Marc Bushala, Founder & CEO, Heaven’s Door

To begin with, could you tell us how everything got started?

Yes, in 2010, I started a brand called Angel’s Envy with several partners. We had a master distiller named Lincoln Henderson and his son Wes Henderson, who were founding partners in the business. Lincoln came from 40 years at Brown-Foreman, where he worked on many successful brands. We were partners with a sales organization called Incub Brands, which was a spirit sales organization focused on selling and building brands in the spirit sector, and a creative agency called Crispin Porter + Bogusky, which was a founding partner in the brand development and package development of the brand.

My fellow founding partner in the company, Steve Groth, and I wanted to get into the whiskey space by leveraging Henderson’s experience in making outstanding whiskey. This was really before American bourbon went through this Renaissance. There was a bourbon boom that really came into full swing in 2012 or 2013. So, we were ahead of that. We didn’t really have any insight into the fact that suddenly, people were going to be interested in bourbon or craft cocktails, but we thought that there was white space in the category. We thought of coming out with a product that had a different brand narrative, a different package, and a different liquid profile. And we were right on that account. 

We created a package that was very different from other packages. The shape of the Angel’s Envy bottle is very distinctive. The name comes from an industry term called the angel share. So, if you age any spirit or wine, it evaporates over time, and the part that evaporates is called the angel share. We thought it would be interesting to play off that and call the part that we kept the Angel’s Envy. That was the genesis of the name. The folks at Crispin Porter + Bogusky then came up with the bottle shape that has those angel wings on the back. That’s why we came up with that design. 

The Hendersons created a finished bourbon, which was very unusual at the time. They took great Kentucky bourbon, put it into a port barrel, and let it rest there for 3 to 6 months, which gave it a different character and taste profile. So, our liquid was different. The name was different, and most whiskeys that were out there were named after someone who made whiskey 100 or 200 years ago; a lot of brands out there were named after some, you know, dead guy. We thought it would be more interesting to tap into some of the industry lore.

Then, we came out with a rye that we finished in rum barrels. This gave the rye, which is normally kind of spicy and a little bit hot, a more caramel and vanilla flavor. So, it had a slightly softer taste than most ryes out there. So, those were the two core products. We launched the product in 2011. We were fortunate that it was almost the perfect storm. We launched when people suddenly came back into the whiskey category and started drinking craft cocktails, and they loved the product. It was very, very well received. Within four years of our launch, we sold the company to Bacardi, which wanted to expand its portfolio into the whiskey category. So, it was the first whiskey brand they had in the portfolio.

What would you say were the keys to the success of the brand in such a short period of time? 

Most of the things that I mentioned—the branding, the package design, the liquid, and certainly the team that we had in place—very seasoned marketers, salespeople, master distiller, and master blender—and then, ultimately, the tide of the market—that’s what really gave us such dynamic growth in such a period of time.

I understand that this was the beginning of Spirits Investment Partners, where you became a holistic concept from customization to commercialization and everything in between. Could you tell us a little bit more about the business model, how you capitalize and diverge, and your knowledge to keep on developing new brands?

So, that was the first spirit deal that I was involved in. And after we sold the company, a larger strategic company very seldom keeps the team. They have the infrastructure, so they don’t really need your management team, and sometimes they keep people on. But they kept on. The Hendersons are involved with the business, but I was no longer needed. So, I created Spirits Investment Partners to develop new brands on our own and invest in other early-stage brands that were looking not only for money but also for support to build their businesses. That would have been in 2015 when we created SIP.

One of the great successes has obviously been Heaven’s Door. Could you tell us a little bit more about this partnership with Bob Dylan?

Yes, so the first investment we made at SIP was to purchase a majority stake in a business in New Zealand. It was a rum brand called Stolen. We thought the rum category was ready for some disruption, so we did something similar to what we did in the whiskey space—a different package, a different story, and a different taste.

The next deal we did was a partnership with Bob Dylan. We had read that he had filed a trademark application for a whiskey brand called Bootleg Whiskey. I was fascinated by this because I’m a big Dylan fan. He’d be the last person I expected who wanted to own a business like this or own anything, and I was just very curious about how he was going to do it. What would it be like? What kind of product? I was able to get in touch with his manager, Jeff Rosen, who had been with Bob for, I think, 45 years, and asked a bunch of questions. 

