He decided on the name Grey Goose because he used to sell an obscure French wine under that name decades before. His primary branding tactic also happened to equate to pure profit a gambit that was just crazy enough to work. He was going to double-down and charge way more than they did. So with that, Frank decided that his new vodka wouldn’t compete with the current players by undercutting, or even matching their prices. And in the go-go era of the dot-com’s, he wanted his vodka to say ‘LUXURY’. The kind of vodka you drank said something about you. Vodka was less about the place it was made, or about the ingredients, than it was about identity. That’s when Frank realized the magic that this neutral spirit represented: with a twist of marketing it could be anything. How could all these brands carve out a piece of the market against historic companies like Smirnoff and Absolut? As an industry veteran, he often marveled at the sheer number of brands that populated store shelves: this was a neutral spirit, after all. So, in 1996, flush with Jager cash and looking for a new market, Frank turned his attention to Vodka. Jagermeister became a sensation and with it, Sidney Frank and his company became the stuff of liquor industry legend. What seems ubiquitous now was, at the time, pure innovation.
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He even pioneered the concept of having teams of attractive salespeople dispense free shots and merchandise in bars and at events. Frank saw an opportunity and started stocking liquor stores in college towns, buying up billboards and populating them with ads making light of the products, err, ‘unique’ taste. To this day no one knows the real reason – college kids just being goofy, perhaps – but it was the start of something big. It was an investment that didn’t do much but keep the lights on, until for unknown reasons, college kids in Baton Rouge started drinking it like water. So Frank tracked down the European rights holder and secured the ability to distribute it in America.
Though it seemed to have a small market (German immigrants), it was also a reliable one. There he spotted bars lined with people drinking something called Jagermeister, a 70-proof, odd-tasting liqueur from their homeland. Little did he know he would find it while strolling from bar-to-bar in a part of New York City then populated almost entirely by German immigrants. Still, like many great men, he dug in and kept trying to find that elusive ticket to success. Frank experienced a lot of financial hardship, often buying luxury assets when business was good, only to turn around the liquidate them to keep the company afloat during hard times. After the untimely death of his wife, and a subsequent rift with the Rosentiel family, Frank decided to set off on his own, founding Sidney Frank Importing Co. Frank went to work in the family business, and showed a knack for it. Through friends at Brown, Sidney Frank met and married Louise Rosenstiel, whose father was then the chief of Schenley Distilleries (a spirits-industry powerhouse). Though ultimately he wouldn’t graduate (though he did donate $100 million to Brown after the sale of Grey Goose), he had found an avenue into a world of elites that would start him on his road to success. An astute student, he was accepted into Brown University, where he rubbed shoulders with the scions of some of the East Coast’s richest families. So how, exactly, did it all happen?īorn in 1919, Sidney Frank grew up poor in rural Connecticut, just a farm boy who had dreams of breaking the cycle of his family’s poverty. Nevermind that at the time there was no bottle, no distillery, and no vodka to take on that name, Frank had a vision.Ī mere 8-years later that vision would be sold to Bacardi for $2 Billion, and the ‘ultra-premium’ vodka sector the brand created would be the fastest growing in the spirits business.
One morning in the summer of 1996, a man named Sidney Frank called up his No.2 at Sidney Frank Importing Co., and told him he had finally figured out the perfect name for his new vodka venture: Grey Goose.
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