A Blueprint for Smart Spirits Innovation

Georgie Bell-Leoni (00:04)

I’m going to be talking about innovation through listening—specifically about community and building a community from a startup challenger brand mindset. However, I truly believe that any drinks brand of any size could put these insights into practice to drive better innovation. To give you a little bit of context about myself, where I’m coming from, and why I’m here: I spent 12 years working in the corporate world.

Georgie Bell-Leoni (00:30)

I spent eight years as a Global Brand Ambassador and four years as the Global Head of Advocacy at Bacardi. Then, about two and a half years ago, my husband and I co-founded The Heart Cut, a startup whiskey company. Because of this, I’m coming at innovation from both sides of the spectrum. I’ve experienced it from a big-budget perspective within a massive, family-owned corporation, and now I see it from the other side, where there are just two of us in the game doing absolutely everything ourselves.

Georgie Bell-Leoni (00:59)

With that background, I want to bring a perspective on what you can achieve at any stage of your company’s life cycle. It doesn’t take a scientist to see that in the drinks industry, we are not short of ideas. None of us are. You only have to open Class Magazine, The Spirits Business, or daily news bulletins to see that.

Georgie Bell-Leoni (01:29)

Day after day, there is a flood of new brands, new products, new SKUs, and new services. While we aren’t short of ideas, we are short of ideas that are sticky, and short of ideas that are actually relevant. I want to start somewhere that might feel a bit uncomfortable for this topic: the fact that most of what we call innovation today isn’t actually innovation at all. We tend to use that word quite flippantly. Bear with me here—please don’t walk out, I’m not hating on anyone and I’m not naming names!

Georgie Bell-Leoni (01:57)

The reality is that most innovation today is just inventory. It’s a liquid put into a glass bottle, packed into a warehouse, and probably left there for two years. It’s noise. It’s a celebratory pat on the back for a marketing team or a new product development (NPD) team.

Georgie Bell-Leoni (02:24)

Alternatively, it’s just a tactical new product brought to market to shore up margins at the end of the fiscal year so the finance team can say, “Yes, we hit our targets this year.” It gets labeled as an “innovation” within the corporate structure—I see some people nodding because you know exactly what I’m talking about—and then it gets promptly discontinued. I am likely responsible for some of these in my past life as well, so this isn’t me pointing fingers without looking in the mirror.

Georgie Bell-Leoni (02:51)

It’s simply me being honest about how we use this word. Innovation isn’t just doing something new. The working definition I want to use for the next ten minutes is this: innovation is solving a real problem in a way that fundamentally changes behavior. By a real problem, I mean something you haven’t just assumed exists because a competitor launched a similar product. I mean an actual, tangible friction point.

Georgie Bell-Leoni (03:18)

And it has to change behavior, rather than just adding another option to an already crowded shelf. Think about it: a standard line extension, a new sherry cask release, another flavored vodka, or a gin with a slightly different botanical bill—are those solving a real problem? Are they changing consumer behavior in a meaningful way? They might be exciting, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with them, but they shouldn’t be confused with innovation.

Georgie Bell-Leoni (03:48)

Here is the key: we talk about brand innovation constantly, but thinking innovatively is just as powerful. That is a mindset we should all be applying to our roles, our jobs, our companies, and our new SKU launches.

Georgie Bell-Leoni (04:17)

When we think innovatively, we are flexing a different muscle. Thinking innovatively is how you find the actual gap in the market, rather than just trying to fill an existing space. Strategy is the process; the product is the output. But you don’t always need an immediate physical output to justify the process itself. The difference between good and great in this entire realm comes down to how well you listen.

Georgie Bell-Leoni (04:46)

When we examine the realm of listening, there is good listening and there is bad listening. Every brand claims they listen, but a lot of them are just operating inside an echo chamber, hearing their own voices reflected back at them. This is exactly how categories become overcrowded with “me-too” products that just add to the ambient noise.

Georgie Bell-Leoni (05:11)

Bad listening often looks like asking customers exactly what they want and then building precisely that. The famous Henry Ford line applies perfectly here: if he had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.

Georgie Bell-Leoni (05:39)

Consumers will generally just describe a slightly better version of what already exists. That isn’t innovation; it’s iteration. Bad listening also includes over-indexing on the loudest voices in the room, or treating casual feedback as a direct roadmap rather than data. Feedback is simply data—it tells you where to look, but it doesn’t tell you exactly what to build.

