The infrastructure, distilling supply chain, and go-to-market strategies that powered spirits growth over the past decade are rapidly becoming obsolete, and the brands winning in 2026 are those rethinking foundational assumptions about how to build, distribute, and connect with consumers. These Bar Convent Berlin sessions explore the critical dimensions of modern spirits infrastructure. Heritage brands navigating duty-free, artisanal producers drowning in compliance complexity, and even craft distilleries seeking to own their customer relationship will learn the strategic frameworks and tactical tools to modernize their infrastructure and reclaim control of their growth trajectory.
Moët Hennessy’s Travel Retail Blueprint
At Bar Convent Berlin, Lauranie Nonotte and Raphaele Delerue shared Moët Hennessy’s strategic “playground” for Global Travel Retail (GTR). They break down the four major constraints of the airport environment (technology, time, noise, and team) and how they’ve bypassed them with groundbreaking innovations. This session provides a masterclass on staying true to brand storytelling while adapting to the chaotic, high-emotion world of international travel.
A Blueprint for Modernizing the Artisanal Spirits Infrastructure
Rob Weir, Co-Founder and CEO of Maguey Exchange, explains why traditional “product thinking” is holding artisanal spirits infrastructure back. In this session, Rob outlines the “Three Pillars of Platform Thinking”: Production Procurement, Compliance & Distribution, and Market Intelligence. Viewers will learn how to turn operational complexity into a competitive advantage by creating a “single source of truth” for compliance and automating manual processes. Rob also shares a real-world case study of a mezcal brand that scaled from $180K to $650K in 18 months by simply streamlining its infrastructure.
How Craft Spirit Brands Can Own the Consumer Relationship
Susan Mooney, CEO of Spirits Consulting Group, believes there has never been a better time for challenger craft spirit brands to win. Susan explains why brands should stop relying on the traditional “on-premise first” model and instead use e-commerce as a beachhead to define their audience and capture psychographic data. We explore how digital tools now allow brands to conduct pricing studies and competitor account-level targeting for a tenth of the traditional cost.
Moët Hennessy’s Travel Retail Blueprint Transcript
Lauranie Nonotte & Raphaele Delerue (0:04)
Why is travel retail an amazing playground for innovation in experiences? Because it has a lot of constraints, a lot of limits. To illustrate that, we’ve structured this presentation in three parts. First, we’ll present the different constraints we face. Second, we’ll show you some of the innovations we’ve developed. And finally, with humility, we’ll share some tips and feedback from our experience.
So let’s start with the constraints. What types of constraints do we have? We’ve listed the main ones.
The first is technological and technical constraints. In our boutiques in airports, we don’t always have Wi-Fi. We don’t always have a fridge for ice, for example. These are the constraints we have to work with when thinking about creating a new experience that will bring the liquid to the lips of our clients.
The second is time. Our consumers sometimes have just five minutes before catching a flight, or they have a connection and three hours to spare. We have to connect with their timing and think about how we can adapt to that.
The third is environment. Our boutiques are in a setting with a lot of noise, music, lights, and competitors. So how do we shine and get a voice in this environment?
And last, importantly, the team. We don’t always have our own brand ambassadors, we don’t always even have one staff member to run the experience and guide clients. So how do we work around that?
Raphaele Delerue (1:54)
I’m going to present the first innovation we wanted to share with you today: the Product Finder. What is the Product Finder? It’s a digital experience we developed to engage and connect with consumers throughout their journey in travel retail. The way it works is a kind of personality diagnostic and whiskey matcher or cognac matcher, or Champagne matcher. Maybe you are a Glenmorangie 12, maybe you are a Signet, but we don’t know. So we needed a way to engage with the consumer that addressed our constraints in different ways.
The first is to emerge in a saturated environment. With so many competitors around, how do you make the difference? How do you engage and connect with the consumer? The second is to engage quickly. As we said, we don’t have time and these experiences are only 30 seconds. In 30 seconds, we can tell you which whiskey or cognac is your best match. And ultimately, in this kind of environment, you sometimes have a connoisseur in front of you, but most of the time there isn’t one. We don’t have time to spend with them the way you would at a distillery, explaining everything. But at the end, you can convert them to a new product they didn’t know before — and that they’re going to buy.
The second innovation is the VVIP Consultation. This is an experience dedicated to one of our most prestigious references, Paradis Hennessy, and it’s created for our VVIP clients. It’s a 15-minute to one-hour experience with a dedicated brand ambassador, for one to five people maximum. It’s a truly privileged and confidential moment in a private room, essentially a tasting journey around Paradis.
What did it help us achieve? First, we adapt to the time constraint, we can do a 15-minute version or go the full journey, taking clients from the cognac vineyards to the distillery to the cellars in a one-hour tasting experience. The second point is that we create a very close relationship with the customer. They spend time with us, and it helps us build a long-term relationship with the client. They willingly give us their data after this experience because they want more, they want another invitation, they want to come back. So we gather data and we convert. We know that we convert at a 70% rate with this experience.
Lauranie Nonotte (4:48)
The next experience is a new one: the Whiskey Sensory Voyage. Within our company we have several whiskey brands, and we wanted to explore how we could engage in this environment with our different whiskies and help people understand at a glance which whiskey they might prefer.
What we developed is an olfactive experience. I’m sure each of you has experienced the moment where you smell a glass and immediately think, “That reminds me of something I like it, I don’t like it.” It’s universal. So we use people’s sense of smell while they’re traveling to help them understand the DNA of the brand.
What we’ve done is use the main taste profile of each whiskey, for example, for Glenmorangie it’s orange; for Ardbeg it’s moss; and for The Dalmore it’s honey. We then created a design inspired by the pot stills of each distillery, with copper and wood that really expresses the terroir of the whiskey.
How does this answer our constraints? First, it really helps to surprise and recruit, we’re targeting non-connoisseurs too, people who don’t know anything about these whiskies. The second point is to stand out, and most importantly, to engage with low tech. In this environment we sometimes struggle with internet connectivity and don’t always have power outlets. So we needed an experience that is easy to implement but speaks to as many people as possible and genuinely engages them. And last but not least, there’s clear product affiliation. It looks simple, but at the end you can tell whether you prefer orange, moss, or honey. And when we do have a brand ambassador, this becomes a starting point to engage the conversation, deep dive into the brand DNA and storytelling, and bring clients closer to the brand. This new experience also pairs with a liquid tasting.
Raphaele Delerue (7:09)
The last one we wanted to share is what we call the Molecular Tasting. We started it with Hennessy a few years ago. It’s an edible membrane that contains a cocktail within it, so our clients can taste a cocktail in a single bite. On our side, in terms of technical constraints, we just need a fridge, that’s the only thing required to keep the jars containing the cocktail and the pearls.
This experience is a traffic stopper. We really catch the attention of consumers, allowing us to shine in the sea of competitors we face in travel retail wines and spirits. The second point is differentiation, we were the first cognac brand to do this with cognac cocktails a few years ago, and now we’re deploying it on whiskey as well, alongside the sensory voyage experience Lauranie just showed you. And the last point: we convert. We’ve measured it and we know that this experience delivers a 40% conversion rate, and it’s still growing. We know it helps drive sales, and it truly creates an emotion because when people bite into that little bubble and the cocktail explodes in their mouth, it’s a great experience.
Lauranie Nonotte & Raphaele Delerue (8:30)
Our last part covers feedback from our experience, the don’ts and the dos.
What’s perhaps surprising but very true is: don’t overinvest in the experience. When working with an agency, it’s important to be precise and pragmatic. You don’t need to spend enormous amounts of money or shoot for the moon to create desirability and emotion. You can keep it simple. Complexity can work against you. In the past we did a lot of high-technology experiences, but as we said, we’re moving more and more toward low technology because we need consumers to get it straight away, and we need everything simple enough to implement reliably.
The last don’t is about being self-centered. When you develop experiences, it’s important to remember what it was like before you worked in the spirits industry, when you were just a consumer, just a traveler. Forget everything you want to convey in terms of brand for a moment, and remind yourself of the experience you had as a traveler yourself. Talk to people from that place, rather than trying to express everything you want to say about your brand.
We’ll end on a positive note with the dos, what we think worked for us and wanted to share.
