L
aurence Briggs, president, CEO and co-founder of Republic of Texas Brands, Inc. talks with the Opportunist’s Managing Editor Leslie Stone about his company’s business model, his recently announced vodka launch and his aspirations for 2012 and beyond.
Laurence Briggs is a born entrepreneur, active capital raiser and advisor to early stage companies. Buying companies and turning them around is his passion. So, when he had the opportunity to transform a tiny operating company into a distinct brand, he jumped at the chance.
Opportunist: How did you get the idea for Republic of Texas Brands?
Laurence: I met Jerry Grisaffi and we hit it off. We had an idea of taking over and launching a line of barbecue and perhaps some restaurants, but we quickly realized our scope was much too narrow. Texas is not all about barbecue. [Laughs] We have some very upscale restaurants and food and some wonderful products. So, we started looking at other Texas products. We discovered 2,000 and many with artisan companies that had recipes five generations old. We are building our Republic of Texas Foods subsidiary based on good quality, upscale Texas foods.
Opportunist: What’s the story behind your logo?
Laurence: We thought, here we are in Texas…the state that is No. 1 in terms of state pride. Texans love b
eing Texans, and we’ve got a fantastic brand, so we trademarked our company name. We wanted a flag but the state flag wasn’t an option. Turns out you can trademark a battle flag, so that’s what we did. Everyone who saw the prototypes said the logo would be fantastic for food products, apparel and more.
Texas is a big place, loved by people all over the world—even if they don’t like America because of politics. The United Kingdom, France, Germany and Australia just love Texas. The Texas Embassy Cantina has been in London’s Trafalgar Square for 25 years and it’s always packed. [Laughs] So, unquestionably, Texas sells. We are all about Texas and somebody who wants to send a little slice of Texas to someone.
Opportunist: Tell us about your online catalog and store.
Laurence: In early October 2011, we saw a great opportunity for corporate gifts and foods and so we decided to focus on foods until Christmas.
Opportunist: Was it a success?
Laurence: Yes, we launched it sort of slowly in October and then we really picked up speed in November with our online company store. We took our first order on Nov. 22, and we shipped 1,000 items to 35 states all with the Republic of Texas branding. When we looked at the results it was interesting to see how many people who visited our site converted to orders. Our new brand was translated into real economic value.
Customers would give us the names of who they wanted to send items to and what message they wanted to include. It was very user-friendly—like having a personal shopper. Some wanted a few hundred items with their company name and “Merry Christmas,” so we would include a note that said something like “Hi Bill and Mary, hope you have a very Merry Christmas, from XYZ Co.” We tried to automate it as much as possible and it was very well received. People called and emailed us, saying how much they loved our brand.
Opportunist: Your packaging could almost be considered a collectible item.
Laurence: Yes. Most of our gifts are actually sent in wooden crates. Local artisans in Dallas make our gift crates out of recycled wood from old wine crates. They are very attractive, with our logo and URL around the back.
Opportunist: What are your competitive advantages?
Laurence: Our brand and our association with Texas is definitely No. 1. Second, is the fact that we have lots of upscale products. Very soon we will be developing our site similar to the Ralph Lauren and Fossil® sites, where we will use our brand as a landing point and then send people off to various other activities such as our beverage company and gourmet chocolates. There are some other developments that I cannot talk about just yet, but very soon ours will be a platform website as opposed to a company store website. Our third competitive advantage is that we only sell products from Texas. For example, our olive oil comes from the Texas Hill Country, our fabulously popular candied jalapeño jelly comes from the Red River Valley, our Swiss cheese and hard cheddar comes from Waco and some of our wines are from just west of Lubbock.
Opportunist: How many people do you have on staff?
Laurence: We are basically a marketing and branding company, so five people focus on the brand. There are also a number of people in each sector of development work, hunting for experts and bringing in other people to whom we can ask “this is what we want, this is the flavor we are looking for…can you develop the product for us?”
We all hunker down and help with everything we do. I designed the first brand and came up with the name, and our chief marketing officer added her contributions.
Opportunist: Where do you find your products?
Laurence: At first we went through 2,000 manufacturers in the food business and decided to try different ones after seeing their website. Now they are finding us.
This morning I received a beer and pineapple sauce. Every week I get a case of sauce from someone saying they’ve been working on it or it’s a family recipe.
