The new spirit of distribution

Drinksology Kirker Greer’s chief commercial & strategy officer Ryan McFarland talks to Fionnuala Carolan about Spiritly’s arrival in the Irish market, the changing needs of the on-trade and how DKG’s unusual combination of brand creation, design, spirits and distribution is shaping its approach

Ryan McFarland is a drinks  industry veteran. Spanning  twenty years his CV includes  some of the biggest names  in global drinks, including Rémy  Cointreau, Bacardi and Molson  Coors, where he spent nine years as  general manager of its Irish business  before moving into international roles  focused on innovation and strategy.  Three years ago, however, he  returned to Belfast and joined a very  different kind of drinks business.  Drinksology Kirker Greer (DKG)  had begun life as a creative and  design agency specialising in alcohol,  but by the time McFarland arrived it  was already evolving into something considerably broader: a group  combining creative services, brand  development, spirits production and,  through Spiritly, direct-to-consumer  and business-to-business distribution.

For McFarland, that combination  was part of the attraction.  “I’m a drinks industry lifer,” he  says. “I had spent much of my career  working for very large businesses,  which can sometimes move at the  speed of an oil tanker. Here, I saw the  opportunity to be the speedboat.”  The speedboat analogy comes with  an immediate caveat.  “The only problem with being  a speedboat is that you feel every  bump!” he laughs.  Nevertheless, the past three years  have seen considerable growth. DKG  says it has doubled in size, increased  its staff by around 80% and invested  significantly in infrastructure.

The  group now employs around 50 people  across Belfast and the UK, with  McFarland citing compound annual  growth of approximately 28% over the  period.  The wider drinks environment,  of course, has hardly been  straightforward. Rising costs,  changing consumer behaviour and  continued pressure on hospitality  have created a challenging backdrop.  It is against that landscape that DKG  has chosen to expand another part  of its business into the Republic of  Ireland.  Spiritly Trade ROI is a digitalfirst  specialist wholesaler focused  on premium spirits and wine. Its  proposition is deliberately narrower  than that of a traditional broadline  drinks wholesaler, with more than  5,000 products available and an  emphasis on premium, luxury and  harder-to-source categories.  The key word, however, is not  disruption. It is complement.  “We want to complement the  Irish trade, not compete with it,”  McFarland says.

From creative agency to drinks ecosystem

To understand the Spiritly proposition,  it helps to understand how DKG got  here.  The company was established  around 16 years ago as a design  and creative agency specialising in  alcohol. Its work has ranged from  brand development and packaging  to bar design, visitor experiences and  the creation of hospitality concepts. DKG has worked with Irish Distillers, the Guinness Storehouse  and The Dead Rabbit in New York,  while its design and experience work  has extended to distilleries including  Roe & Co in Dublin and projects at  Hinch Distillery. The creative operation  remains central to the business.

“We see design as integral because  it keeps our fingers on the pulse of  what is happening in the industry  and allows us to influence trends,”  McFarland says.  The work can begin with a  relatively simple innovation brief,  or extend into something much  more comprehensive: a brand name,  trademark, visual identity, bottle,  liquid, distillery concept and visitor  experience.  DKG’s work at Roe & Co, for  example, included the Mind Map Room, an experience designed to  explore the flavours and creative  thinking behind whiskey.

Elsewhere,  the company has worked on the  visitor experience at Hinch and  continues to undertake design  projects across the Guinness estate.  There is a commercial calculation  behind the creativity, too.  “These experiences are about  creating an emotional connection  with the consumer,”

McFarland says.  “But they are expensive assets, so  they have to work. There’s no point  in building a beautiful distillery that  nobody visits.”  Much of DKG’s international work is  confidential, he adds, meaning there  are projects the company cannot  discuss publicly. But the underlying  principle is consistent: use creativity  to solve commercial problems and  create stronger connections between  brands and consumers.  That thinking eventually led to  what DKG calls its “Create, Build,  Deliver” model.  “We create brands, bars and  experiences. We build our own brands  and intellectual property through  Kirker Greer. And we deliver the  customer and consumer experience  through Spiritly.”

In McFarland’s description, the  result is effectively a 360-degree  alcohol and beverage ecosystem. A  brand can be conceived, developed,  built and ultimately delivered to an  outlet and consumer within different  parts of the same group.  The important element is the  feedback loop.  “We learn at every stage and feed  those insights back into the next  innovation project,” he says.

The Spiritly proposition 

Spiritly is the delivery component of  that model.  Spiritly.com operates as the group’s  direct-to-consumer business, while  Spiritly Trade has developed from  the smaller wholesale operation DKG  previously maintained in the North.  The distinction matters. Spiritly  Trade is not intended to replicate  the full-service model of Ireland’s  established drinks wholesalers.

“We’re essentially a digital-first  specialist wholesaler focused on  premium spirits and wine,” McFarland  says.  The business can draw on a  sourcing base that spans both the UK  and EU, while its existing consumer  operation gives it access to a  substantial range of products.  That range is one of its principal  points of difference.

But McFarland is  keen to position the business within,  rather than against, the existing Irish  distribution landscape.  “The Irish wholesale network is  very sophisticated,” he says. “There  are more than 100 wholesalers  operating across the country. We  don’t believe one business can cover  every possible spirit, expression,  flavour profile or niche category.”

Spiritly’s role, therefore, is to fill  some of the gaps created by an  increasingly diverse premium drinks  market.  A bar might have an established  core wholesale relationship but want  to develop a more extensive cocktail  programme, premium back bar or  specialist spirits list. That could mean sourcing a particular mezcal,  Japanese whiskey, Australian whiskey  or Belgian spirit that is not routinely  carried by its existing supplier.

