12/11/2023 0 Comments Cabin fever maple whiskey![]() ![]() “I don’t think I’ll ever stop doing this,” he says. But I mean, it felt good for about three months, but it doesn’t feel nearly as good as it does now to have my brand back.”īesides keeping the Cabin Fever flame burning in New England, Robillard has developed an experimental whiskey called Walrus Blood, for which he hopes to find a distributor as soon as possible. You have to customize the deal to satisfy your own desires and needs…. “When you’re doing something for yourself - you might be digging a trench, but if it’s your trench, you don’t mind digging it, you know?” To distillers who are weighing buyout offers today, he has some advice: “What you have to do is find out what you want to do with yourself after the deal. “I’ve got to tell you, I feel like I’m in love again!” he says. Robillard is thrilled to be running the show at Cabin Fever again. “They actually gave it back,” he says, “and I still have a great relationship with them.” It took about a year for Robillard to get his operation back up and running he kept the brand on the market by buying it from suppliers in markets where it hadn’t done well: “Alabama couldn’t sell it, well, hey, I’ll take your stock. In 2016, four years after acquiring Cabin Fever, Diageo offered Robillard his brand back - for free. I mean, you can call it craft, and you can make it the same way, but you can almost say the definition of craft is anything not Diageo.” I would buy a case of my Cabin Fever and a case of Diageo’s, and I couldn’t tell the difference. “I put it in the contract that the recipe can’t be changed. Something less quantifiable had changed as well. “You can’t sell maple down south, they don’t even know what it is…. Robillard attributes the problem to Diageo’s attempt to turn it from a regional brand to a national one. “We had private jets - we would fly in the morning, and then we’d take you out to dinner, and then we’d go to the clubs, and then we’d go to the hotel, and the next morning we’d fly to the next city, and do the whole thing all over.” But Cabin Fever never wound up meeting expectations, sales-wise. And Robillard, still the public face of Cabin Fever even if he was no longer distilling the product himself, agreed, at least at first. ![]() Me, I always wanted to be part of the brand.” Some people want to create the brand and they want to sell it, but they want nothing to do with it, they don’t want to travel. So I was always gonna get royalties, and I was always going to be the face of the brand and always be part of it, and that was important to me. And then I needed to always be part of the brand. “I mean, I was saving up to get my muffler fixed. “I needed a little money up front,” he says. Which is why, when Diageo came knocking in 2012, he was more than receptive to being bought out. Sales were strong in New England, but as is the case with most small businesses, cashflow was an issue. In 2006, Robillard quit his job to devote himself to Cabin Fever full-time.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |