What Ben Branson Learned Building and Selling Seedlip

Seedlip founder Ben Branson on inventing a drinks category, finding a million-pound cash hole at 30,000 feet, and starting all over again.

The first time I tried Seedlip I had no real idea what to expect from it. I think I said something insightful to Will about how it was not really a gin, which is exactly the sort of analysis people pay an agency for. Ben Branson had not built a gin substitute at all. He had built something that did not yet have a shelf to sit on.

Ben launched Seedlip in Selfridges in November 2015 and sold his first thousand bottles inside three weeks. Four years later Diageo bought a majority shareholding in the business. This episode covers everything in between, including the afternoon he learned about a million-pound hole in his working capital while being rushed through airport security.

How do you sell a product nobody has asked for?

You start at the very top, borrow credibility from the retailer, and accept that a brand new category will make some people genuinely furious.

Seedlip did not begin as a business plan. Ben was living in what he calls a Hansel and Gretel style cottage in Buckinghamshire, running a small design agency, doing some consulting, and teaching himself taxidermy. He also had a full-size ostrich in the hall, which he mentioned in passing as though everybody keeps one. He had started growing botanicals because he wanted to understand herbs properly rather than buy a bag of mint from a supermarket.

Then he found a scanned copy of a book on Wikipedia. The Art of Distillation was published by the English physician John French in 1651, and it is often described as the earliest detailed book on the subject. It contains roughly two hundred ingredients, drawings of copper stills, and a set of recipes that were mostly herbal medicine. Ben bought a small copper still off the internet purely because he wanted a go at it.

The commercial idea arrived much later, in a restaurant in King’s Cross. Everyone else got an old-fashioned or a decent glass of red, and Ben got something pink and sweet with no umbrella and no dignity. He describes feeling like an idiot at his own dinner table. That gap between the two experiences became the whole proposition.

When he did launch, he refused to start small. Selfridges took Spice 94 in November 2015, and the reasoning was deliberate.

“I wanted to start at the top and start with trend-leading accounts, start with credibility, and ultimately as a new brand in a new category that no one’s ever heard of, I was desperate to beg, borrow and steal as much credibility as possible.”

There was also a brutally practical reason behind that choice. If the Selfridges buyer thought the liquid was rubbish, Ben would find out fast and cheaply. The product also cost roughly ten times what a soft drink cost to make, so a supermarket shelf was never realistically on the table.

What he did not expect was how angry it made people. In 2015 the alcohol-free aisle barely existed, with Beck’s Blue in the UK and O’Doul’s in America and very little else. A man in his fifties stood in Selfridges and asked Ben why he would work for a company that made a product like that.

“Seedlip actually made a lot of people very angry, which was the most interesting thing from a psychological perspective, of an inanimate object actually triggering a super strong angry response.”

Somebody else told him online that Seedlip tasted like witches’ piss which did make me laugh. Ben decided early to share the worst feedback rather than bury it, and that particular review is the one still stuck in his head a decade later. Will made the point that leaning into a weakness is oddly endearing, and Guinness has been selling patience with “good things come to those who wait” for decades on exactly that principle. Indifference is the thing that should worry you.

What happens when a launch goes better than the plan?

You lose the plan completely, and Ben spent the first six months of runaway success hating almost every part of it.

His plan was modest and specific. Sell a thousand bottles in six months, get into fifty good bars and restaurants, hire one part-time intern, work from home, and ease into it after two exhausting years of development. He wanted to take a breath.

“Those thousand bottles sold out in three weeks and the plan went out the window.”

Within three months he had heard from a hundred countries. There was a big Evening Standard write-up, an invitation to Buckingham Palace, and a steady stream of restaurants asking for stock he did not have. Production had to jump from thousand bottle batches to seven thousand bottle batches, which meant outsourcing the bottling and hiring people at speed.

He is refreshingly blunt about how that felt at the time. He wanted to tiptoe into the market, and instead the market was shouting back at him asking where he had been. Most founder interviews turn that into a triumph. Ben just says he did not enjoy it.

How do you survive finding a million pound hole?

Ben traded out of it within six months, and he credits the relationships his team had built rather than any clever financial manoeuvre.

For context on the pace, Ben took Seedlip from his kitchen to 35 countries, roughly seven and a half thousand bars, restaurants, hotels and retailers, and 30 American states in three and a half years. Three offices across three continents. By his own reckoning they built a business twice as big and twice as fast as the industry standard, which is a lovely line until you understand what it does to a founder.

He was in Singapore, running late for a flight to Australia, being hurried through security when the emergency call came. The board told him they had found a million-pound working capital hole. He had to hang up and board the plane, and this was before decent in-flight internet existed.

So he spent the entire flight running worst case scenarios with no way of checking anything. He was exhausted, he burst into tears, and he says the whole thing validated the irrational belief he already carried that everything was about to crumble. They landed, they got to work, and the team traded their way out of it in six months.

