Financial viability aside, isn't it asking for trouble to start a gay-owned company in an old-boy industry? Verzello and Goodwin did have to look hard for a brewery to produce the beer: 23 brewers turned them down, although only one actually said it had no interest in pursuing that market. The Lion Brewery, in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., agreed to take Black Sheep on. "The management was brand-new," says Verzello, and it was hungry for customers. The couple expected wholesalers to have reservations as well, but they didn't. Here the partners' target market may have actually worked in their favor. "Distributors are closer to the customer than brewers are," says Verzello. "They know how lucrative the gay market is." The Armory, a gay bar in Atlanta, is one of the largest liquor-selling venues in the state of Georgia.
The founders knew of at least three earlier attempts to create a beer for the gay market, and they saw much that they could improve upon. The earlier products were private-label brands (basically, someone else's beer with the brand's label pasted on). "They had crappy packaging, and the beer wasn't very good," Verzello says. Someone might try a gay-produced beer as a novelty or out of community loyalty, he says, but that only opens the door. "People won't continue to buy a beer that they don't like."
Besides, the brand names of those earlier beers -- one was called Pink Triangle, and another Pride -- smacked of patronization. Black Sheep Light Lager, in contrast, makes only a sly reference to the owners' sexuality and that of the drinkers they've initially targeted. Verzello and Goodwin intend Black Sheep's ads and promotional materials to appeal to gays and straights alike. The beer's label reads, "Our taste runs counter to the traditional. Apart from the crowd. Proudly unique . . . a beer . . . as out of the ordinary as the people who drink it." That's a message the founders hope will appeal to anyone harboring even the slightest rebel complex. Recent marketing campaigns for Dewar's White Label Scotch, Midori Melon Liqueur, and Skyy Vodka have all used similarly ambiguous language to market to straights and gays.
Verzello and Goodwin budgeted $2,000 a month per market for advertising. If the amount seems low, it's because ads placed in gay publications are considerably cheaper than the same ads in mainstream publications. A full-page four-color ad in The Southern Voice, a newspaper directed toward Atlanta's gay population, ran them $450, as opposed to $4,000 for a comparable ad in Creative Loafing, an alternative paper serving the same geographic market but not specifically targeted toward gays. The duo also scored a lot of free publicity in Atlanta by playing up the "local boys make good" angle of their story as well as the idea of a gay couple starting a company together. They amassed 57 local media mentions in the first month in their home city, including numerous mentions in The Atlanta Constitution-Journal, as well as local TV and radio interviews.
In August 1994 the David & Mark Brewing Co. introduced Black Sheep at the Atlanta premiere of Tony Kushner's play Angels in America, the first of numerous on-site marketing events. Verzello and Goodwin invited the local media and 150 restaurant and bar owners to the opening-night party, offering them the chance to be among the first to taste the beer. "It got a lot of people talking about the new 'gay' beer," says Verzello. For a month after the event, bar owners and managers called him, and when he did start knocking on doors, he reports, people knew who he was, which made for easier sales.
Based on their Atlanta experience, the founders developed a marketing formula that they thought would apply elsewhere. They would first get the attention of the local gay market through ads and stories run in local gay newspapers and magazines and through their support of social and fund-raising events to which gays would normally be attracted. Concurrently, they would make sales calls on local gay bars and restaurants, just as they had in Atlanta. Then, once they had some distribution in a city, they would capitalize on the fact that many of the managers and staff of mainstream establishments are gay and would happily help them move Black Sheep into nongay venues. The cultural events they had sponsored and would sponsor didn't attract an exclusively gay crowd, and thus would aid the founders in their mainstream push. Black Sheep had already cracked numerous mainstream venues in Atlanta: only half of the more than 100 local bars and restaurants that were carrying Black Sheep a year after its debut served a predominantly gay clientele. The founders figured that with the correct positioning, their beer could continue to appeal to all drinkers.
But Verzello and Goodwin have run into trouble trying to bring the beer to other cities. In Washington, D.C., the founders' first foray away from home, "we expected the Atlanta experience all over again," says Verzello. But in Atlanta they were the hometown boys, and in D.C. they were not. The local press was not impressed and did not deliver much free publicity. After four months of trying, the company managed to get its beer into just 20 outlets in the Washington area before backing away. "We went too fast. We didn't have a full-time rep," says Verzello. "We were still too focused on Atlanta."
Hoping to fare better in Manhattan, Verzello hired a full-time New York sales rep before the beer's Big Apple launch, in September 1995. The rep had experience in generating publicity. "We know how much PR helped in Atlanta," says Verzello. "And we know how much it hurt not to have it in D.C." The New York papers did publish some stories, and the rep was able to get the beer into some of the city's most popular gay clubs -- but not enough of them. After three months New York hadn't welcomed Black Sheep any more than Washington had, and Verzello and Goodwin put the Big Apple on hold as well. This time, Verzello says, it was because the sales rep didn't work out -- that and the fact that the company ran short of cash. With its seed capital long since spent, the business wasn't generating enough cash to support growth efforts outside Atlanta.
