that was a be careful of what you wish for moment for the brand and all things happen when they're on the timeline they're supposed to happen on.
I really believe that even if it can seem painfully long. The patients required to kind of stick with it.
We have that and when the second opportunity came around, we were an established brand and the port was like, yep, you're one of the brands we want Portlanders and the rest of the world to know about. And have you all featured at the airport.
For the folks who are listening, who haven't been longingly looking at the pictures of the Straightaway Cocktail's kiosk in the Portland Airport, can you describe what that looks like and how it operates?
Yeah, we is a space one of our lease that we have. And so Straightaway, along with some really amazing other Portland brands, were brought in on this last round of RFP.
So some of these coming in, our friends over at Freeland Spirits are coming on board at the airline as well. PDX Gear is a great local apparel maker here too.
So we're all in stage one of the final part of the process here, which is a bigger than a typical pop-up kiosk activation. They gave us a good amount of space. You can't really miss us.
We're just off to the Seagates right after security. And they gave us a whole wall, which is amazing. And guests can come experience our brand for the first time at the port.
And we have a shopping area where we've got retail walls. And then we have a tiny little mini bar, a half circle bar. And we've got our famous little cherry sword right over the top of it, which is a really fun ad to put on the top of that.
Kiosk, but you can belly up to the bar and have a little mini cocktail fight. We can pour our little mini samples. And we've had that now for 14 months.
And come April, we will be opening a full service new to world concept that we're really, really excited about that will open in April. So that's actually, Melissa, when we need to get out there for ribbon cutting ceremonies for our bar.
I'm coming over to the West Coast. The time has come. So please, okay, before we get into the new activation, I want to ask you a few more questions about the existing one.
So what would you say the value proposition is in terms of brand awareness for Straightaway Cocktails with the kiosk in the airport versus having the product in the airplanes? You know, how is it the same? How is it different?
You know, folks that are landing or arriving, we're on the Seagates.
That's where all the Alaska Gates are. So if people are coming off, you're walking down the Seahall the entire way towards our tasting room. So you're reading that wall.
You can see our kiosk the entire walk, whether you're at Gate 20 or Gate 2 on the seaside, you're coming right at us and you have to walk past us on the B side as well. So we get a ton of exposure to those 18 million passengers annually.
And then secondarily, getting back to what I was mentioning around awareness on the flights, we've had so many people come up to us and say, oh, I just had you on the flights or I didn't know you guys were on the flights.
And so it's actually creating this really cool ecosystem of like a prompt before you get on the plane or a prompt that you got off the plane. Oh, this is the brand. These guys are from Portland.
You may not even know that when you're on the flight. Of course, you're flying all over the countries. So I think it just kind of helps cements that we're a maker.
We have a physical space. We're here to have a great guest experience and connect people over cocktails one sip at a time. And it all kind of comes together at that central point.
And again, to aligning with Alaska has been amazing. And so we're getting to know their teams better as they're doing their work on a day-to-day basis there, too, whether it's the folks at the check encounter or people coming off the planes itself.
And, spoiler alert, when you come out in April to see our big ribbon cutting ceremony, Alaska's new flagship 10,000-square-foot lounge is our, they're our roof, so we're right beneath them.
So our brands will be even that much more connected come April, which is really, really, we're all looking very much forward to that one.
You also told me that you were part of an ad with Alaska Airlines for the NBA finals. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Yeah, that was incredible. Again, tipping my hat to Alaska and just how fortunate we are to partner with them and how happy we are with being a part of their offerings.
They on their own, they've done so much to continue to level up the passenger experience. It's really an amazing experience now. It's such a food-driven experience when you're on flights.
But beyond that, there's so many creature comforts that they're adding to just make you feel here at home and elevated. So they ran a series of ads and Filson was one of the ads, Stumptown was one of the ads, Straightaway was one of the ads.
They created the ad, they ran the ad. It was the national campaign for Alaska and it was talking about their new offerings or more leg room or better experiences in the sky. We were one of the three brands they featured, which was incredible.
So those ads ran all over the place and the last one I think I saw was on the NBA finals. I don't know if they're still running, but yeah, they were up and running for months, first half of this year and it was incredible.
