JW Wiseman: Founder & CEO of Curious Elixirs

Episode 663

On this episode of The Kara Goldin Show, we’re joined by JW Wiseman, Founder and CEO of Curious Elixirs, a brand that is redefining social drinking with bold, booze-free craft cocktails infused with adaptogens. JW launched Curious Elixirs before the sober-curious movement became mainstream, pioneering a new way to enjoy complex, sophisticated cocktails without alcohol.
During our conversation, JW shares how he turned a personal wake-up call into a thriving brand, the challenges of bootstrapping a business in the beverage space, and what it takes to create one of the most innovative non-alcoholic beverage brands on the market. We dive into the evolution of the sober-curious movement, how Curious Elixirs became a staple in Michelin-starred restaurants and top nightclubs, and why he believes the future of social drinking is changing.
Whether you’re an entrepreneur, a beverage industry insider, or simply curious about alcohol-free alternatives, this episode is packed with insights on brand-building, perseverance, and shaking up an industry. Now on The Kara Goldin Show.

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Transcript

Kara Goldin 0:00
I am unwilling to give up that I will start over from scratch as many times as it takes to get where I want to be. I want to be you. Just want to make sure you will get knocked down. But just make sure you don’t get knocked out, knocked out. So your only choice should be go focus on what you can control. Control. Hi everyone, and welcome to the Kara Goldin show. Join me each week for inspiring conversations with some of the world’s greatest leaders. We’ll talk with founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs and really, some of the most interesting people of our time. Can’t wait to get started. Let’s go. Let’s go. Hi everyone, and welcome back to the Kara Goldin show today. I’m super excited to be joined by JW Wiseman, who is the founder and CEO of an incredible brand called Curious Elixirs, and it’s a brand that is reshaping the way we think about social drinking. JW launched Curious Elixirs a decade ago, well before the sober curious movement took off, pioneering non alcoholic craft cocktails with bold flavors and all kinds of incredible benefits. His mission is to create complex, booze free cocktails that offer the same sophistication and social experience as traditional drinks, and he’s definitely succeeded in doing that. It’s I absolutely love the product and the brand, so I cannot wait to hear a lot more about Curious Elixirs, not only about the product, but also about JWs journey and building this incredible company and being an entrepreneur. So JW, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Kara, super excited to have you here. So first of all, can you give us the definition the Master, the Master himself? Can you give us the definition of Curious Elixirs? What is the company for anyone who is not familiar with it.

JW Wiseman 2:03
So curious, elixirs are the world’s best booze free beverages. We make non alcoholic craft cocktails and wine alternatives infused with adaptogens to help your body unwind. So it’s something that you can have while you’re hanging out with friends, or if you want to unwind after a long day, something sophisticated, like you said, something that is going to have a beginning, middle and an end to it when you drink it like it’s got to be a full sensory experience, so that you feel like you’re getting something that is special, that is made just for you. And it really came out of, you know, my own being a cocktail nerd, and really like drinking way too much. And you know, after One Crazy Night of 20 drinks, I woke up the next day without a hangover, and I was like, wow, I gotta transform my relationship with alcohol and Curious Elixirs. Was born that was well over a decade ago. That’s incredible.

Kara Goldin 2:57
So over a decade ago and today, there’s a lot of other drinks out there. The movement overall, I think, has really taken off, not just in the cocktail category, but, of course, in the beer category, non alcoholic beer and other spirits too. So how did you decide one day that I’ve got to go and create these products, because it was so different 10 years ago, no one was talking about this. And I mean, it’s quite the risk to go and just hang your hat on this idea, especially when no one else is really doing it. I guess being a first mover is really essentially the topic here. So how did you have the courage to go and go and create this?

JW Wiseman 3:47
Well, it came out of a personal need, you know, and personal passion, you know, back in, back in those days, when I was first changing my relationship with alcohol, I was the head of marketing for a digital media company called Thrillist, and, you know, the best restaurants and bars and events going on in your city. And I loved helping these 1000s of mom and pop restaurants across the country in like 21 different cities like to help them get their start. So being in a startup environment already that kind of helped me have the confidence to say, Oh, you can get from zero to one. You know, the question is, how you get from one to 10? But it came out of a personal need and a desire. I was a big cocktail nerd for a really long time, and I asked myself the question after that crazy night of 20 drinks of like chasing the dragon, like, Could I make like a non alcoholic Negroni? Could I make a non alcoholic? Dark and Stormy? Could I make a non alcoholic chocolate, old fashioned? You know, these are the questions that I started asking myself. I didn’t have the answers, but I had a lot of questions, and that’s ultimately why we ended up calling the company curious, because I was curious about what life looked like with less alcohol. You fast forward a couple of years. Yes, and you know, miraculously, this term sober curious gets coined, and that really put a name to the movement, even though we’d already been like around for a few years. That really helped build up a good head of steam for our little company, so that people be like, You know what? I am interested in drinking less and seeing what life is like with less alcohol. And now we’re starting to see hundreds of brands kind of validate this idea. People are really flocking to it and kind of asking themselves, what do I want my life to be like? Do I want to be eating less gluten? Do I want to be having less alcohol? How do I want to feel? What kind of person do I want to be? And that’s really important for people to ask themselves those questions, and I’m just thrilled to see that people are really starting to take action on that, on these questions that we’re all asking ourselves. So

Kara Goldin 5:52
the beginning stages, you mentioned you were in a totally different industry. So you’re at Thrillist, you were dealing with restaurants, but very different still from actually going and creating a product, a company as you have, what was the first step that you said, you know? Was it a business plan? Was it, you know, figuring out what you were going to put these drinks in? Was it figuring out how many SKUs? What was kind of those early days of Curious Elixirs, like

JW Wiseman 6:23
the first step, you know, was really talking to my existing business partners. My brother and I had opened a whiskey bar while I was at Thrillist. So, you know, I was in the hospitality industry already. And so, you know, when you live in a in a big city, and you know, you have access to public transportation or taxis, you can drink an awful lot and still be highly functional. And that’s one of the things that I did, was I started asking some of these people in the industry, like, what do you do when people come out and ask and they’re like, Oh, I make them a bitters and soda. Well, I got really bored with bitters and soda very quickly. And one of my friends, you know, had been sober and in AA for a few years, and I asked him, like, hey, what do you drink when you’re not drinking? He’s like, Well, I drink a ginger beer. And he’s like, if you’re lucky, they have a ginger beer. And that is like 60 grams, like six zero grams of sugar. And, you know, as I started exploring, I also, you know, I left Thrillist. Still had the Whiskey Bar. I had made my own growth marketing agency called good business, and I was working with companies like daily harvest, you know, super foods, smoothies and soups, helping them go national and other clean food brands. So I started learning about adaptogens. I learned about refined sugars and what they do to the body. And so I said to myself, if I’m going to start tinkering with these and start making these things in my kitchen, which is what I did, then I need to make them with kind of like a wellness mindset. You know, have them from the beginning, try and make them as clean ingredient as possible, because I knew that once we get further down the road that you’re going to need to have these without, like, a bunch of funny ingredients in them, you know, like, keep the artificial stuff out. And that’s what was really the hardest part, you know, is making something that’s delicious without, you know, using artificial stuff. So I was talking to people, talking to bartenders, mixologists, restauranteurs, and also just tinkering in my kitchen. You know, I started to learn more from herbalists and things of that nature as well. And, you know, it’s 100 conversations to kind of like, get going, and you have a lot of people tell you you’re nuts. And my answer is, like, are you nuts enough? You know, yeah, that’s really what you have to beat in order to start something. I

Kara Goldin 8:42
love it. So how many SKUs did you actually launch with? We launched

JW Wiseman 8:45
with one SKU, you know. And the plan was to, you know, as you might see from our lineup now, there’s curious number one through nine. And, you know, we launch one new elixir a year. So we’ve been around for 10 years, and curious zero, which will be our 10th elixir, will take us back to the beginning. So we’ll have curious zero through nine, starting in May, no starting next month. So that’s going to be really interesting to see how we go from one skew and constant, iterative testing, like I read every review that comes into curiouslixirs.com and we try to make our drinks better and better and better over the years, because I feel like our recipes are never over, because as long as we focus on making the world’s best versions of what these drinks are, then we don’t really have any competition. We’re just competing against ourselves.

Kara Goldin 9:38
So you’ve really focused on bars, restaurants, market overall and as well as direct to consumer. And you and I were talking about, we, you haven’t really gone towards the retail side of things. You’re in some boutique businesses. But how difficult was that to you? Convince especially 10 years ago, maybe it’s gotten a little bit easier, but still, maybe a lot of bars and restaurants are thinking, we can just do this ourselves. I mean, why would we do this when you know here you are putting an incredible non alcoholic drink together for them, and so many people are coming in. I mean, it’s, it’s super great, but you still have to educate people and get them to say yes. So how difficult was that?

JW Wiseman 10:26
Oh, hugely difficult. In the early years, it’s gotten easier and easier. There’s been a couple of inflection points around that, you know, like my partner’s in the Whiskey Bar. They totally didn’t get and they even said, you know, in the in the beginning, they’re like, you know, I may be missing something, but I sell alcohol, you know, so if, if somebody comes in they want something on alcoholic, I make them a lemonade. Well, what we make is not lemonade. What we make is not soda. We make things that these bars and restaurants could only make if they devoted hundreds of hours and multiple years to making these. Because, you know, when we were first starting, you know, if you want something that’s like bitter, or if you want something that’s smoky, you have to make a custom alcohol free extract in order to do that, no bar or restaurant has the equipment to do that, or very, very few, if at all. And so the conversations have gotten easier and easier as the smart ones, like the top five to 10% of restaurants have kind of wised up to the fact that they can make more money by offering world class non alcoholic drinks that also don’t take their bartenders five minutes to make you know, as someone who you know owned a high volume Whiskey Bar, you don’t want to be having something that takes six things off the rail and mixing that’s going to lose you money, especially with labor costs being where they are. So what we do is we make it super easy to have a ready to garnish drink. You know, you don’t have to add anything except the garnish and ice to our drinks, and that really completes the flavor profile. And I’ll give you a perfect example of like, the types of places that are making more money now, like Blue Note jazz club, one of the most famous performance venues in the world, here in New York City, in Greenwich Village, and their general manager, you know, he got sidelined by one of his own employees at their holiday party, and a sober employee of his said, We’ve got to be doing better for our sober guests and for guests who are drinking less, were leaving money on the table. And he’s like, really. And then he looked at it, and he he sought us out. And then once he had curious on the menu, he went from $0 to over $10,000 a month in incremental revenue just selling Curious Elixirs. That’s a lot of money for a place that is, you know, not a couple 1000 people in the venue that they have a capacity of 300 so that’s real money that places are just leaving on the table. And now the smart ones are really starting to get it, and they can’t just make some of these complex drinks easily. You know, that’s why we focused on making things that are very specific, like any bar restaurant, can make a fancy lemonade with a fancy garnish and and sell it for, you know, 10 to $12 anybody can do that. But are people going to come back for that drink a second time? Are they going to get two of them? No, so that’s where they’re going to lose people, because people want to go back to a place where they know that they’re going to have something spectacular, you know, something that’s both familiar and also nourishing, and hopefully makes their body feel good too. That’s one of the key differentiators for us, is we have things that, like, subtly support the body, subtly make you a little bit more connected to your people when you’re hanging out.

Kara Goldin 13:35
So is there a runaway bestseller of all of your SKUs?

JW Wiseman 13:41
It depends on the season. You know, like in the summertime, you’ll see something like curious number four, our Sicilian sprints. That one will do great in the summertime, yeah. And then, surprisingly, though, even things like curious number nine, which is not a wine, it’s curious number nine, but it’s our Rosie rose a and that one has been doing well. We just launched that last May. All four seasons, sparkling Rose is selling really well. Didn’t really expect that, but I think it’s also because we have, you know, a million plus customers all over the country. And you know, if you’re buying something in Phoenix, Arizona, it’s a different, a little bit warmer down there, you might want to have some sparkling rose any time of year. So those are a couple that like do really, really well.

Kara Goldin 14:24
So you have a pretty nice direct to consumer business. You talked a little bit. You had some experience in direct to consumer. How different is that business versus, you know, selling into blue note, for example, for you, or for any entrepreneur, like any sort of lessons. And would you do it again? Would you start it earlier and really make sure that that’s taking off? Because I would imagine people are sharing to see your brand when they’re going into these restaurants, and then, you know, they’re interested in. And getting it at home. So it’s a natural thing for you to sell those as well. But I I’m so curious. I think we

JW Wiseman 15:07
would do it a little differently if I were to do it again. I think we would start working with distributors a little bit earlier. If I were to do this again, we were self distributed for the first nine years of the business, and now we have a few distributors across the country, but we’re still learning, you know, we have a lot to learn in that space. And when I was first researching this, you know, over a decade ago, it was clear to me that so many beverage brands start and they go with a retail first strategy. And I was like, Okay, let’s do the Warren Buffet thing. Let’s, let’s do the opposite of what everybody else does. Let’s go direct to consumer first. And that’s also what I knew how to do, you know, like, I knew how to do that. So I knew we could be successful at it. And we made subscription a really key part of our business, because, from my experience at daily harvest, I knew that that was going to keep money flowing in and cash flow, you know, cash is like oxygen to a business. If you don’t have cash, you’re out of business, and we don’t have any investors, we don’t have any venture backed funding. So, and that’s something that is really tied in with our mission of transforming how we drink socially. I felt like we could either we couldn’t serve both masters. If we want to serve the mission, it can’t just all be about money. We have to make money in order to achieve the mission, but we’d have to put the 20, the 40, the 80 year mission first, and that is really why we’ve done it that way. And it’s been it’s been interesting to see how some of our bets have really paid off really well. But to your question, we definitely would have started with more distributors earlier if I were to do this again, because, like, one of the distributors we have in in Michigan, for example, incredible partner, you know, and they’ve been really helping us get into restaurants and into our first kind of retail environments, into, like, some of the upscale supermarkets and stuff like that, as experiments. And it’s selling really well there. And that’s something that we wouldn’t have been able to just do by ourselves with, like a scrappy team of, you know, 20 people. That’s

Kara Goldin 17:05
so interesting. So what has surprised you about, I guess, sort of the journey of of building a physical goods product company, as you have, I mean, you had been in the media industry, very different, very complicated as well. So you clearly are a glutton for punishment going back into an industry, going back down to the bottom, and starting, starting again to go and build something incredible. But what have you learned that’s kind of surprised you about the physical, good space that maybe when you know a friend comes to you and says, Oh, I’m gonna go start a beverage company. What do you say? I

JW Wiseman 17:48
say to them, do it get started now. Yeah, like, don’t, don’t delay. We have, you know, I don’t know about you, but I have this inner critic in my head that is, you know, constantly second guessing. You know, what I want to do, and it’s important to listen to that inner critic, but I’ve learned that that inner critic is just trying to help me be better, really, you know. And I think that’s one of the things that surprises me. And I say this to people when they come to me and they’re like, I want to start, you know, a beverage business. There’s a woman who I mentor a little bit, and she came to me a few years ago and was asking, like, Oh, hey, would you have any advice? And I was like, reformulate your product now and make it clean ingredients. And that is something that I wish she had done three years ago. They’re doing it now. And she’s like, you know, you told me to do this, and I wish I had followed your advice three years ago. So my advice is, do the hard work up front, make it exactly how you want it to be, and make it as clean as possible. Because 10 years from now, people are going to be if you’re successful, people are going to be like, Oh, they did it the right way, and they have a reputation for being the best that, I think is the best way to keep yourself separated from everybody else in the market, because I’m kind of surprised by Well, there’s hundreds of non alcoholic brands out there, but maybe 1% of them are clean ingredient lists. That’s pretty surprising to me. So just just because something is non alcoholic doesn’t mean that it’s good for you. So I encourage everyone to, like, read their ingredient labels, be a curious person, and and also ask yourself how you feel after drinking or eating something like your body’s going to keep the score right, like it’s going to tell you what’s going on. That’s

Kara Goldin 19:29
awesome. When did you know that you had a business that was it was going to make it right? Founders are constantly, I think, competing against themselves, right? So they hit these goals, they set another goal, right? And there’s this constant relationship. Maybe it’s that voice in their head, but it’s this, they don’t stop, right? It’s never kind of good enough, so which is hard, right? And it’s consistent across so many entrepreneurs and founders that i. Read about or or interview on the show as well. But when did you know that? Okay, we’ve got to do this, you know, I’m all in. It’s going to make it.

JW Wiseman 20:13
You know, it was actually very early, and it was, it was even before we launched our Kickstarter. It was watching Martha Stewart speak at Summit Series, and I’ve been toying with this idea for a while, and somebody asked Martha the question, Was there ever a moment where you doubted yourself, where you thought the chips were down, and, you know, you thought things might not work out? And without hesitation, she said, Nope, never, not once. And her unbelievable courage and her confidence. It struck me like a bolt of lightning that I couldn’t borrow, that I could borrow, that I was like, This is what I’ve been wanting to do. I’ve been getting in my own way. This business is starting now. It’s time to go, and I knew then that it would be a success. How

Kara Goldin 20:58
many people do you have in your company now, full time,

JW Wiseman 21:01
full time, about 20, and we have about 30 people who work on it, total.

Kara Goldin 21:07
That’s awesome. Are you only in the US? Do you have international business as well? Only

JW Wiseman 21:13
in the US right now, we are testing out some things to Canada. And, you know, similar to the kind of, like, the distribution you know thing where, you know, where it’s like, I need to learn a lot more. You know, we’ll be looking for good partners in those other countries in order to people who just know their country inside and out and know the food and beverage space. Because we’re, you know, we’re never gonna know these countries the way that they do. So right now, we’re really focused on continuing to evolve the product line, and which is pretty much, you know, almost set, like we’ve almost got our 10th skew out there, but then we’ve got to refine and then we have to take it across the world.