First, don’t compromise on quality. The level of standards you apply to your elaboration process and the quality of your packaging should be the same for an experience. Don’t compromise with your providers on the quality of the device, the quality of the materials, whatever it may be.
Think legacy, think of the future. The Molecular Tasting, for example, we started five years ago and it’s still new for customers today. It’s not new for us anymore, but for our clients it is. So think about what you want your clients to feel, and think about how your experience can last well into the future.
And last: stay true to yourself. Don’t reinvent your storytelling. The reason why you created your brand, the reason why you’re here today, should be the same as it was 20 years ago and as it will be a century from now. Stay true to yourself.
That’s Raphaele and Lauranie. Please don’t hesitate if you have any questions. Thank you!
A Blueprint for Modernizing the Artisanal Spirits Infrastructure Transcript
Rob Weir (0:04)
Good afternoon, BCB. I’m Rob Weir, CEO and founder of Mayа Exchange. Maya Exchange is a digital platform that connects artisanal spirits and wine producers to global buyers, managing compliance, fulfillment, importing, and everything in between through the use of technology. But I’m not here to talk to you about new software or show you some new technology, which is becoming harder than ever in this advent of AI. What I am here to talk to you about is a mindset. And that mindset is focused on platform thinking.
Brands today live what I would call a siloed lifestyle. If there are brand owners in the audience, you’re probably managing 10 to 15 different systems simultaneously. My question to you is: are those systems talking to each other? What information is flowing between them?
Because as a brand, you’re already a platform. Compliance automatically connects to supply chain, connects to importing, and so on. But are you managing those intentionally? Usually the brands that we work with have a product-thinking approach, it’s one in, one out. You sell, you make money, you pay your costs. There’s no room for exponential growth, because platforms and platform thinking don’t just sell products. They’re ecosystems where each participant adds to the value of that system.
So what we’re talking about here is moving from product thinking to platform thinking. Are you managing those network effects strategically or accidentally? Because when you manage those network effects, and we experience them every day through Uber, Netflix, and tech companies you’re able to achieve exponential growth, scalability, and flexibility. I’m not here to tell brands to become tech companies overnight. We work in a different business. However, there are aspects, philosophies, and approaches of this type of thinking that allow you to unlock value and not leave money on the table.
Rob Weir (2:26)
I’d like to call your attention to what I call the three pillars. These pillars can help change operational complexity into competitive advantage.
The first pillar is production and procurement. The whole idea is that your production data or harvest data doesn’t just sit in a spreadsheet, it informs purchasing decisions, dry goods, and supplier negotiations that you can enter into with strength. Furthermore, it enables you to forecast and plan, thereby reducing your costs by up to 30%.
The second pillar is compliance and distribution. The whole idea here is to have a single source of truth, an all-purpose platform for compliance documentation that allows you to enter markets faster. How many times have brands been constantly scrambling to find the same paperwork over and over again, whether in the states, in Europe, or in Latin America? A lot of these compliance documents share the same information inputs. So why waste time looking for the same documentation repeatedly when you can have a single unified platform that allows you to automate and submit it seamlessly? The result is time. We’ve brought customers down from six months to three weeks in terms of entering new markets. And that time is money. That time is peace of mind.
The third pillar is customer and market intelligence. The purpose of this is to build feedback loops from on-premise and off-premise locations that inform decisions on product development and inventory, whether you have too many SKUs or too few and to intelligently address customer preferences in an age where those are constantly changing.
The benefit and value of these three pillars is that they’re interconnected. Your production intelligence improves compliance speed. Your compliance speed improves distribution efficiency. And this all leads to a more optimized market entry.
Rob Weir (5:03)
This implementation framework is not hard and it’s not costly. Start with the basics. Start with simple Google Sheets. Have a CRM system such as Mixmax to adequately address customer feedback and collect intelligence. Your production data shouldn’t just sit in a spreadsheet, it should influence all your inventory purchasing, dry goods, and so on.
From that scrappy start, you build the integration layer using APIs. Platforms like Zapier are your friends because they allow these systems to talk to each other simultaneously, so you don’t have to swivel chair, meaning you’re not manually taking information from one system and entering it into another.