Spiritly can also supply major  brands and McFarland points to  Jameson and Gordon’s as examples  but he sees breadth and specialist  sourcing as the more important part  of the proposition.

A market asking for  another route 

The decision to launch Spiritly Trade  in the Republic was not, McFarland  says, based solely on an internal  growth plan.  “The simple answer is that the trade was already asking us to do it.”

Irish customers were contacting  the business regularly looking for  help sourcing individual products.  Rather than treating those requests as  isolated opportunities, DKG decided  to test whether there was a broader  proposition.  The company ran a trial involving  20 outlets across Ireland, deliberately  selecting a mixture of locations and  businesses.  Among them were high-end  operators including Cask in Cork and  the Westbury in Dublin, alongside  businesses such as Dillon’s Hotel in  Letterkenny.  The objective was to establish  whether the proposition was  essentially a Dublin or Cork  phenomenon or whether the demand  extended further.  Repeat orders from several of the  trial customers gave DKG confidence  that the model had relevance beyond  the largest urban markets.

For customers, the attraction is  partly range and partly flexibility. Because Spiritly operates across  both consumer and trade channels,  it can carry products that might  otherwise struggle to justify the  rate of sale required by a traditional  wholesale model. Stock can  potentially be supported by demand  through the consumer business as  well as the on-trade.  There is also flexibility around  ordering. Spiritly Trade operates on a  bottle-pick basis, meaning customers  do not necessarily have to commit to  full cases and can place mixed orders.

Orders over €400 qualify for free  delivery, while account set-up is  handled digitally.  That digital-first approach is  perhaps the clearest indication of how  Spiritly wants to operate differently.

Making wholesale more transparent 

For McFarland, digital-first is less  about technology for its own sake  than about removing friction from the  ordering process.  The platform operates 24 hours  a day, allowing bar managers and  other customers to browse products,  check availability and order outside  traditional office hours.  Stock information is also central to  the proposition.

“If we’ve only got 10 bottles left, we  want the customer to know that,” he  says. “And if something they’ve been  waiting for comes back into stock,  we’ll tell them.”

That transparency extends to  products Spiritly cannot supply.  “If we can’t get something for a  customer, we’ll tell them,” McFarland  says. “We’d rather support them in  finding it elsewhere than pretend we  can supply something we can’t.”  It is a refreshingly straightforward  philosophy in a category where  availability can sometimes be opaque.  The aim, he says, is to combine  competitive pricing with “really good  and considered service”.

Differentiation in a difficult  market 

McFarland’s assessment of the Irish  on-trade is pragmatic.  “The industry is undoubtedly  challenging,” he says. “We’re seeing  outlets close, but at the same time  some of the businesses doing very  well are those with a differentiated  proposition.”

That differentiation can take many  forms. For one operator it might mean  cocktails; for another, an exceptional  spirits range or a particular category  specialism.  Over the past decade, Irish back  bars have become considerably  more diverse, with niche, premium  and luxury brands joining the  established core categories.

Whiskey  and gin were early drivers of that  development, but the premiumisation  trend has extended into mezcal,  agave spirits, Japanese whiskey  and an increasingly broad range of  international categories.  Not every venue needs to stock  everything.  But for an operator that wants to  build a reputation around a particular  category, access to breadth without  having to carry significant quantities  of stock can be useful.

Independent cocktail bars,  meanwhile, naturally require breadth  because their bartenders need access  to a wide variety of spirits to create  different drinks.  Spiritly’s core customer base  is what McFarland describes as  HORECO – hotels, restaurants and  cocktail venues – but the intention  is not to exclude other types of  operator.

More than a box of bottles  

Education is another area where DKG  hopes to differentiate its offer.  Spiritly Academy has been  developed from the training expertise  within DKG’s creative business, which  has worked with some of the world’s  leading bars on staff development  and training programmes.  McFarland is keen to frame  this as something broader than  simply addressing gaps in product  knowledge.

“As an industry, we need to recruit,  retain and develop staff consistently,”  he says.  The training can therefore be  tailored to experience and role.  Someone moving from bar back to  bartender might need support with  the fundamentals of working behind  a bar, while a more experienced  employee could access wine, category  or cocktail education.  Importantly, McFarland says,  the programme is not intended  simply to become a series of brand  presentations.  “We want to bring more value to  an outlet than simply delivering a  box.”

Building partnerships rather  than simply accounts 

Over the next three years, McFarland  says the ambition is not simply to  accumulate trade accounts.  Instead, Spiritly wants to build a  focused network of partner outlets  where it can provide support  beyond distribution, whether that  means education, sourcing, creative  work, product knowledge or help  developing an outlet’s proposition.

Geographically, Dublin, Cork,  Galway and Limerick represent  obvious opportunities, but the hotel  sector gives the business a naturally  broader footprint. The ultimate  measure of success, McFarland says,  will be whether customers genuinely  value the service.  The Irish launch of Spiritly Trade is  therefore not simply a new wholesaler  entering an established market. It  is an extension of a much broader  experiment in how a modern drinks  business can operate across the  different stages of the value chain.

And McFarland is clear about the  role he believes Spiritly can play.  “What we’re bringing is a specialist  premium range, digital accessibility,  flexible ordering and additional  support around education, sourcing  and the development of the outlet.  “If we can do that successfully in  Ireland, while supporting the existing  trade rather than competing with it,  then I think Spiritly Trade has a very  useful role to play.” ■