23:54
Partnership Value Evolution
I mean, it sounds like the partnership has certainly gotten used so much in terms of awareness.
I've heard from a few brands that their airline partnerships are more of a marketing opportunity than a sales opportunity. How has that worked out for you? Certainly, the marketing has been amazing from what you've said.
How are the sales and how do you mark success in that regard in terms of what you were expecting versus what you're getting?
Yeah, I don't think we would ever want to be in a position where it was 50% of our sales or anything along those lines.
Of course, we want to keep scaling and growing, but it fits perfectly into how we're looking to build our brand and what percent of sales go to which parts of our business.
Our business has grown with them since we've started, which has been really, really nice. Every brand treats their partnerships differently. Every airline treats their partnerships differently too.
I think Alaska is interested in a win-win for everybody. Obviously, the startup brand, we are as well.
We don't have a huge budget to where we can lose money on a program or be upside down on anything really that we do and so from our perspective, we want to acknowledge that they need a sharp price point and they're looking to offer something at a
sharp price, a reasonable price point for passengers as well, and an amenity as well. And a lot of what happens on the flights is comps, right? And so you have to be cognizant of their P&L as you're looking at your own.
And again, like we're solutions, we love finding solutions with our partners. And we were able to arrive at something that felt like a really good spot for them and for us to platform off of and get started.
And how are you able to track sales, especially understanding that there are comps involved? It's not like you have POS data. So how do you understand what's actually going on on the airplanes?
It's the same for every airline, right?
You don't, it's not like there's a, there are little hand-held rings that you can get.
You know, you see on the airlines for sure, but it isn't set up like, say, a grocery store is where every transaction, every UPC is run through a register and you can see it.
So what you kind of have to rely on is perceived take rates and or your depletions data. So how many cases are we shipping? How many cases are they ordering?
Really, you kind of triangulate that together. And in our instance, we work really closely with them on datasets.
We're looking at it every month together to make sure that the forecasting is there, that we're understanding if we've evolved our program.
And so we started with a couple of core SKUs and now we get to evolve to a really fun opportunity where we're doing seasonal offerings and with an anchor SKU and seasonal offerings.
So we're constantly evaluating with these seasonal offerings, how's this one performing, how's this one performing?
And it's a data share triangulation that we have our data set, they have their data set and we collaborate to do our best to make the most informed picture of what's happening on those flights.
So we've been in forecasting a couple of times. What was your forecasting before the launch and what were the actual numbers?
Yeah, we were all, you know, there had been new cycles of other brands being on flights and they're like, good gracious, we're trying to catch up. And we all knew that going into it.
So I think from their end and our end, we would just want to be overly cautious. We all, we produced more at first than we needed to. So we had to sit on some inventory and work through that.
And then once the flywheel started spinning, then the cadence became clear. But at first we were like, well, we last thing in the world, we want to do is towards them.
And we'd heard these stories of other brands, Wine, Beer, Spirits or Cocktail, running through products at a rate that no one was quite anticipating. And so we were overly cautious on that front.
And then we kind of had to right size things over the first six months. And then we got to our cadence of all the data that you and I were just talking about. Like, okay, this is actually the take rate.
This is the run rate. And we can settle into a production schedule that makes the most sense.
So what will this evolved partnership look like with Alaska Airlines?
So when we launched, we had our classic margarita, which I was making for Friends and Family 20 years ago, which features mezcal. And I like a little smoke in my margarita. And I like a little heat.
And so we had a mango habanero syrup in there. And we had Jacobson sea salt in there, fresh, fresh lime juice. And we aged our tequila with our producer to repasado to kind of get that oaky tannin-y note to stop the margarita from feeling too sweet.
So not a savory, but a slightly gently spicy margarita with a fair amount of heat to it is what we launched with. And we launched with our Oregon Old Fashioned. And our Oregon Old Fashioned is what my co-founder was making 20 years ago.
And we take fur needles from the backyard of where I grew up, by Mount Hood. My dad picks those. He's worked on our team the entire time since we've launched.
And he's been on the production side. He picks fur needles literally from the backyard where I grew up. And we make a biter out of that.