Kara Goldin 21:56
Who was, I was interviewing somebody the other day, and I asked him the question of how many SKUs he had. And he had been talking about how he had to do skew rationalization and really look at it. And I’m like, but how many SKUs Do you have? And he’s like, Oh, 270 and I was just, I was like, wow, yes. I was like, come on. I said, you really need that many. And anyway we we launched into that whole conversation. I thought it was fascinating. So do you think you need more more skews in a in a line of products? Or, you know, there’s this also this thinking that sometimes too many skews is, I guess what I would say is, the consumer will always say, what else do you have, right? Like, but I think at some point, you know, what’s the Steve Jobs said? Like, you tell your consumers you don’t necessarily ask them, it’s the luxury

JW Wiseman 22:54
playbook, right? Dominate the customer. Yeah. And, you know, we love listening to our customers, and they certainly want more flavors. But I try to think of Curious Elixirs as almost like trying to create the perfect non alcoholic drink list. We probably don’t need to have 50 different drinks on there. You know, probably like a dozen will be good. I think we will probably need to have a couple more, but there may be ones that we cycle in and out over the years. You know, I think that our core line of curious, zero through nine will be our core line, and then we might have a few others that come up over the course of the next few years. But I don’t think we need to have dozens and dozens, you know, we just need to have, like, a really good, tight list. It’s kind of like the paradox of choice, right? You know, if you have too many options, people know what to do, you know, and then they’re less satisfied with what they get. So my thinking is, have a good height curated menu, and that’s enough, and that we make it very specific, make it things that bartenders can’t create on their own, you know that? Because then it solves a problem for them too. Because we’re here not just for the end consumer, but we’re also trying to help these restaurants and bars, comedy clubs, theaters and business networking events, festivals, trying to make all these places make it easy for them to have a world class non alcohol, non alcoholic option, like curious behind the bar, because what it does is that’s how you change culture. When you you know, at the artists after party for Coachella last year, they asked us to be there to have Curious Elixirs behind the bar because they specifically wanted adaptogen, adaptogenic, non alcoholic options, because the artists were asking for it, that means that something’s changing, and we have to pay attention to that so that hopefully, two generations from now, when people are going to a wedding, people can just have, like, a glass of champagne, or they can have a glass of curious elixir number seven, and it’s not a big deal. It’s like expected that people are going to be drinking whatever it is that they want, and they’re not just quitting. One specific thing that has been told to them by their parents generation.

Kara Goldin 25:03
So what are you most excited about for Curious Elixirs in, say, the next few months?

JW Wiseman 25:12
Oh, the thing I’m most excited about is the great curious cocktail party. This will be the third year of doing that, which is on May 14, 2025 it’s a Wednesday night. We’re throwing 100 parties in 100 cities all on the same night. So that’s what I’m excited about. It’s going to be the biggest sober, curious gathering on the planet. It’ll be a constellation of celebrations. So that’s going to be really fun. And we’ve done it the past two years, and it’s just amazing to see what people come up with. Because, you know, some people are throwing a, you know, a backyard barbecue in Nashville, Tennessee, with singer songwriters playing guitars, and then other people are having a Bollywood movie night in Brooklyn, and other people are having a bonfire on the beach in San Diego. But they’re all drinking curious and they’re all toasting to their own choices when it comes to alcohol. And I just think that’s fantastic. I’m really excited to see what people come up with this year.

Kara Goldin 26:09
I love it. So JW, thank you so much for the incredible conversation. You’re doing some amazing things with Curious Elixirs and such a great company that you felt you should be really proud. So it’s really, really terrific. And if you have not tried Curious Elixirs, I hope that you will head over to Curious Elixirs.com also ask for it in your local establishment. And you’re doing such an incredible job. You also have a podcast too, the Stay curious show, which is also very terrific. So everyone needs to tune into that too. So thank you again for coming on and thanks everyone for listening. Thank you Kara, thanks again for listening to the Kara Goldin show. If you would please give us a review, and feel free to share this podcast with others who would benefit. And of course, feel free to subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode of our podcast. Just a reminder that I can be found on all platforms. At Kara Goldin, I would love to hear from you too. So feel free to DM me, and if you want to hear more about my journey. I hope you will have a listen or pick up a copy of my Wall Street Journal, best selling book, undaunted, where I share more about my journey, including founding and building. Hint, we are here every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Thanks for listening and goodbye for now. You.

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