Barrel Labs Asks: Why Can’t You Put Your Face on a Beer Can?
Founders Max Berg, Joe Schwappach and Dave Goldman are doing God’s work. Images c/o Barrel Labs
Barrel Labs, an LA-based beverage startup and the parent company of ELIQS, was born out of the ever-important, existential question: Why can't I put my face on a beer? Now, through the company, anyone can create personalized cans of beer, wine, and seltzer.
Barrel Labs is using patent-pending technology to blow up big beverage. Barrel Labs gives corporations, designers, and everyday customers alike the opportunity to design their own way forward one beer (or wine, or hard seltzer, or sparkling water) at a time. And it opens up new partnership opportunities for designers to help bring those custom creations to life.
Dave Goldman, Co-founder and CEO shares how an MBA thesis (and home brew frustrations) led him and his founders down this career path, how Barrel Labs is creating a space for imaginative innovation, and why the e-commerce of the future will be experiential commerce.
Need a customized beer for your big day? You got it.
Why couldn't we put our faces on a beer can before?
My co-founders and I asked ourselves that when we worked on our MBA master thesis at UCLA. It turned out that the answer was much bigger than just putting your face on a beer. Whereas you could, say, put your face on a T-shirt, you couldn’t do customization in the beverage industry.
There were two reasons why. The big one is that it’s difficult to sell alcohol across state lines and direct-to-consumer. The second problem was that there was no infrastructure built for small batch creation of beverages. Small batch works well for direct-to-consumer, but it doesn't work for the traditional retail distribution systems. We needed to solve both problems and that unlocked the much, much bigger opportunity of finding as many ways as possible to open up the creativity of the beverage industry. We think of ourselves as an innovation lab for the beverage industry. Anyone can come to us to come up with the craziest ideas that they could possibly have, and we can help them bring it to life.
Did you ever dream you'd be designing beer cans?
I came from the finance industry, so no. When I look at what the world of e-commerce it has meant electric or electronic commerce. I think in the next decade e-commerce will be about experiential commerce. It’s boring when you go into an e-commerce site, and it's all conversion rate optimization. It's focused on paid social advertising, and everybody is tired of the ads when you're scrolling through Instagram and Tik Tok. We're spending 50% of our waking hours on computers and social media. This version of commerce is not fun and engaging. The internet right now looks like a utilitarian structure of what the internet is. And I want to see it look like Paris, beautiful experiences that are community oriented.
You, too, can create your own birthday beer.
What are you doing to create your version of Paris at Barrel Labs?
Our beverages have to taste incredible otherwise people don't enjoy it and won't come back to consume it. But the experience that people have with us has to go beyond the normal experience and that goes beyond the can design. We have to make something people want to share with other people. We make the whole experience of working with us a point of consumer delight.
What can’t and can be customized on a beer can?
There’s a process called the certificate of label approval (COLA). When you file for a COLA, there are 37 different allowable revisions you can make to a bottle or can. When you get into the fine print of those allowable revisions, it's everything from replacing graphics to changing the font. You can replace almost everything on a bottle other than the surgeon general warning, alcohol percentage, and where the beverage was produced. Our idea has always been to make the can your canvas.
When you take all of that required information and change it from being the focus into a singular panel, which is considered the front of the can, it opens up the rest of the can to these allowable revisions. That allows anyone to make the can their canvas and it has unlocked our partners ability to be creative on it.
What's your pitch to attract creators?
We do things that people thought were impossible or that they've never seen before. That opens the door to people wanting to partner with us.
Who’s a dream collaborator?
Bored Ape Yacht Club.
Nice cans.
What are some of the biggest things in the beverage beverage industry you want to disrupt?
For most packers, it’s a scale game, not a game of creativity. The incentive structure is not aligned between the folks who are doing formulation and production of the beverages and the middle market creator/community side. Think of an album drop in music. You can sign artists to your label and help them drop their first album, then a second and then they might go on tour and get retail distribution. In the beverage world it’s very difficult to get that first drop in the middle market creator area.
That is an interesting opportunity, and we need to realign the incentive structure. There are some non-obvious ways that we're testing and experimenting with that. We’re working with a partner that has a passionate core community. Traditionally in the creator/community relationship we've seen is that the creator creates something and puts it for sale for the community. Now with NFT's acting as ownership in a securitized community, we're testing having the community purchase the beverage products at wholesale prices so the community can buy much more than if the product was started by just the creator.
So you follow your favorite creator and take a business stake in the enterprises as well.
Yeah. There’s a third step there and it’s community contribution. The relationship between the creator and the community is inverted where members of the community create things and the original creator offers it to everyone in their community and takes an affiliate fee. The community member contribution creates a larger community and brand.
What was it that you discovered in your master’s thesis that gave you this idea in the first place?
We were talking about home brewing and we went around the table and asked who had done home brewing. No one had. Then we followed up with: Is that because the barrier to entry is too high, you don’t have the knowledge, or it’s too time consuming? Everyone said yeah.
Everyone wanted their own beverage, and we realized we could make it more accessible to the masses. As we explored it, people cared less about making their own beer – of course, they wanted it to be high quality – but they really wanted their own beer label. We decided to build out the core infrastructure for that. We supply the beer and our customers and partners can customize their own labels.
What’s your favorite beer of the moment?
I love our ELIQS golden ale. It’s a little sweet and not too alcoholic.
Plus, check out the following pieces:
