Marc Farrell, founder & CEO of Ten To One rum, is a proud Trinidadian whose cultural ties to the Caribbean and broad business acumen propelled him to create contemporary rum blends that elevate the perception of the spirit and change the conversation about the entire category. His inspiration for Ten To One began when he noticed the discrepancies between how rum is consumed and perceived in the Caribbean compared to in the U.S. He attended MIT at age 16, followed by Cambridge University and Harvard Business School before holding a number of roles at Starbucks as its youngest Vice President, including eCommerce, U.S. Retail Lobby and Beverage Innovation. Throughout his career, Marc dreamed of creating a product that genuinely reflected himself and his Caribbean DNA.
The story of Ten To One begins in Trinidad and Tobago — that’s where I’m from, that’s where I’m born and raised, and I think in a lot of ways my relationship with the spirit can be traced back to those roots. I’m often reflecting on the fact that for so many Caribbean people, rum plays such an active role in all of these moments of celebration. If I think about Christmas at home with my family, or any of the other joyous occasions we have throughout the year, Trinidad Carnival…you’ll often find rum playing a role in all of these moments of celebration. It’s very much a part of our cultural fabric in many ways, so I think a big part of the inspiration for creating Ten To One has really been born out of a desire to find a way to bring that story to life in another market, here in the U.S.
Authenticity, versatility and history, or a sense of place. I think authenticity is important because, tying back to this idea of sense of place, when we really reflect on the centuries-long history that rum has had, and the heritage that surrounds the spirit, a lot of it ends up getting lost in some of the more caricatured narratives that you often see used to represent rum. So, trying to find avenues to represent the spirit, the category, the culture more authentically is super important, as is defining that sense of place. And I think versatility is incredibly important too. We have this saying — “anything you can do, rum can do better.” Unlocking all of these different occasions, all of those different cocktails for the everyday consumer, is a matter of opportunity for rum that I think has been untapped in many ways.
I think Ten To One is my contribution. The chance to be a founder of a brand in the category is meaningful in its own right, but more so I think doing that as a young Black man who was born and raised in the Caribbean, while trying to be an advocate for what rum, rum culture, Caribbean culture means to us, is certainly important. But seeing Ten To One resonate, not just through the lens of creating an amazing product but also through having a very authentic, very highly regarded brand story and narrative, is equally important as well. I would say that has probably been my, or our, major contribution to the category to date. Hopefully we have much more to contribute and many more exciting stories to tell.
The biggest benefit that the rum industry has given me, honestly, is an opportunity and a platform to tell the story of who I am and where I’m from. To me, this idea of rum being so inextricably tied to my Caribbean heritage and culture, my Trinidadian heritage and culture, is super, super important. As a young entrepreneur, you’re always looking for ways to create a product or tell a story that is really a reflection of you as authentically and as broadly as it possibly can be. I think that rum has provided a very unique channel and avenue to do that, so that’s probably been the single biggest gift. Something that’s really beautiful about creating any consumer product, but certainly in spirits, is that you have a chance to see people interacting with your product and enjoying it in real time. Seeing that bottle in someone’s hand, seeing somebody make a drink, seeing somebody try rum for the first time and having the chance to enjoy it, is probably the single most fulfilling thing about being an entrepreneur in that space, and I think that is a gift that has been given to us directly or indirectly by rum.
I’m passionate about many things! I’m passionate about sports — I’m a very competitive guy. I’m really passionate about culture, and I think that ties back to a lot of what you see with Ten To One as a brand. We think of it as an opportunity to showcase a really high-quality liquid and an amazing product, but also to tell the story of a culture through the lens of the brand. I’ve always been big on storytelling. If you look at every stop in my career, even prior to Ten To One, I’ve always been focused on consumer brands, focused on creating points of connection with those consumers, telling a story with which they can resonate. To me that is part personal point of passion and part professional opportunity.
Anywhere that has Ten To One *laughs*. What I would say is that, for so long, rum has been artificially limited to a very specific set of occasions, so you have people that answer that question with, “Oh yeah, when I was on spring break in Jamaica,” or “That one time I was sailing in the BVI.” And that’s super dope that that is where you’ve had a chance to experience rum, but it doesn’t need to be limited to those occasions. Those moments should make their way back with you to the U.S. whenever you return. Our bottle should feature very prominently at a gala or a fancy dinner party just as much as it might on the streets of Trinidad, so to me, favorite occasions are less about a specific place and more about the energy, more about the people you’re surrounded by, and more about this idea of these moments of celebration that are so important to Caribbean culture.
My favorite drink at the moment is probably a rum old fashioned. The founder’s choice for Ten To One is always dark rum with a splash of soda water — that’s easy, very delicious, and will always be my staple. But if you ask me about creating a cocktail, then the rum old fashioned is incredible. You put that in front of even the most staunchly resistant whiskey drinker, they’re immediately in love, and I think it’s an extraordinary drink myself.
It’s extraordinarily important to educate the rum consumer, because if you look at all of the major spirits categories out there, there’s probably the single biggest gap between industry fact and consumer understanding in the world of rum. Think about some of the basics around the category — Why is dark rum dark? Is it barrel-aged? What does that signify? What’s the difference between spiced rum and dark rum? Are rums more highly caloric? Do they have a bunch of sugar added? Can they be premium? Should they be premium? Even the basic question of, how do I mix rum? We spend a lot of time educating people on the value of the “origin serves,” as we call them: rum with soda water, tonic or a splash of coconut water, which are all really amazing combinations for folks to enjoy and experience our rum. I think once you can begin to cast off some of those old assumptions, stereotypes, and tropes in some cases, and introduce people to the beauty of the spirit on more of a standalone basis, get them more comfortable with how to drink it and how to share it, it’s only going to be a major boon to the category.
The first is to treat the exercise in the same way you would a whiskey tasting or a wine tasting or any other category that you have a tendency to curate or to approach with some level of curiosity or sense of discovery. Not just this idea that rum is meant to be a shot, or that it’s meant to be in a slushy cocktail; the attitude and the approach to it is incredibly important. Whenever we take somebody through a tasting, we always advocate exploring and experiencing the nose of the rum before going in and tasting and seeing what you discover in terms of the structure or the palate, so I think an aggregation of all of these exercises is also really crucial. I always tell people, what you smell is what you smell, what you taste is what you taste, so a piece of advice I would give is to trust your instincts. We’re not all sommeliers out there, certainly I’m not, but you’ll pick up notes that are a little bit reminiscent of some of your favorite foods or some of your favorite memories growing up, or things that your partner or your girlfriend might like, and all of those I think are equally valid. The last piece of advice I would give is to really try a spectrum or an array of different spirits so you can really begin to hone in on or calibrate what you have a passion for and what you have an interest in. In the same way that you might be able to tell someone that you love a merlot versus a pinot noir versus a cab…or talk about something that’s big and bold and bright, or high tannins — all of these things in the world of wine — you can actually get the same exact taste with rum or with any other spirit, You’ll begin to pick up some of those notes, and you’ll calibrate your own palate based on that.
I think we clearly have a number of profound crises in a number of countries at the moment. Yes, you have a healthcare crisis that is orbiting around COVID at the moment…I think we have a massive civil rights reckoning and a humanitarian question that has certainly been asked here in the U.S., and I think you’ve seen similar offshoots of it in the Caribbean and really anywhere else in the world, particularly where you have predominantly Black or folks of African descent or whatever the case is. The way I think about us playing a role there is just in lending a voice to the conversation; putting ourselves in a position to ask difficult questions of ourselves and of others, as a Black-owned, Black-founded business for sure. We’ve always tried to stay true to our roots as a brand, so when you talk about things like #CaribbeanMade, or #BeautyintheBlend, or you look at the seminar we just moderated around creatives using their platforms to advocate for social justice, I think a lot of those questions that maybe larger brands have a harder time asking, answering and reflecting to their consumer base…are the kind of foundations that we’ve built our brand on. I think we have a really, really critical role to play in helping to advance the agenda and advance the conversation around some of those crises or reckonings.
Maybe, I think it’s one of the ingredients. Anything you want to produce in today’s consumer landscape should have an element of sustainability that certainly should be moving the ball in that direction, fairly quickly and ambitiously at this stage, but again, I think that’s one ingredient. Like we said before, education is going to make a massive, massive difference for the consumer because ultimately, you need people who are calling for it, one, and two, who are also active in advancing their own journeys in that space. To me, those are the core elements that are required to get people to really start understanding and appreciating and celebrating rum for what it is. If you get to that point, where people don’t just think of rum as some input in some slushy cocktail or some throwaway drink, you’re going to hear more of those calls for a deeper understanding of the category. You’re going to hear more of those calls to hold producers and suppliers to a higher standard and call them to account. You’re going to hear more of those calls for preservation of the heritage of the distillation and the aging, the blend, those types of things, but we need to have more folks pounding the table in service of that, and that only comes when you have consumers and others in the category who are sharing the same level of enthusiasm and passion as a select few.
My goals are centered around building a business brick by brick. We’re very early in the game, we’re only in a couple of markets at this point; certainly I want to build something that is universally enjoyed very uniformly and pervasively here in the U.S., our primary market. There’s a great deal of pride that’s attached to being from the Caribbean, having a product that has found a place at home in Trinidad and elsewhere in the Caribbean as well, and you hope that you get to a place where this is an internationally known, highly regarded brand. To me, success doesn’t just manifest as a product or a spirit that is revered, but also continuing to represent the brand and the brand story in an authentic fashion that is very unique to how we see Ten To One in the world of rum, in that broader landscape. You hope that you’ll look back on it five years from now, ten years from now and be able to point to something that feels like it was a very active and hopefully iconic contributor to the progress of rum.
I have no plans to leave the rum industry because all of my plans are focused on building as outstanding and iconic a business as we can.
Education and evangelism. Ultimately in the spirits space, particularly when you’re a small brand, you don’t have big budgets, you’re not doing TV advertising or billboards or hosting Grammys parties. The number of touchpoints you have with the consumer can feel fairly limited, so I think a big part of that formula has to be thinking of the bartender as your customer as well. You want them to understand the finer points of your spirit, how you created it, why you created it, how it’s best used, how it came to be, the types of consumers who might enjoy it, and you’re going to ask them to find ways to project that onto their consumers who walk in and sit at the bar on a daily or weekly basis. So, I think of the bartender as a very critical fulcrum or pivot point for any young brand; it really amplifies the message that you’re sharing with your desired audience.
It’s a spirit with extraordinary history and amazing breadth, so really be proud of that and find ways to celebrate that. I think my advice would be that there really is no need to depart from telling that story in an authentic way that represents what we know and what we love. By the same token, taking a fresh look at how and where consumers spend their time today, and figuring out how you can build bridges into those categories so that we meet them where they’re at, is a pretty untapped and unexplored category for a lot of folks in rum, so those would probably be the major pieces of advice that I would offer to somebody who was, like myself, up and coming in the rum game.
People can visit Ten To One’s website www.tentoonerum.com, buy our rum at www.shoptentoone.com and keep up on the latest news and other original content on our Instagram page https://www.instagram.com/tentoonerum/
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