And then there's a hazelnut grower. We call them filberts here in Oregon, just south of Portland. They grow our filberts for us.
They roast them. And then we make a biter out of that as well, which is why it's called the Oregon Old Fashioned. We pair that with a three-year-old whiskey that we love with the right mash bill.
And it all comes together and makes the Oregon Old Fashioned, which we love. And so once we had those two on the flight for the first two years, we really kind of understood where take rates were coming from, which skews we're going to work the best.
And then we could start working together on, okay, now that we know what we know, what would be really fun to have in the winter? What would be really fun to have in the summer? And we started moving to that model.
And so we introduced our espresso martini almost this time last year. And that was amazing to have for the holidays. It's our Nitro espresso martini featuring Stumptown cold brew coffee.
We get honey from the Willamette Valley. It's only curated in the Willamette Valley. It's called Meadow Foam.
The Oregon Bee Project is our partner with it. And we make our own coffee liqueur to make our own espresso martini with.
So just diving a little bit more deeply into our makership style and how we produce product, that's also helping inform our calendar, like what's in season. And so we have berries here in Oregon. We haven't launched that yet on Alaska.
But you can see how there will be a seasonal play. Right. And so I'm excited to right now, we have our Pacific Paloma, which was on for the summer.
And so that is a riff on a Paloma. Typically it's carbonated. We call it Pacific Paloma because we need to get into 100 mil pack format.
You can't carbonate it. So it's a still Paloma, but it's a variation or a riff off of a Paloma. And we got that on board.
And so it's a really refreshing summery citrus, grapefruit-forward, fresh pressed grapefruit-forward cocktail. And it's done great. And so now we look at what comes next for the next season.
And that's been a really fun evolution, I think, for them, and for us to think through this together.
Hearing you talk about the cocktails and the origin of the ingredients, it really sets the stage for the experience itself. How do you tell this story to the passengers on the airline when they may not be looking at their menu at all?
We do put some copy on our cans to kind of prompt some of the ingredients and flavor profiles, but it's a tiny can, you can't say all the things. So we do rely on people exploring the brand further.
If they've had a sip, they might be more likely to pull us up on Instagram or visit our website, and then we can get more into the narrative.
Or maybe they'll find us in Trader Joe's in California, or now we're in Wisconsin, not Wisconsin, Illinois and Massachusetts, with Trader Joe's as well, and you might pull a box, and we have more opportunity for copy and convey in our story on our
outer packaging. Ditto for Costco with our Advent calendars or tequila pack that we did with them earlier in the year too, where you can dive more deeply into Straightaway's universe and how we think about things and how we produce.
We have to rely on that right now. We don't have another real, if I could stand there with a little bullhorn after they had everybody fasten their seat belts, then I could do a little preamble on what they could be drinking.
I'd do it, Melissa, but they haven't let me do that yet.
So experiential events for food and beverage brands, they're so difficult to track the return after the event, to see who's buying the product after the event.
This to me sounds like the ultimate experiential event in terms of you know that you have an incredibly captive audience, you have an amazing product and a great story to tell.
Is there any way that you've been able to track how you're affecting consumer behavior after they get off those flights? Are they buying straightaway cocktails wherever home is, whether it's in the Pacific Northwest or elsewhere?
It was really important to me the entire time is, again, going back to the business plan years ago, and thinking through what's the brand we want to manifest, how do we want to bring this all to life, the straightaway experience for consumers.
It was really important to me that we had a D2C component. I have a beverage background and a physical brick and mortar retail background.
And the power of that, I don't need convincing on how powerful that combination can be, where you get the opportunity to connect with your consumer one on one through a D2C experience.
And so we have two physical brick and mortar locations, and then we have an e-comm store.
And so through those experiences, we can get customer sentiment and surveys done, and we can see how many folks have listed Alaska as the first time they tried our product or found us, how many times maybe they found us at Costco or Trader Joe's or
Whole Foods or what have you. We can see not every single transaction, but a fair amount that's certainly directionally helpful to say, okay, folks are finest on those flights.
They're getting off the flights or maybe they're shopping while they're on the flight and ordering our product. So that has been a really kind of a powerful tool.