Jeff said, “Look, I know nothing about the spirit space. I don’t know how or what we’re going to do. But Bob is passionate about whiskey, and this has been something he’s been wanting to do for a long time. He liked the idea of the name Bootleg, so I at least filed the trademark for it. But beyond that, I don’t know.” And I said, “Well, can I share some thoughts and ideas you would be interested in, you know, just to help educate you and maybe give you a point of view?” And he said, “Of course, feel free.”

I just said, “Is there anything that you can share on Bob that most people wouldn’t know or I wouldn’t find online so I could start to think about what the brand story should be?” We all know he’s a famous musician. We know a fair amount about his personality from what we read, but what would people not know? And he said, “Well, most people don’t know that he’s a very accomplished visual artist, and he paints and sculpts.”

I said, “I had no idea.” So, you don’t see much of it, but he’s actually been critically acclaimed by art critics around the world. He’s had museum shows, and he’s got a gallery that represents his art in the UK. So I said, “Well, send me some examples of his work. I’d love to look at that and see if maybe there’s something there.” And so I got this big file, and I was just blown away by the quality and breadth of this artwork. Most artists have a particular style. You couldn’t believe that these paintings were by the same artist, and it was amazing. 

The metalwork sculptures that he did were really interesting because he had some guys or pickers who went around the country to scrap yards and farms and find junk. These are basically old weather vanes, gears, springs, and whatever they find that Bob would think is of interest. They load their truck up, and they take it back to his metal shop. And in this metal shop, he’s just got tons and tons of stuff. He comes in, picks things out, and lays these things on the floor with a vision in his mind. And then, he welds these pieces together in what he calls Gates. They’re basically like a flat panel metalwork. And they have this really cool, steampunk quality, and they look quite interesting.

The artwork could be a really interesting position because our one insight was that Dylan is so reclusive and is not the kind of person you expect to be the face of a brand. We thought the brand shouldn’t be about Bob. It needs to stand on its own. He can be the hero behind the brand but not the brand.

We thought the art stood alone. It’s eye-catching, interesting, and works on the bottle. If you saw it in the liquor store or the bar, it would look cool. You don’t need to know that Bob Dylan is involved with it. We’re going to focus on the liquid being great and make sure that it wins awards and that whiskey drinkers love it. We’re not trying to sell a celebrity brand. Very often, you’re selling because of the celebrity of the person behind it, not because of the liquid. In the whiskey space, we feel that it has to be about the liquid.

So, we came back and said, “This is just one idea. There are other areas we can explore, but we think the arts are really interesting, and the positioning of the brand is this intersection of art and craft, craft whiskey and this exploration of art.” I didn’t know if it would be offensive to an artist to have their paintings, which is a very emotional thing, on a liquor bottle, but said, “It looks good, and I think it’s an interesting brand story. But you know, if you don’t like it, there’s other things that we can explore”.

And I said, “The second thing is, it doesn’t really make sense to have a single whiskey or one expression. Dylan is prolific, and his music has a huge range to it. It doesn’t feel like having a singular brand or product would make sense. Let’s think about this as an evolving catalog of music and that what we produce will always evolve. We probably want to have a couple of products that are always there but have a lot of limited releases. Consumers like that. They’re interested in trying things that are new. So we see this as maybe a really a portfolio of whiskies.

Those were the initial thoughts that we presented. And Jeff called back a week later and said, “Bob loves it. When do we start?” And it was an amazing call to receive and a conversation to have. And I said, “Well, we’ve already started.” So we rolled up our sleeves, and we started working on building that concept out. We netted out three core products: bourbon, a double barrel whiskey, and rye, which are three pillars of American whiskey. We thought that we would have one special release a year in those packets. In those three cores, we use the metalwork gates as the bottle label, and then we do one special release a year. That’s very limited at US$500 plus per bottle, and those would be a ceramic bottle that would have a different painting each year. 

