What happens when an experienced bar owner and a drinks branding strategist decide to build a cocktail brand together?
For brother and sister Antosh and Tash Samek, the answer became Rythmik Cocktails - a range of bar-quality bottled cocktails where mixology meets music, with every drink accompanied by its own carefully curated playlist.
But Rythmik wasn't originally supposed to become a drinks brand.
When lockdown closed Antosh's bar after more than a decade in hospitality, customers started asking whether they could have his cocktails delivered to their homes. What began with small batches and blank bottles soon revealed a much bigger opportunity.
Antosh brought years of experience behind the bar - including an earlier career with Bacardi Brown-Forman - while Tash brought a career spent creating and positioning drinks brands. Together, they began figuring out how to turn cocktails designed for a busy bar into a product capable of sitting on a retail shelf.
And that meant learning an entirely new business almost from scratch.
In this episode of The Drinks Entrepreneur Podcast, we explore:
๐ธ How lockdown transformed a bar product into a drinks brand - and why Antosh ultimately chose the scalability of bottles over opening more bars.
๐ต Why every Rythmik cocktail has its own soundtrack - and how music became an authentic part of the brand rather than simply a marketing device.
๐งช The obsession behind creating genuinely bar-quality bottled cocktails - from testing ingredients and perfecting shelf-stable recipes to refusing to compromise simply to reduce costs.
๐จ What happens when a professional brand strategist builds her own brand - and Tash's experience of going from working with major drinks budgets to discovering the very different realities of entrepreneurship.
๐ Breaking into retail and hospitality - including Rythmik's journey into John Lewis, events such as Henley Regatta and the Affordable Art Fair, and the growing opportunity within the on-trade.
๐ The economics of building a drinks business - why every marketing opportunity has to be a calculated gamble and the brilliantly simple question they use when considering expenditure: how many cocktails do we need to sell to pay for this?
๐ซ What it's really like building a company with your sibling - the advantages of trust, discovering how differently you work, finding clear responsibilities and even drafting Mum and Dad into the operation when Christmas demand takes off.
๐ก The lessons five years of entrepreneurship have taught them - including becoming comfortable with not knowing the answer, asking others for help and learning that sometimes you simply have to ask for the opportunity.
Rythmik is now stocked in John Lewis, has built a loyal direct-to-consumer following and is expanding its presence across retail, hospitality and events - but Tash and Antosh are equally candid about how much work sits behind that progress.
It's a conversation about cocktails, branding and music, but also about something much bigger: making the leap from being an expert in your profession to becoming an entrepreneur โ where suddenly everything is your responsibility.
๐๏ธ A brilliant founder story for anyone interested in drinks, hospitality, branding or the realities of building a consumer brand from the ground up.
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