Nilla Länsman, Nålla Kova Sooda: Building a Finnish hard seltzer brand from a finance background

welcome to another founder wisdom podcast we have Nila landsman with us he is co-founder at Nola kova which is a hard Seltzer uh it's a beautiful company he's based in Finland he's been in finance before has an interesting background and I love his company this podcast is brought to you by pod buyer by the way if you want to start scale be invited to podcasts like this

one go to botbuyer.com Nila can you tell us a bit more about yourself and about your company sure uh well I'm originally from the northern post a part not the most part of Finland about 300 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle oh I I grew up in a Sami reindeer hurting family but during my University study that I preached had a bit internationally so I ended up

studying London and I am ended up there working finest for about the decade and it's an MBA in Singapore in between but most of my time abroad was spending London um first Investment Banking then PE and then I worked for um big asset management company so public equities um mostly and uh about two years ago we found this um Heart Center business in Finland um a few

of my products here and uh well I moved to Finland in uh February last year to run this business full-time and have been doing it ever since why did you decided to start a Seltzer company I mean you could have got into like banking or Consulting starting your own company into that wipe launch a complex product like this one some people probably could argue that some Financial

products are reasonably complex too uh well it's not that I had had an idea of business spreading for a long time apparently had you asked me five years ago were they in watch industry I would launch a business should I eventually do that it would have been uh my own um equities fund uh but I run into sales service on a work trip in Autumn 2019 in us uh which was the after the summer they really took off uh in U.S summer Celsius and uh yeah I grew in very interested in the product and uh then the following summer my in firm actually ended up investing in one of the leading players in U.S cellular Market a company called Boston beer which makes some Adam Adams uh craft beer if you can call it craft

beer these days uh and also truly sensor so it being my investment I grew very familiar with the business models so and uh it actually grew from there so I started speaking with some friends of mine who happened to be specialists in various areas like an architect I know I got interested and promised me the the design the camp for us and so forth um coincidentally I

think uh after a decade in London I think kind of the hand was played already in multiple ways after brexit a lot of friends of mine moved out from the country basically all that people from Nordic countries worked on South Side in back since the European Union Financial regulation 4 bits Financial products to be sold from outside European Union to inside European Union so these people have

to be relocated to Paris and especially during covet a lot of people moved out for Learners it really wasn't the place to be during the heaviest lockdowns um I also spent a lot of time in Finland during that time and uh well many of them didn't come back at all um so I felt that okay London maybe it's it's kind of over for me and also I had grown as slightly this illusioned maybe about financial career overall I mean people still earn good salaries at least from Finnish point of view with lower taxation but and the carrier ladder had gotten much steeper and you probably could argue that at least some Public Market side the um markets had gotten more efficient so I didn't see my life story as earning two-person uh for three percent

out for the cycle okay that that's not really not the racist story you could come up with uh so since I had this idea I decided to run with it it's a pretty interesting product I love the website and the images it reminds me of the svalbard sordev I'm Canadian so I just love going in the snow in long walks or run in the forest it's my peaceful place you know that in the beach sort of but more more the forest with like minus 30 degrees Celsius so I really relate to that I'm watching your Instagram as well I I see a bunch of athletes I see a bunch of cool dinners I see sauna so really like what you guys are doing apparently you're into more than a hundred stores in Finland um there

are at least 1 000 uh it's slightly seasonal products so cannot claim that at every minute they it's actually a bit hard to track how many stores we're currently anything if some store drop announcements somewhere or anything uh so during summer months we we're probably close to the 1000 stores and during winter months it's it's smaller number than that wow so how do you get into that

many stores and I would guess that you're almost everywhere in Finland at this point like what's your growth strategy there well that's more than about three thousand the off trade uh location grocery stores in Finland so a way to go then uh I would imagine the best of the market structure in any individual Market how the Retail Landscape is divided but in Finland it's hugely concentrated so

two leading grocery chains they control more than 80 percent of the market and with one of them you operate you negotiate with the um headquarters they have centralized uh buying and they announced twice a year their stock coverage you're gonna get and with the other one uh well you can deal with the make a deal with the headquarters too but we're still getting there but this chain

operates with a franchising principle and the store owners can make individual decisions what they stock on about half of their assortment uh so it's been just huge amount of black work then going around these stores so how many cans do you sell a year this is our second full year in the market so uh well it's not a static number right but uh I would imagine this year I will be selling maybe 300 000.