Georgie Bell-Leoni (06:06)

Good listening, however, involves tuning into three distinct pillars: what people say, what they actually do, and most importantly, what they don’t say—the unsaid tension or what is entirely missing from the piece.

Let’s break down what they are saying. This feedback comes through surveys, reviews, direct conversations, and doing barrel-top samplings. Raise your hand if you have ever personally conducted a barrel-top or an in-store sampling.

Georgie Bell-Leoni (06:36)

For those of you who didn’t raise your hands: if you work anywhere near a spirits bottle, regardless of your corporate role, go out and do a live sampling with an off-trade retail account. It is a massive eye-opener.

Next is behavior—what are they actually doing? What are they buying, and what are they ignoring? What products do they come back for, and what do they abandon at the online checkout? Tracked behavior will beat a consumer’s stated preference every single time.

Georgie Bell-Leoni (07:05)

The final piece is tension. What is missing or unsaid? What compromises have consumers accepted as normal simply because they don’t know that things could be any different? This tension area is where the real commercial opportunity lies.

Georgie Bell-Leoni (07:35)

At this intersection of what people say, what they do, and what they struggle with, you find your sweet spot. I want to share two examples of how we have brought this to life at The Heart Cut. I’ll preface this by saying it’s up to you to judge the results, but I believe these showcase innovative thinking. Again, I struggle with the word “innovation” because it’s slapped onto so many standard releases, but this is a demonstration of innovative thinking aligned with listening to our community as a challenger brand.

The Heart Cut is a whiskey company, and the whiskey category can be incredibly overwhelming. There are so many brands, there is an immense amount of choice, and the category is bogged down by historical stereotypes. Someone once told me that in the whiskey industry, “there are more Glens than at a Scottish wedding.”

Georgie Bell-Leoni (08:27)

It is an amazing phrase that I can no longer remove from my head because it is entirely true. To combat this choice paralysis, we built a digital flavor matchmaker tool. It’s a quiz that takes just 90 seconds, pairing people with a whiskey we genuinely think they will love based entirely on their real flavor preferences, rather than any assumed connoisseur knowledge.

Georgie Bell-Leoni (08:53)

Over 7,000 people have now taken this quiz directly on our website. What’s just as good as that 7,000 figure is the cost: it costs us a grand total of £300 a year to run. We aren’t talking about massive corporate budgets here—just £300 a year.

Crucially, this quiz didn’t just net us a pile of isolated opinions; it revealed clear patterns in our back-end data. We didn’t originally set it up with this intention, but the data mapped out the precise flavor profiles that 7,000 modern whiskey drinkers enjoy in flavor, in spirits, and in life.

Georgie Bell-Leoni (09:21)

We were able to see exactly where the data peaked, identifying what the clear majority of consumers love. That flavor pattern became a formal product brief for us. We used that data to create our very first core release—or our “house pour,” as we prefer to call it. “Core release” is industry jargon that everyday consumers don’t actually understand.

Georgie Bell-Leoni (09:51)

Our house pour is called Barley, and we entirely reverse-engineered it. We took the most popular flavor notes that thousands of drinkers told us they loved in whiskey, and we sourced and blended a liquid explicitly to match them. The tasting notes featured directly on the bottle are strawberry jam, cinnamon buns, thick vanilla cream, and fresh raspberries.

Georgie Bell-Leoni (10:17)

These are the exact flavors our community highlighted. For me, Barley is my “Monday to Thursday” whiskey. It isn’t a trophy-cabinet bottle meant to sit on a shelf; it is designed for repeat purchase, for the second bottle, and for the customer who picks it up and thinks, “That is exactly what I wanted.” It is easy to understand, and you don’t need an industry degree to know what is going on inside the bottle. We listened to the reality of choice paralysis, evaluated what people wanted from a flavor perspective, and built a product to solve it.

Georgie Bell-Leoni (10:46)

Our second case study comes from our second brand birthday last year. We sent out a free Google Forms survey to our consumer community, and we received hundreds of detailed answers back. One request came up consistently, using the exact same phrasing over and over again: “I’d love a sample,” “I want a small sample first,” “I’m worried about committing to a full bottle,” or “I want tasting sessions before buying.”

Georgie Bell-Leoni (11:44)

People explicitly wanted to try the liquid before they committed their hard-earned money to a full purchase. We received plenty of other feedback as well, believe me, but remember the rule of good listening: you have to look for the signal in behavior and identify what aligns with the unsaid tension. This specific insight checked every box.

In response, we launched our Pocket Pours.

Georgie Bell-Leoni (12:07)

These are 30ml flexible pouches of our whiskey. Creatively, they cost us three times less to fulfill and ship through the mail than a traditional glass miniature, and the minimum order quantity (MOQ) per unit is significantly lower than a glass bottle factory run. This operational shift immediately protected our budget line.

Georgie Bell-Leoni (12:35)

Fascinatingly, our drinkers are the ones who ended up defining the consumption occasion for these pouches. They have taken our whiskey into lifestyle environments we never could have predicted: on commuter trains, at football matches, and out on the White Cliffs of Dover!

We initially launched these as a quick market trial in November off the back of that survey data. We acted fast and pivoted our production. The trial pouches completely flew out the door. Following that success, we rolled Pocket Pours out into traditional off-trade retail accounts, and they have flown there as well.

Georgie Bell-Leoni (13:04)

We had a small independent account in a tiny fishing village on the east coast of Scotland take 30 pouches two weeks ago; they emailed us this weekend saying they were entirely sold out and needed 30 more immediately. That’s a tiny bottle shop generating rapid repeat turn!

Our friend Katie at Spirited bottle shop noted that they function as perfect “grab-and-go” counter items that are great for starting consumer conversations and increasing the total retail basket spend. We built this product by listening to our drinks community’s desire for sampling, but we tailored the execution in tandem with our off-trade retail partners to ensure it was fit for purpose on their counters.

Georgie Bell-Leoni (13:33)

This strategy has unlocked entirely new consumption occasions for premium whiskey, inserting the spirit into travel, gifting, sporting events, and festivals—places where a full glass bottle makes zero practical sense, but a great whiskey does. Furthermore, it has driven a much higher conversion rate to full-bottle purchases because the “try before you buy” element removes the financial risk for the consumer. It serves as an approachable, unintimidating entry point for our brand and the wider category.

Georgie Bell-Leoni (14:28)

Listening didn’t just iterate an existing product for us; it expanded the physical spaces where whiskey fits into people’s lives. To reiterate: both of these initiatives cost us next to nothing—£300 for the digital quiz infrastructure and a free Google Sheet survey to listen to our consumer base.

However, listening does have its limits, and this is a vital caveat. Anyone who has managed a brand knows this to be true: if you listen to absolutely everything, you end up letting the tail wag the dog. It won’t get you where you need to go.

Georgie Bell-Leoni (14:57)

Not all feedback is commercially useful—let’s start with that upfront honesty. Don’t tell your customers that, of course; tell them their feedback is wonderful! But the reality is that not all feedback is useful, not all trends are worth chasing, and sometimes you genuinely need to lead rather than follow.

Georgie Bell-Leoni (15:23)

Take Pepsi AM, for example. Has anyone seen this before? It was launched in 1989 as a breakfast cola. Focus groups had indicated they wanted an extra shot of caffeine in the morning, so Pepsi listened and built a hyper-caffeinated morning soda. It was discontinued within a single year. Now, as a mother of two, a breakfast cola sounds amazing to me, but historically it was a total flop!

Georgie Bell-Leoni (15:51)

Listening tells you exactly where the gap in the market is, but conviction tells you whether or not you should actually fill it. Your gut instinct, your brand strategy, and your core values dictate whether an execution makes sense for your business.

If you take only three things away from today, let it be these:

• Build direct feedback loops: Whatever your brand, category, or route to market, create direct lines to your audience. Sit in bars when they open, and don’t just leave that to your brand ambassadors. Get your whole team—finance and operations included—out doing barrel-top samplings and interacting with off-trade retailers.

• Look for patterns, not isolated opinions: A single consumer anecdote means very little. But when you have thousands of data points pointing in the exact same direction, you have a pattern. That is a formal product brief.

• Find the tension point: Identify what is actively frustrating your customers. Understanding what they struggle with tells you infinitely more about market opportunity than asking them what they like.

Georgie Bell-Leoni (16:41)

Think innovatively going forward. Thank you very much for your time.