And we said, “Let’s call that limited release the Bootleg series.” I said I got the reason to use the name Bootleg because Bob has this collection of albums called the Bootleg series. But in whiskey, the bootleg is moonshine. It’s unaged, very high proof, and usually pretty low-quality whiskey. I don’t think anyone will be confused about whether this is moonshine or not because of the price point, and you’re going to see that it’s aged. It’s brown. I said, “I think there’s maybe some creative exploration around names that could be better. But let’s use the Bootleg series for the limited release only. And, like the album, it’ll be Volume 1, Volume 2, and so on. Bob loved the idea. I love the idea of constantly exploring different whiskies, different finishes, and different collaborations. So that became the basis of our business plan. That’s really the brand architecture in a nutshell.

Now it makes sense, and it actually reminds me of the Rothschild winery in France, which also mixed art in its bottles, I believe, a hundred years ago. Actually, the labels were done by Picasso. So, besides Heaven’s Door, would you like to mention anything about the other brands? 

Shortly after we launched Heaven’s Door, I got a call from the CEO of Playboy Enterprises, 

Ben Kohn. Ben said that Playboy was interested in getting into the alcoholic beverage space. He loved the work that he saw with Heaven’s Door and was a big fan of Angel’s Envy. Would that be something we’d be interested in? This was probably 2017, maybe 2018. I said, “Well, I don’t know if the Playboy brand will work for a high-end spirit in the US. I think I could see that working in other parts of the world where you have very high brand recognition and brand equity. I think it could be China, India, or Brazil, but I don’t know that it would have any value for this category in the US. And he said, “Well, China’s one of our biggest markets. We have 98% brand awareness, and we do a ton of business there. I said, “Great. It’s the biggest spirit market in the world. If we want to focus outside of the US, it could be interesting.” So, we ended up putting together a partnership, and our plan was to go to China first and then expand throughout Asia, then think about these other core markets in the world.

We spend almost 2 years in product development and research and finding distributors for China. And then Covid hits first in China. So okay, we’re not launching anything there. The markets were completely closed, and no one knew how long it would be. So we had a lot of time. And then, obviously, the markets in the US  closed with the rest of the world. So, we ended up thinking more about whether there was a better way to come up with a brand that could work globally. And so it should have some kind of subtle reference to Playboy. We originally thought that Playboy Bunny was the icon.

Rare Hare speaks to rare whiskey, and Rare Hare ties in the bunny to Playboy. But the brand is not going to be Playboy. It’s going to be a separate thing entirely, kind of like Dylan. The brand wasn’t Dylan. Playboy is part of the company and behind the brand, but they’re not the brand. 

We’ll make the brand architecture based on rare and unique whiskeys from around the world. It does not need to be focused only on American whiskey; it can be anywhere. It just needs to be truly unique and hard to find. People in the whiskey space love to explore and try different things. It’s incredible the last 10 years. Just about anybody at a cocktail party will tell you about their whiskey collection, and that was not the case, you know, 10, 15 years ago.

So we thought it was a fun positioning, and we started looking for very hard-to-find whiskeys, which means a high-age statement that you don’t see too much of in whiskey. We’re talking about 15 years plus, which you find in Scotch, but it is an American whiskey. So, we came out with a release. Our first release was a 20-year-old. Then we called that Expression 1953, the year Playboy was founded. And we made about 4,000 bottles, 1,953 for us and 1,953 for the rest of the world. It was priced at $500, so it was very limited.

The thought was that the first four Expressions would all be like that: under 4,000 bottles, high price point, hard to get. Then, after those four releases over two years, we’ll come out with a product that is more accessible but still expensive, still ultra-premium, which becomes permanent. 

We did the 20-year-old. Then we did a 60-year-old cognac from vintage. It was 1961,

then a 30-year-old Canadian whiskey with an interesting barrel finish. And our fourth release was a 20-year-old Tasmanian whiskey. And most people certainly in the States know that they know Tasmania. They don’t know anything about it. They most probably wouldn’t know where it is. But it immediately kind of sparks a curiosity like Tasmanian whiskey. What is that?

