Building Categories from Scratch: Customer Discovery Over Market Research
From The MAFFEO DRINKS Podcast: Category creation strategies from Guillaume Lambrecht (Supasawa), Michael Ballantyne, and Daniel Szor (Cotswolds)—direct customer discovery, 60+ iterations, and why building categories takes years not months.
Creating entirely new categories in the drinks industry requires fundamentally different methodologies than competing within established markets.
Through conversations with founders who have successfully built new categories from personal problems, we've identified consistent approaches that prioritize direct customer discovery over traditional market research and theoretical planning.
The Personal Problem Origin
The most successful category creation often begins with founders solving problems they personally experience. Guillaume Lambrecht's development of Supasawa started when he recognized citrus-related operational challenges that bartenders faced daily but hadn't identified as solvable problems.
His approach required extensive observation of actual bar operations to understand the scope and impact of these workflow issues.
We discussed how Guillaume's methodology involved entering bars and engaging in conversations about cocktail operations, allowing professionals to naturally reveal their operational pain points. The consistent patterns emerged: inconsistency from fruit variations, waste from spoilage, time consumption in daily prep, and quality control challenges across service periods.
Michael Ballantyne's category creation followed a similar personal origin. His frustration with whisky-drinking friends who wouldn't appreciate tequila led him to explore ways of bridging that gap.
Rather than accepting this as an unchangeable consumer preference, he investigated whether product innovation could address the underlying resistance.
Daniel Szor from Cotswold's Distillery approached category creation from personal passion as well. As a whisky enthusiast, he wanted to create something he would genuinely want to drink himself, in a location he found beautiful and meaningful. This personal motivation provided an authentic purpose that sustained the lengthy development process required for true category building.
Direct Validation Over Market Research
All three bypassed traditional market research in favor of direct customer validation through real-world testing.
Their approaches differed in execution but shared the principle of learning from actual customer interactions rather than theoretical analysis.