His conclusion is not a finance lesson at all bizarrely.

“Don’t be a dick and be nice to people, because we built such great relationships with our customers and with our suppliers and amongst our team from a cultural perspective, we could call in favours and people supported us.”

The smaller mistakes are just as good. He insisted on posing for his launch photographs with a taxidermy fox, on the grounds that the botanicals on the Spice 94 label are arranged in the shape of one. He also convinced his team, his investors and several customers, including Virgin Atlantic, that frozen peas were the correct garnish for Garden 108. People tried it, the peas bobbed on the surface looking horrible, and the idea died quickly. He once turned up to run a Seedlip event believing it was a book launch, and walked into a children’s party, which is nothing short of hilarious.

Does a late autism and ADHD diagnosis change how you work?

Ben was assessed four years ago and says he is now kinder to himself and clearer about himself than he has ever been.

He had not heard the word neurodiversity until then. He heard someone he knew in the drinks industry describe how their brain worked, then heard a founder on a podcast talk about a recent autism diagnosis, and recognised a great deal of it. He booked a twelve-week remote assessment while his wife was eight and a half months pregnant, and he told nobody at all.

The psychologist said to him, “Congratulations, Ben, you’re autistic.”

An ADHD assessment followed about six months later. Ben is open about how hard the years before that were, including psychiatric care from the age of eight and an addiction he came through in his twenties. He connects that directly to the statistics he now works on, because neurodivergent people without support are heavily over-represented in almost every bad outcome you can name.

That work is now a registered UK charity called The Hidden 20%, which grew out of his podcast of the same name. His argument on the show is that the familiar one in five figure has never properly been checked or validated, and that we have built our education, health, employment and justice systems around numbers nobody stress-tested. He puts the annual cost of not supporting autism and ADHD in this country at around £50 billion, which sits close to the published estimates when you add the London School of Economics autism figure to the ADHD taskforce figure. He says his team reach a very different population number and will publish it later this year.

This part of the conversation actually landed close to home for me. My son has ADHD, and I lost my brother to depression, so I have watched a fair amount of this from the inside myself. Hearing someone with Ben’s brain putting real resources behind it was the best part of the hour and pretty inspirign for me anyway.

What is Ben Branson building now?

Three separate things at once, which he cheerfully admits he would not recommend to any other founder.

Pollen Projects is his independent venture studio, launched in 2023. The first release was Seasn, a pair of 0.5% ABV cocktail bitters called Light and Dark, developed over five years using more than thirty plant extracts. He describes them as a play on Angostura, and says they now sit in nearly ten markets and around five hundred UK listings.

The second is stranger and more interesting. Years ago Ben worked on an American project looking at accelerated maturation for bourbon, using ultrasound and UV rather than time in a barrel. Shortly after Seedlip launched he bought a domestic jewellery cleaner, because jewellery cleaners run on ultrasound. He dropped in a bottle of Seedlip and some wood chips, and by the end of the day he had a golden liquid that tasted faintly of wood.

He parked it for years, then came back and commercialised it. Sylva is his non-alcoholic distillery and sonic maturation lab, using ultrasound, oxygen, pressure and heat to age liquids made from many different tree species rather than the single oak the barrel trade relies on. The first release, Padauk, is named after an aromatic reddish West African wood. It is already stocked in Selfridges, Berry Bros & Rudd and The Fat Duck, and a second maturation lab is being built in upstate New York.

His questions about the category are worth stealing. Why does maturation have to take so long? Why do we only really use one tree species for the half billion barrels in the world? Why do we cut down hundred-year-old oaks to make two barrels each?

Ben’s working rules

• Start at the top of the market when your category has no credibility yet.
• Share the worst feedback publicly instead of quietly deleting it.
• Build relationships that are not purely transactional, because you will need favours.
• Assume a proper food and drink launch takes two years, never three months.
• Keep three priorities only, and make time for yourself one of them.
• No weekends and no evenings, and take your holidays properly.

That last set is not the usual founder hustle sermon, and he has earned the right to it. Ben says he will not spend two hundred days a year away from his children again.

Listen to the full episode with Ben

Watch the full episode with Ben on YouTube, or find every episode at embracingmarketingmistakes.co.uk. You can read more about Ben’s charity work at hidden20.org and his current drinks work at sylvalabs.com.

Embracing Marketing Mistakes is the weekly podcast I host with my Prohibition PR co-director Will Ockenden, where senior marketers talk honestly about the campaigns, decisions and hires that went wrong. We publish a new conversation every week.

Ben spent an entire flight to Australia assuming his company was finished, and it turned out to be a six-month problem rather than a fatal one. What is the thing you are currently catastrophising about that would look far smaller on the ground?