And you know the whiskey they make is almost like a Scotch single malt. The conditions there are perfect for whiskey, making very small craft distilleries doing very low production. We were able to find the oldest stuff, which was 20 years old. So, our fourth limited release is a 20-year-old Tasmanian single malt whiskey called the Tempest that just came out in the next quarter in Q2. We have our core collection coming out. It’s a 7-year-old, 15-year-old, and 20-year-old American whiskey. The 7-year-old is a blend of two different bourbons. The 15 and 20-year-olds are not blends. They have different barrel finishes, and those are priced at $79, $149, and $249.

While we’re developing this, we’ve said the tequila space is really taking off. It would be great to include it in the Playboy portfolio of tequila. We spent years trying to find a tequila that we really liked and had an interesting heritage with a producer as a partner. We ended up partnering with a family-owned distillery that’s over a hundred years old and is called Casa Centinela. It’s still privately held. They make outstanding tequilas. They don’t use additives. Their production methods are fantastic and unique. They were not built to be an industrial producer, and they also had exceptionally old stock. You don’t typically see that in tequila. So, not only producing great Blancos and Reposados but Extras up to 15 years old, which is really hard to find.

So, we partnered with them to create a brand called Trece Hares, or 3Hares. We wanted to use the number 3 because many Americans won’t or can’t pronounce trece or don’t know what it means. So we put 3Hares, and you can say trece or 3. We wanted it to feel more like a heritage brand because our producer is a heritage distillery.

There is a proliferation of new tequilas coming to market every day. We wanted to feel more like a heritage Tequila offering, so we’re using these handcrafted porcelain bottles. The iconography is centuries old: three rabbits in a circle with their ears connecting to a triangle with the moon in the center. There are a lot of interesting backstories about this, which I’ll send you in a copy. I won’t use up too much of our time, but both the story of the branding, the imagery, the bottle, the liquid, and the partner, all of these things are very important to build a successful brand. It can’t just be that we have a celebrity behind their tequila, or we’re going to put in additives and make it sweet or taste like vanilla so it’s easy to drink for mass market sales. We want the most authentic additive-free tequila that we can find. We wanted to have a unique flavor profile. We want to offer some extra age statement stuff that people just won’t find anywhere else, and we wanted to have this organic story behind it. So, there was a lot of thought about that whole development.

So, 3Hares will be released in Q3 of this year with a Blanco Reposado and Anejo Extras, and Anejo and Christalino, which is kind of a new entrance into the category, which is an aged tequila, of which the color and tannins are taken out of the tequila. When Extra Anejo sits in a barrel for a while, it starts to get dark and starts to get tannins from the barrel, which can make it taste bitter or woody. So Christalino takes that out. So, you get this very different taste from the maturation in 4 plus years, but a very smooth finish. And you get more of these honey notes from the agave. So, there are five different skews in the 3Hares brand. 

Lastly, in the same portfolio, we got into the ready-to-drink hard seltzer space. RTDs have now become the biggest category of all alcohol. So the three biggest today are in the US, at least our RTD tequila and whiskey. So, we have one of each of those three in our portfolio. The seltzers are very different. This is consumed differently than super-premium spirits. The target market is younger. You know you’re drinking these on the golf course, at the beach, at parties, and at backyard barbecues. 

We love the idea of using Playboy’s bunny head as branding, and that brand is very specific to Playboy. So we came up with the name Play from Playboy on their letterhead and Hard Seltzers. So that’s the name of the brand: Play Hard Seltzers. Playboy has an amazing art collection. A lot of famous artists from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s did paintings for Hefner, including Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Peter Max, and so on, and so their art collections are incredible. We love the idea of using their art for the branding of our portfolio. So we use Warhol’s bunny head for our first releases, which are the vodka seltzers. So our can pops out. It looks pretty cool. We will use the other artwork for subsequent releases. So, we’ll do a tequila seltzer, or we’re going to do some canned cocktails all under the Play Hard umbrella.

It’s interesting to see how everything has fallen together with you as you have evolved as a company. What are the next steps? What does the future hold for you?