It’s all about the integration layer and what you do with your data. And finally, this framework is tool-agnostic. You can use HubSpot, NetSuite, or any of these platforms. The whole purpose is having a dashboard, having visibility, so you can make better business decisions.
Implementation starts with looking at your existing systems and documenting data gaps. Where are you missing information? What’s not transferring from one part to another? Once you identify those gaps, you identify the highest-impact manual processes that need to be automated to save you time, money, and effort. And once you integrate those systems, you need a dashboard just like you can’t drive a car without knowing how fast you’re going, how much gas you have, or when you need an oil change. You need a dashboard to understand what’s happening with your business and, more importantly, when that red light is flickering and you need to act.
Rob Weir (8:19)
To illustrate this, let me share a case study from a client. We helped a Mezcal brand become more connected. When they started with us in year one, they had manual compliance processes per state, submitting the same documents over and over, struggling to find them, and sometimes taking months just to realize they were non-compliant with existing documentation. They had isolated distributor relationships and were only entering one state at a time.
Through our help, and through their own efforts as well, they were able to build a production system where agave harvests influenced production, which influenced forecasts, and then also the purchasing of bottles, labels, and packaging. This also informed how they balanced entry into new markets with speed and flexibility.
On the compliance side, we started with a simple Google Drive containing all their PDFs and registrations, along with a tracker that flagged when they were non-compliant. That alone saved literally months. I know it sounds like a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised how many brands are still sending raw PDF and Excel files back and forth. And on the market intelligence side, we built systems so they could finally collect customer feedback, collate it, and make decisions based on it whether to expand the diversity of their portfolio or increase output.
The results: they were able to leverage these network effects and achieve exponential growth. They went from approximately $180K to $650K in less than 18 months. They improved their margins and expanded to new markets with speed and flexibility.
Rob Weir (10:26)
My point is that traditional brands are often holding themselves back by exhibiting product-focused thinking rather than platform thinking. They’re rebuilding infrastructure market by market whether in the states, in Europe, or in South America. They also have siloed customer activations and tastings that really go nowhere. They say, “The tasting went well,” but what did customers like about it? What new products are they excited about? What are they looking for on shelves instead of your product? This is all valuable intelligence that allows you to activate a lot faster.
With platform thinking, you’re able to take advantage of all of this and do less work with more effect. This is the customer expectation across Uber, Amazon, and Netflix, customers expect a platform-focused approach. That’s the name of the game.
If you’re trying to win in this constantly changing world, you can choose to be an early adopter, moving fast and taking advantage of a fragmented market. You can be a fast follower, implementing frameworks and systems to become more effective. Or you can be a laggard, watch everyone run ahead of you, and end up paying a premium to use someone else’s platform.
Rob Weir (11:54)
This all starts with a mindset shift. First, think ecosystem, think about your brand as an ecosystem, not just a product. Second, take an audit of your entire infrastructure. If something is taking you a long time, think about doing it differently. And last but not least, implement these things in a pilot fashion. Develop a hypothesis, measure results, figure out what you can do better next time, and scale systematically and exponentially.
In closing: every brand already connects producers, distributors, and customers. You’re already a platform. The question is whether you’re managing these connections strategically or accidentally. And that is the difference between succeeding and failing in today’s market. Thank you for your time. I’m Rob Weir, Maya Exchange.
How Craft Spirit Brands Can Own the Consumer Relationship Transcript
Susan Mooney (0:03)
Hi, I’m Susan Mooney from Spirits Consulting Group, and we have successfully been helping brands enter the US market for the past 15 years. So what’s happening right now: online sales and e-commerce is increasing every year for brands, but also B2B e-commerce in the United States is taking off and this is going to continue to increase. RNDC and Southern Glazer’s platforms are passing billions of dollars and they’re not going to slow down.
You now have tools to target both your retail accounts and your end consumer in real time in a way that you’ve never been able to do before. Data. You can have more data at your fingertips about how your brand is performing and who your actual buyer is than you’ve ever been able to before. So that’s another benefit.
You can own the relationship with the consumer, with your buyer. This has historically been something that sits with the distributor, with the retailer, and they choose when to share that information or not. These tools are constantly evolving. Right now, myself and my team spend I would say half to 60% of our time making sure that we know about all the changes, whether it’s algorithms, advertising, and new tools that will help brands establish themselves and compete. That way, you don’t have to. You can focus on your company and building your company while we geek out with the technology.
