Build For Someone, Not Everyone

One of the biggest spirits acquisitions of the decade started with a single SKU and a very specific consumer.

When I moved to Austin four years ago, Lalo was the bottle everyone brought to dinner parties. This was right as they were finishing a raise that was oversubscribed with a very specific group of influential people. The kind of people who talk, host, and shape taste without trying to.

We spent time with some of the founders and early employees back then, and it was obvious they were running a different playbook.

Lalo is the rare story of how a one-SKU tequila brand broke through one of the noisiest categories in spirits and became the go-to bottle for a certain kind of consumer long before it became one of the biggest spirits acquisitions in the last decade, when it sold to Tito’s.

It’s a case study in focus, restraint, and understanding exactly who you’re building for.

Most brands enter tequila trying to win every consumer at once. Blanco, reposado, añejo, cristalino, the whole ladder.

Lalo went the opposite direction. They launched with blanco and stayed there. Even as they scaled, they held the line: blanco and a higher-proof blanco. That’s it.

They bet on a liquid defined by purity and transparency — pure tequila with nothing to hide. At a time when “clean” wasn’t yet a crowded word in spirits, they owned it.

Distribution followed the same discipline.

They entered the highest end of the market in the places their consumer already lived: Aspen, Austin, St. Barths, Miami, LA.

Not just everywhere in those cities either. Specific restaurants, bars, and members clubs. Always within arm’s reach of the right drinker. Always in rooms where being seen mattered more than being everywhere.

And they staffed those markets with people who were plugged into culture. People who could place the brand at the Met Gala one week and at the right dinner party the next. That’s how you build gravitational pull.

Even their merch strategy had discipline. Those hats weren’t freebies, they were strategic signals. You saw them on investors, founders, chefs, musicians, and friends of the brand who actually shaped culture. Highly selective gifts to the people who already had the microphone.

You don’t need every consumer. You need the right consumer early, then you build outward from there. You need clarity of product, clarity of point of view, and the conviction to stay narrow until the world catches up.

Lalo didn’t scale because they shouted from the rooftops. They scaled because they stayed small in all the right places until demand pulled them bigger. A lot of brands could take a page from that playbook.