Conor Begley and Joe Cloyes have a frothy new venture.
The two entrepreneurs — Begley is the founder of Tribe Dynamics and Cloyes cofounded Youth to the People — have taken their business know-how to a bubbly new brand called Fathers.
Cofounded by the two with Steve Klei, Mark Harvey Kenney and Gabriel Rangel, Fathers aims to bring a prestige beauty level of ingredient transparency to the beer aisle.
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With successful exits under their belts — Begley’s to CreatorIQ and Cloyes’s to L’Oréal, both in 2021 — the duo has a proven track record of identifying white space. And while beer and beauty might at first seem completely unrelated, for Begley the connection was immediate. “The lack of transparency is something that really popped out to me,” Begley said of the beverage space. “I watched brands like Joe’s emerge with this combination of ‘here’s what’s in us’ and ingredient transparency, and saw this lack and a need for clean.”
The venture came about as the two, who sold their respective businesses around the same time, would meet over beers to talk about what was next. They spent $25,000 on testing beers with a lab to understand the key issues with many beers. “We found lead, arsenic. People are weird about plastic water bottles, but we were testing pale ales and IPAs that had 40 times more plastic than a water bottle,” Begley said. “One that we tested had 600 grains of sand per liter of beer.”
As with beauty, the vision is to move from niche to scale. Cloyes envisions Fathers becoming “that next great American lager brand,” he said.
There is one big difference between beer and beauty though. The former isn’t nearly as sku-intensive as the latter. “Guinness, Heineken — they’re known for one or two beers, that’s it. You just keep doing it over and over again, and you make it the best,” Cloyes said. “Part of our strategy is being focused on making one thing great. The goal will be to stay hyper focused on what we do, continue to try to make it cleaner.”
In addition to cleaning up the beer itself, nailing the flavor was another hurdle.
“Like skin care, or any beauty product, it has to work,” Cloyes said. “In beer, why you haven’t seen a lot of movement to an organic beer or cleaner beer is it has to taste good. That was our number-one issue, making it clean and then the best tasting beer possible.”
Early signs are good, with Fathers already garnering some industry accolades.
As with beauty, the distribution landscape is complex. “Beer is a much more fragmented market in terms of where you’re distributed,” Begley said. “If you look at the largest beer distributor or seller in California, they only have 10 percent share. It’s not much relative to beauty.”
The duo have created a pretty straightforward criteria for the distribution.
“They have to sell vegetables of some variety,” Begley said. “If you can find a small kind of store that might have some convenience aisles but sells some vegetables, it’s perceived as healthier. Vegetables end up being the defining criteria. But it could be a nice restaurant, a grocery store, a small market nearby.”
For now, don’t look for Fathers at a big sporting event or music festival. “A bar with a lot of beer on tap, or where a concert is, people drink what they know, usually,” Cloyes said. “We’re so new, you don’t know us. The places where people go for a little more for discovery, like a nicer restaurant or grocery store, is where we do better.”
The brand is currently only licensed to distribute in California, and most of that distribution is on the northern side of the state where the cofounders reside. “We’re going to start to expand across Northern California and then Southern California. Eventually we’ll add states,” Cloyes said. “It’ll take time. It’s a much slower distribution game than, say, Sephora.
“It’s getting really deeply penetrated in the area we’re in first, growing out slowly from that,” he said. “For us, that’ll be the way to build this thing and grow it the right way.”