Susan Mooney (2:06)
Let’s talk about targeting. We are doing competitor comparisons in real time across all 40 states and we are also doing pric
I’m going to skip to the tools and talk about the solutions. What we do is build a commercial operations platform, very much like Rob was talking about. We set that up. Chris, who’s managiing studies. This information used to be extremely expensive for new brands and they were unable to get it in a timely manner. Now we can do it in real time for less than a tenth of the cost.
This is a very pragmatic use. We can drill down to the account level, the zip code level, of where your competitors are. And then we can do account targeting for you or your sales team. What we do a lot is build two lists: merchants to acquire or merchants to win back. You can see where your competitors are in all of these accounts. This is your account list, and we work with you to create the lighthouse accounts, the premium accounts, and then your wider accounts. Again, you get to focus your time and your money on the most important accounts and then accounts to win back, where they’ve purchased but haven’t purchased in a while. So you need to go back there, all in real time.
As far as consumer interest, whether you’re entering the market or you’re in the market and underperforming we’re really looking at what the consumer is searching for, what they’re interested in, and providing you with a variety of different consumer targets.
Susan Mooney (4:11)
We recently launched a brand two months ago and we had very different targets in our campaign. Once you see who’s buying, you can see the demographic and the psychographic that is actually buying versus who you thought might buy. Then you focus your spend on that. We’ve already narrowed it down to three.
On brand messaging: I’ve talked to several brands here yesterday and this morning who want to enter the US market. They have their key messages, but they’re not sure they’re going to resonate in the US. So we create several campaigns. Again using as an example this recent launch, we had 12 different visuals and eight different messages, and we’ve already narrowed it down to three. We know these are the messages that are resonating. They’re what people are clicking on and what people are converting and buying.
On consumer purchase insight: you know who’s buying your product and you know their frequency. You would never have this level of information through regular retail channels or with restaurants and bars. And finally, you can build that consumer relationship yourself. It’s your customer. You can reach out to them through email marketing, for recipes, for events. You’re having the relationship with them, not the retailer.
Susan Mooney (6:12)
Switching a little bit to the B2B side and how these tools are helping you manage your distribution channel. The current status is that brands are increasingly self-representing their products and investing more in it because they have to. Distributors are trying to do more with less, and they are working with their larger brands. The thousands of other brands that are not their top revenue drivers, they can’t help at all. So the brands have no standardized planning or communication with the distributor, and they don’t have access to their own data.ng this area, was with Diageo and with Southern Glazer’s Wine and Spirits for many, many years. He knows how to program, he knows how to communicate with the distributors and what they want to hear. This commercial platform imports all of your sales data, and then you have an analytics dashboard, brand planning and forecasting, and communications. You can share strategies and playbooks. This saves about 40 hours a week of your staff time, that’s one full-time equivalent. And that’s not even counting the monthly reporting that you need to do to either your team, your investors, or whoever. So this is real time-saving.
Susan Mooney (8:31)
The summary of the benefits is that you have smarter budget allocation. There’s that old joke: half of marketing is wasted, but you don’t know which half. You actually do know which half now, for better or for worse. So you can allocate your budget on the customers and the accounts that are actually working.
You have improved operations. You’re saving a lot of time as Robert said, swirling that chair, taking the data from here to there. You’re looking at your performance dashboard, and that frees you up for the data and insights part to really understand what’s happening with your brand in real time, adjust your strategy, and create your plans for the next move.
And I can’t stress this enough: owning the relationship is key. The consumer is now discovering everything online, on their phone. We’ve already started to see a lot of incoming interest from ChatGPT, where people are going to be asking, “I like this gin, or I like this vodka, or I like this whiskey, what new whiskey or vodka should I try?” You’ve got to be ready for that. They’re also going to be thinking, “I just bought this product, what recipe should I make with it?” That is something that’s really evolving.
Susan Mooney (10:24)
But if you’re owning that relationship, it’s really important because as a newer brand to the market or a challenger brand, the consumer really looks at you as a personality instead of a corporation. That’s where you have your strength. Make it work. Thank you!
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