The fact that we're not just sold on a shelf as a widget, that we actually are an experience, an experiential brand, and we have a pretty deep connection with our consumer.
So this certainly sounds like a match made in heaven. What should brands know about the less glamorous side about working with airlines? Is it compliance?
Is it distribution? Is it timelines? What are the things that get in the way?
When you're partnering with an airline, they're a big org or a smaller org, right?
And so I think cadence of communications, making sure that you've got a really, really strong relationship with them built.
So no matter what you're doing in your walk of life, and especially if you're building something or if you're in the business of being in business, the only thing you know for sure is things aren't going to go exactly the way you expect them to go.
And that goes for everybody, right?
It doesn't matter how strong an operator, a company or a brand is, whether it's Straightaway, whether it's Alaska, whether it's Nike or what have you, we all are going to go through our learnings and our trials and tribulations.
But I think probably for us, it's really important to be relationship driven as a brand versus transactional. And I think Alaska approaches things the same way.
So there's going to be hiccups, there's going to be things that we get wrong, there's going to be things that everybody else, other folks get wrong in the conversation too.
And I think for me, it's less about where there's missteps or misfires, it's more about what kind of relationship have you built together to make sure that you're resolving things as quickly as you can for the airline if it's on you.
And if it's something that maybe you could use more information on that you're clearly communicating that. So you've got a fair amount of time to address something together.
So I think that part has been exceptional in our relationship with them and doesn't mean that everything's gone. Let it perfect, it couldn't. And it's a logistics game, right?
So tons of learnings along the way.
And that's certainly good advice no matter who your partner is. And like I said, it sounds like a fantastic match for other entrepreneurs out there who are looking for a similar partnership with an airline. What should they be looking for?
Not all airline partnerships are built the same. What kind of cultural or brand alignment matters most?
I can only speak for like our experience and what's our North Star. It's important for us to grow our business. It's important for us to drive revenue.
For sure, it's important for us to be a solution and help people help democratize this really amazing category of cocktails that before this, you were maybe just having to find a great bar or restaurant once or twice a month that you go out to.
And so this experience of allowing people to find this world of cocktails has been amazing, and being a part of that is amazing. And I think for us, that was a really important part of this partnership and connective tissue.
Alaska shared that same feeling. And I think from my perspective, I try to avoid, as much as possible, it's not always the case, potential relationships where it's going to feel really, really transactional.
It's not, it isn't like the big customer is seeing our brand for what it is, and it's important to them, it's just a transaction. You may not matter that much to them or you may not be that relevant to them.
We're very careful to try to make sure that it's a win-win. I guess if I could advocate for folks, like it just depends on everybody's model and what they're trying to get done, right?
It might be completely acceptable for someone's business model and strat plan to say, I know this is going to be a transactional thing, I know I'm not going to make money on it, or sign yourself up for something because the exposure is really, really
strong. I'd hesitate to say, to give too much advising around that, but I think what was really important, why I signaled, I think Alaska is the fifth biggest airline now. They had been our North Star the entire time.
That's why I wrote them into the business plan two years before we launched. Being fully aware of those bigger airlines, they were the airline that felt to me the most relationship driven.
They understood food and beverage the way we think about it too. And I think we were very selective about making sure the partnership felt right, versus like, well, we're just the maximum possible velocity and volume we can do.
To me, it felt more like, who could we talk to or who could we work with, where there's really mutual alignment and it could be a deep strategic partnership for both sides, it could last for a really long time versus one year or two year kind of pop
and exposure. That was a long, winded answer to a short question.
That was the perfect amount of wind, and it's the perfect amount of winds because Straightaway Cocktails wins, Alaska Airlines wins, and the passengers win. So it's win, win, win. Cy Cain of Straightaway Cocktails.
Thank you so much for joining us on the Nombase Podcast. For everybody in the audience, thank you for joining us, and we'll see you next time. That concludes another episode of the Nombase Podcast.
If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a review and follow us on your listening platform of choice. You can also watch and listen to past episodes on nombase.com, and don't forget to join our Nombase Slack.
It's slack.bevnet.com for company updates, industry networking, and community discussions. See you next time.
