In an interview with the Brown Alumni Magazine, on the heels of his massive donation, Frank was asked if he had any advice for the young Brown student. Sidney Frank was a charmer, and he knew which people to charm. Old snapshots show a handsome, broad-shouldered fellow, always in a coat and bow tie, hair slicked back in an impeccable part. (When Grey Goose was sold, he gave $100 million to Brown to provide financial aid for poor students.) But Frank made the most of his brush with privilege. Frank had to drop out of Brown after one year because he couldn’t afford tuition. He wiggled his way into Brown University, where, for the first time, he slept on real bedsheets (not sewn-together flour sacks), and found himself surrounded by the children of the rich and powerful. Born in 1919, Sidney Frank grew up poor in rural Connecticut, a farm boy who harbored a Gatsby-esque drive for social transformation. Given the fierce competition, can Sidney Frank, now 85, do it again? Of course he can. And whatever marketing tricks SFIC had up its sleeve last time-all the guerrilla promotions that Sidney Frank is famous for-everyone else is onto them by now. Some say the Grey Goose explosion was a fluke, a miraculous confluence of timing and trends. The odds against any new spirits brand are long. As the product becomes known, says Frank, “some idea will come to me that will push it forward.” SFIC will spend at least $3 million on Corazón marketing in 2005 and make it available to all sorts of influential crowds-at a VIP tailgate party at the Super Bowl, at the victory dinner for the Indy 500, and at the Junior League’s Winter Ball in New York. Making matters worse, there’s already a strong brand entrenched in the superpremium tequila category, Patrón.īut when Goose got sold to Bacardi, SFIC signed a stringent noncompete clause: It can’t launch a new brand of vodka or gin for the next four years. Vodka dominates with 26.5 percent, while rum has 13 and gin 7. And in the distilled-spirits game, tequila plays in the second division, accounting for just 5.1 percent of the market. Agave plants are notoriously fragile crops, and the fancier tequilas must be aged for a year or two, while vodka comes out of the still and is good to go. Sidney Frank doesn’t necessarily want to be in the tequila business either. When I suggest to an SFIC vice-president that vodka is by definition odorless and tasteless, his face goes tight. Now the SFIC team is compelled to push this unknown brand of tequila, all night, every night, on crowds that don’t know what it is and don’t particularly care to find out. Then their beloved Goose got sold to these mass-market hacks from Bacardi (who’d tried, without much success, to launch their own superpremium vodka-an Estonian concoction called Türi-before they bought Goose). A Grey Goose Cosmo here, a Grey Goose–and–tonic there. Consider their fate: Just a few months back, their job had been to drink (and promote) Grey Goose, which made them the most popular people wherever they went. Suddenly, the SFIC folks look a bit downcast. SFIC publicist to Bacardi salesguy: “What are you drinking tonight?”īacardi salesguy, swirling ice in highball glass: “Goose Orange, baby!” And then, in a small club in the meatpacking district, they run smack into the competition: Bacardi salesguys, making their own nightly rounds.
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They teach bartenders how to mix new Corazón cocktails. A team of SFIC employees are out pushing Sidney Frank’s new brand of the moment: Corazón tequila. The only question left: What’s next?Ĭut to a shiver-cold night in downtown Manhattan, not long after the sale. Longtime SFIC secretaries were handed checks for more than $100,000 apiece. (To understand how much that is, consider that IBM’s personal-computer business, nurtured, honed, and advertised since 1981, recently sold for $1.75 billion.)Īfter the Grey Goose sale, everyone at Sidney Frank Importing Co. Yet this past June, almost exactly eight years after Sidney Frank gave name to this nonexistent liquor, Grey Goose was sold to Bacardi for more than $2 billion.
Grey Goose vodka, invented from thin air that summer morning, had as yet no distillery, no bottle, and-perhaps the most pressing order of business-no vodka. 2 executive, who listened in a groggy daze as Frank proclaimed, “I figured out the name! It’s Grey Goose!”Īnd so was born one of the most astonishing brands in the history of distilled spirits. Photo: Robyn TwomeyĪt 5:20 on a Sunday morning in the summer of 1996, Sidney Frank-liquor baron extraordinaire, dapper elderly gent, CEO of the Sidney Frank Importing Co.-picked up his phone in a fit of inspiration. Sidney Frank at his winter home in California.
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