yeah it's it's not Bud Light but it's quite uh it's quite impressive um yeah 300 000 is it uh sold in a pack of 24 uh cans some retailers uh they don't break down the package we ship to them in the packs of 24 and or Trace uh for example little uh they don't break down cans from the tray but taking into account the very high uh excess taxes on alcohol in Finland and also a large value added tax and we we are not uh playing uh the low end of market price wise uh actually 24 cans of our Goods uh in with typical stores it would be something like 70 euros maybe which is actually quite large purchase so uh yeah typically people uh buy us can't buy can wow okay so 70 euros

and they resell it at um twice that or like [Music] Euros or a bit less well uh well I don't want to go into that but there's big amount of things you need to add to the price uh when the after it leaves our warehouses so uh there's 66 cents and direct alcohol tax uh added then there's uh 12 cents recycling deposit which the customer gets uh and that that that's before vit the recycling deposit the customer gets it back if they take them they can and any store out there and then you add the retailer margin which depending uh of the stories probably for the third for the person and then you have the 24 percent v80 and yes so if you walk back backwards from there yeah our sales price the retail stores

it's not 30 Euros yeah yeah for sure and let's say that a store in average it buys 300 cans from you a year um in average right like a mini profit you have big supermarkets or something like that but that would be 10 uh 10 orders ish if not 13 orders per year um my question my next question is like how do you compete with these other products are there are you like the only artisanal slash cool hard Seltzer out there or do you have competition well sure what should we do um we are the only hot sell to start up operating in Finland but naturally and the big boys who finish the rich Market some of them owned by this multinational beverage companies do you have them uh old sensors and it's much easier

for them to a guy and get wide distribution and uh also there are some smaller beverage houses that also make sensors um so uh from yeah we for sure cannot claim that there wouldn't be competition out there uh the international Seltzer brands have not taken off in Finland very well um the market leader in U.S White Club is trying imported by one of the biggest spirituals in

Finland but um those far at least it's a it's kind of finished market for uh finished products for Finnish consumers I for for some reason I think you're muted no yeah I am uh thank you for that I was saying that the obviously like from a brand perspective you look way better um then on the taste level why do people adopt you like do do you like reach a specific taste that is um that a lot of people enjoy or like how do you distinguish yourself um and then it's for the end consumer to decide but what we're at least attempting to do is uh to have a clear single flavors that would be well adapted to finish markets preferably uh uh finish um plants that crawl in Finland um seltzer typically is has very

light taste um so the typical troubles you can get with that kind of flavor profile is that you either um taste alcohol to to the beverage which for most consumers is not a good thing maybe some people would like to taste of some vodka there but most of them don't and also it's easy to taste very artificial especially if you try to hide the taste of alcohol

by adding just more stronger flavors I think that we are done quite good job in avoiding those two pitfalls um so yeah we try to be very Finnish fresh and so forth while it feels at least that some of the big beverage houses um they have a bit of a brand package a legacy package to carry so if they're known for some certain kind of ciders for example it's hard for them to not taste like those Ciders at least in consumer minds and uh naturally if a consumer is looking for their General assessor experience that's not necessarily a good thing for them right and I see you partner with various athletes with folks in various situations chilling and so forth what's your influencer strategy if you have one under who do you want to be

promoted well uh we naturally want to be seen as the low calorie option um so it's a good to be associated with something healthy finish alcohol advertising regulation is very strong with for sure not allowed to promote us drinks as healthy uh but it's nice to be Associated uh with fun activities that might burn calories and so forth naturally another nice things about social media is that

it's easy to track all kind of metrics so it's an advertising Channel to which you have some idea how your money is spent naturally seeing as some kind of paid promotion and social media platform on social media platforms doesn't compare to actually physically tasting the products so while it's nice to be seen on social media it's much better to be actually present somewhere where customer meets you

face to face and again finish alcohol regulation is kind of strict in many markets you promote new alcoholic beverages by giving out free samples on retail store floors that's just strictly illegal in Finland so what we try to do is to have a very strong presence in all kind of events in which we can sell alcohol um and uh through this way the customer gets uh like

direct feel of the brand and the product right last but not least us about uh deer herding what's what is it about and uh yeah what what do you like doing that well it's kind of family business going through the generations uh lifestyle thingy but well it's another reindeer in Finland is owned by someone um but in most of the areas most of the year they free

mild in nature we do have fences but those fences are quite big even on American Standards the 10th by tens of kilometers so you actually in our own area you gather them all advice a year which is during the around mid-summer to Mark the new book of the show who owns them um when they get born naturally you cannot sell that straight away and uh then you

gather them again early winter to uh well we'll show the ones you I want to butcher looks like delicious meat I'm seeing on your Instagram where can people find out more about you Nila well we do have we're mostly finished brand right now so our main Instagram page is uh I think the it's in Finnish and the same goes with our uh website but we have launched

in some like um well International expansion thingies uh so we do have international website as well and international Instagram account too um and we do have uh one tapping English in our main website uh funny thing uh in Finland if you open a alcoholic beverage website you have the best consumer whether they're 18 or not and if they're not our webpage directs them people to some kids

clip on YouTube and uh I think in finished the world for now it can force some English consumer since it's uh en uh it might make you think like this is the English website then so don't be fooled by that if you want to check us out and you also have a villa uh Vape moo which is beautiful if folks wanna see the Northern Lights and have a sauna it looks like quite the amazing place in my whole time I had quite recently built and uh or already have had some Hollywood people there Apple was filming a big TV production in Finland with January and uh the their biggest star Nomi rappers the Swedish actress I think she stayed in mind one of my places for a month nice hope she had a good time

there so thank you so much Nila um it's been fun that is Nila landsman on LinkedIn if you want to find and I am Charles Cormier host the founder wisdompodcast.com