Well, we have also now invested in a distillery. We purchased a distillery in Kentucky. It is absolutely beautiful, unlike any other distillery that I’ve been to. It’s on 160 acres. There are rolling hills. There’s a creek called Six Mile Creek that runs through the distillery. Absolutely beautiful. There are three or four cabins that we’ve found in Pennsylvania and other parts of the country from the late 1700s. We took them apart, brought them to Six Mile Creek, and put them along the creek along with a grain mill that’s turned by the creek and a water wheel to mill the grain. We don’t mill our own grains with the water wheel. It’s just there as part of our history park if you will.

So when you’re on the property, and you’re down in this area, the low-lying land along the creek, you feel like you’ve just gone back through time with these old cabins and the water mill. It’s an incredible experience. And these are truly old and authentic pieces. They’re not replicas. There’s nothing that feels like Disneyland about it.

So we’re telling a bit of a story of American history and the roots of whiskey making through the structures that are there. The barns that were built to hold the distilling equipment used the kind of architecture that was used for barns in the 1800s down to the joinery. The type of wood is really quite unusual because it’s expensive to build a distillery if you’re trying to build it, and being true to these architectural styles and materials becomes very expensive. So, it’s a beautiful place.

We’ve been making whiskey there for four years. We’re scaling our production, and the liquid coming from the Six Mile Creek Distillery is outstanding. So, we will add Kentucky Bourbon to the three that I mentioned before for Heaven’s Door. Now we have a fourth permanent skew: Tennessee and Kentucky Bourbon, the double barrel whiskey, and the rye. We will open the distillery to the public in late summer, but we’ve been producing there for quite some time.

Understood. Marc, what will be your final message for our readers?

The spirit space has been around since the beginning of time, and it’s going to be around forever. It’s interesting to see how trends change, how people consume non-alcoholic beverages, and how low-alcoholic beverages have become a popular category. But what you’ve seen, and I think it’s going to hold true, is people will enter a category, and if they like what they’re drinking, whether it’s rum or tequila or whiskey, there’s eventually a trend towards drinking better, not necessarily towards drinking more. We like being in that super-premium and ultra-premium space and really trying to create products that have a point of difference from both the quality of the liquid and the brand story. I think that those are two really essential elements.

So, whether it’s the production side or, ultimately, the brand side, it’s got to be great quality liquid. If you’re just a producer to sell to third parties, you don’t need a beautiful distillery. You could build a factory if you want. But if it is part of a brand story, it needs to be consistent with the brand. So, we think very deeply about those stories. There’s been a lot of celebrity brands in the last 5 or 6 years. Some of them have great products, but maybe not, as they rely too much on the celebrity. There is not enough thinking about the brand itself. So, it’s a great way to drive awareness and to have a celebrity as a partner, but it has to make sense. It has to be relevant. And you know, sometimes there’s a disconnect between the two. So, we’re very, very diligent and focused about thinking about those stories to make sense. 

It’s a fun place to work, and everyone loves it. We love to come to work, and we love to do what we do. We’ve got a pipeline of ideas that could take us the rest of our lives to bring to market. But right now, we’ve got a really nice core portfolio, and we’re enjoying what we do.

Well, Marc, thank you very much for your time. It has been definitely very interesting. Is there anything I haven’t asked that you would like to mention?

I think we have the original bottles that we did for Heaven’s Door, and we changed our label recently. So you can see the contrast. It’s kind of interesting. The original bottles took those gates, and we kind of blew them up on the bottle. So you didn’t see the whole image of it, and it looked cool. But when we decided to reduce it so you could see the whole part of the artwork, it felt much more premium, and you could really appreciate what you’re looking at better. So everyone loves the new label design. We liked what we started with, but this is even better.

And having Dylan as a partner, he’s a perfectionist, and you know he is with his music. He is with his art. I think he said once, “What do you do when you finally paint your masterpiece? You paint another.” He pushes us to constantly try to make everything better, even if it’s great. How will you make that better? We push ourselves to constantly try to come up with something that’s different and not just different to be different. Different, to try to make it even better than what we’ve done before. 

That’s not easy to do. There’s only so much innovation you can do in the whiskey space or the tequila space. But I would say that having him as a partner has pushed us to really come up with some great liquid, and the last release that we did, called the Exploration Series, I think, is the best release we have had to date. So, it’s been an exciting ride, and I think the opening of the distillery will open a new chapter for the Heaven’s Door brand.