Opportunist: Do you personally sample your products?
Laurence: Yes. [Laughs] A number of us put on weight because we literally did not stop eating for about four months! We were working at our desks and not doing much exercise while sampling fabulous pecan pies and garlic herbed chickens and beautiful chocolates. Now that’s over and we don’t have to keep testing products. [Laughs]
Opportunist: Are other product lines in the works?
Laurence: We were considering a line of jeans but the more we studied the market we realized there were already so many brands of jeans. So, we decided apparel should be put on ice for the time being. Six months down the road we might revisit that. Right now we are very busy with our vodka and other spirits as well as our condiments line.
Opportunist: Tell us about your move into the alcoholic beverages market and particularly your forthcoming vodka launch.
Laurence: We were looking for consumer products without the seasonal effect of food and came up with vodka and alcoholic spirits. Vodka is a$5.5 billion market in bottled annual sales. The U.S. Constitution lays down who does what and how much you get paid and when, which creates a nice structure and a good growth market. [Laughs] The receipt of our brand has been absolutely fabulous, so licensing our brand to a beverage company is a very clear, very wise thing to do. Smirnoff and Absolut vodkas are the No. 1 brands, with about 80% of the market share, but the rest is owned by little brands. We are now fine-tuning the flavor and plan to do some other alcoholic spirits as well.
Opportunist: Will you market your alcoholic beverages overseas?
Laurence: I don’t know whether it’s possible to take our alcohol products overseas, but we are coming out with an entire family of products that go under the Republic of Texas Brands.
Opportunist: Tell us about your condiments.
Laurence: Our condiments line is based on four genuine gourmet Mexican products: TexMex, Pico de Gallo, bean dips and spinach dips. Those will be launched alongside various spirits so they’ll have our brand but be from the food company. We are also working on a Bloody Mary mix and tortilla chips at the moment. We are trying to make our tortilla chips good and healthy—as in preservative free—but that isn’t easy with tortilla chips. There will be TexMex mixes that go with and will, hopefully, be sold alongside our spirits. That could be a way for liquor stores to compete with the encroachment of stores like Walgreens and Kroger into the alcoholic beverage market.
Opportunist: What is your most memorable experience in developing this company?
Laurence: One day we had about 500 crates stacked up in our reception area, waiting for UPS to come and pick them up. We shipped to 35 states in five weeks. It’s fun when you make these little milestones.
When individuals came to our tastings and you could see their eyes beaming at the brand—that gave me a great thrill. We had 200 people at our launch party with about 10 different items of our foods—tamales, peppered ham, herb grilled chicken and turkey. They would tell us we had a success and how much they loved our products. In fact, our Tomatillo Salsa won the Scovie Award the very week we launched it.
Seeing our story on “Good Morning Texas” was very satisfying too.
Opportunist: Are you pursuing any joint ventures or licensees?
Laurence: Well, we are certainly open to it. We intend to license out our brand and logo to other companies with product lines that are compatible with our positioning. And our subsidiary, Republic of Texas Food Co., is actively seeking joint ventures and acquisitions in the Organic/Natural, Gourmet Mexican and Upscale Texas style food sectors. We are looking for people to come to us and say here is an idea. We can then take the idea and talk it over and innovate it and possibly create a nice little business in a growing sector, where the brand is licensed from parent to subsidiary and the other side owns a small part of the company and it grows and has its own life with a management team and additional capital. We want to be innovators and build out these brands via scalable businesses.
National brands like Harley Davidson and General Motors could have licensing potential for us at some point. General Motors, for one, has enormous presence in Dallas. We are planning to make presentations to some sports teams as well.
Opportunist: What are your aspirations for the company in 2012 and beyond?
Laurence: I would hope we can become a multimillion-dollar company with our vodka line and that our food company can grow very nicely. I would like to see a line of products for conventions or tourists—that could be an apparel company with T-shirts and products and jalapeño sauces and tomatillo sauces—that would offer people something from Texas that’s really Texan.
Our success will be based on the ability to get working capital to fund our growth and make it happen.
OTC Markets: RTXB
Leslie Stone is an award-winning writer/editor with more than two decades of experience covering business, finance and lifestyle issues for newspapers, magazines and online publications. Originally from Virginia, she currently resides in the Orlando area.
