Enemigo tequila taking on George Clooney’s Casamigos, according to 28-year-old founders

Max Davies-Gilbert (left) and Robin Clough, cofounders
of Enemigo.
Enemigo

• Robin Clough and Max Davies-Gilbert are the 28-year-old
  British founders of luxury tequila brand Enemigo.
• The brand is taking on George Clooney’s Casamigos, which
  was bought by Diageo for $1 billion
  in 2017.
• Enemigo was valued at $5 million after just 5 months of
  trading in January.
• It’s already in 80 locations in London and is served every 90
  seconds during drinking hours.
• It’s slightly more expensive than Casamigos, but the pair
  believes they have the better product.
• Enemigo will launch in New York in November.

With 206 million bottles of tequila sold in the US last year (and
tequila cocktails even being
served at royal weddings),
tequila is quickly becoming the spirit of the moment — and
there’s a new brand coming to town.

Robin Clough and Max Davies-Gilbert are the 28-year-old British
founders of Enemigo, the award-winning luxury
tequila taking on George Clooney’s success story
Casamigos, which was bought by Diageo for $1 billion in
2017.

Enemigo has made quite the mark on the drinks scene since its
launch in August last year.

In just over a year, it has won
five awards across three continents — including Double Gold
and Gold at the Global Spirits Comp in Las Vegas, The Master’s
Medal in the 2017 Luxury Masters in London, and two Double Golds
in the China Wine and Spirits Awards in Hong Kong.

According to the brand, an Enemigo tequila is served every 90
seconds between 4 p.m. and 4 a.m. in London, where the brand is
stocked in 80 venues including The Ritz, The Connaught, and
Annabel’s.

And it’s now heading to New York, where it says it plans to take
on the likes of “Clooney’s Casamigos, Patron and Don Julio on
their home turf of the US.”

Clough and Davies-Gilbert may be the youngest heads of an
international luxury spirits brand, but they seem to be onto
something.

Tequila is currently the fastest growing spirit in the US,
according to the brand.

A $20 million brand in less than 2 years

Enemigo itself was valued at $5 million following a Series A
investment round in January 2018 — and the pair told Business
Insider they expect its value to hit $20 million at the close of
a Series B funding round in December this year.

Speaking at Annabel’s members’ club in London, Clough said that
he and Max have been friends since they were days old — and added
that they’ve both “always been entrepreneurial.”

While studying for his MBA in California, Clough met their third
cofounder Sebastian Gonzalez, who took him on a trip to his
home of Mexico to visit his friends and family.

“I was exposed to this liquid they called tequila, which was
unlike anything we’d ever drunk, or even seen before in the UK,”
he said. “It was a whirlwind story after that.”

He approached Davies-Gilbert — who had studied law before
going to work in motor racing — about getting involved.

“I worked for a family office looking after the guys going out to
the GP2 Series,” Davies-Glibert told Business Insider. “I
was working there when Robin sent a message saying, ‘We need to
get involved in this.’ About six months later I went down to
Mexico. I said, ‘I’ve got to try this and make sure it’s as good
as they say.’ It was, and I quit.”

Clough admitted that they “didn’t know much about the process” in
the beginning, but the samples they brought back to London “went
down incredibly well.”

In order to produce the liquid, they
teamed up with Maestro Tequilero Enrique Legorreta, a close
friend of Gonzalez’.

“Each recipe takes a significant
amount of time to do,” Davies-Gilbert said. “It’s not just
sitting there and doing one recipe every hour, [it] took us two
and a bit years.”

The brand’s Enemigo 89 Añejo
Cristalino was named because 89 different recipes were tried
before they got the right one.

Davies-Gilbert added that the brand uses water that filters down
from the Mexican volcano Tequila to produce the liquid.

“What that does, you have 200 million years of volcanic rock that
diffuses the water, that minerality and slight taste on the mouth
gives it that whole flavour,” he said. “It’s the entire process
that creates this incredibly smooth, easy to drink, but also
delicate and complex liquid.”

He also claims that the brand’s process is “one of the most
environmentally friendly in the world.”

“We use 50% less water, 60% less power, and no fossil fuels in
our production process compared to industry standards,” he said.
“We burn the agave residue to heat the oven, we don’t use gas or
oil, anything.”

He added that the brand has also put in fair pricing for agave
farmers amid an agave crisis “perpetuated by agave prices going
up because no one’s farming it, then everyone starts farming it
and prices go down.”

‘The enemy of everything that serves marketing over product’

Enemigo

The duo claims it cost a total of
$35,000 — raised from the “life savings” of the three founders
and “a couple of other friends” — to bring the product to
market.

From the beginning, Clough said the trio wanted to be “completely
different,” and put product quality over marketing.

“Enemigo means enemy in Spanish,” he explained. “We want to be
the enemy of everything that serves marketing first rather than
product.”

He added that all of the awards Enemigo has won have been based
on blind taste tests — “nothing about branding or anything else.”

While they started out with a PR company, the brand is now doing
all communication with the press themselves — and they’re staying
away from any work with social media influencers.

“People are getting wise to PR companies going out there and
pushing social,” Davies-Gilbert said. “It kind of takes away
from your message. It’s not about the ‘Hey, so and so is drinking
it, so should you.’ If you like it, you should drink it, and you
will.”

He added: “If you don’t come from the industry you’re looking at,
you have no preconceived ideas of how to act in that industry, so
you can just do things differently, which sometimes works out to
be possibly better.”

‘Ours is the real one you can sit there and sip all day’

The tequila is slightly more expensive than Casamigos — it
retails at £60 for the Añejo Cristalino (liquid which is aged in
American oak then filtered to take away the colour) or £150 for
the Extra Añejo (which is rich and deep in colour).

Enemigo

While the pair says Casamigos “has done amazing things for the
industry and is a seriously impressive brand,” they believe that
consumers can taste the difference between the two brands.

“Ours is the real one you can sit there and sip all day,”
Davies-Gilbert said. “If you then sat there and sipped another
brand, you would notice the difference.”

He added that the idea that you can drink something all day and
not get hungover — which was what Clooney and Rande Gerber set
out to create when they founded Casamigos — is “bold and
definitely not true.”

Clough added: “Before Casamigos launched, there was still this
growing trend of tequila. Tequila has been growing year-on-year
for 13, 14 years at an incredible pace.

“I think the market was looking for someone like Casamigos to
come in and refresh the way that a product is marketed, and I
think they did a wonderful job. Where we position ourselves
against that is they’ve done incredible jobs with making tequila
mainstream, now it’s our job to go and really instil, ‘this is
what a tequila really is.'”

Raising the reputation of tequila

According to Clough, Enemigo is about “raising the reputation of
what tequila is and where it should be.”

“Tequila has this reputation,” he said. “We love breaking that
stereotype every time [people] try our tequila. For us, it’s
about raising it to that next level, being something you do want
to give as a Christmas present or serve at your dinner party,
even neat, which, especially in the UK is nearly unheard of.”

“We’ll have people who say, ‘Oh no, I don’t drink tequila, I
don’t like tequila,’ because their memory is this fire water from
university or college years that just kills you,” Davies-Gilbert
added. “[With Enemigo] they take one tentative sip, and say, ‘Oh,
no, that is really good.’ That moment, I’ve seen it so many
times, it’s such a gratifying feeling.”

Ultimately, they believe Enemigo is “so simple and versatile it
works in every environment.”

“Like a cognac or whiskey it’s still incredibly complex and
smooth,” Clough said. “[It’s about] finding those moments that
just fit into peoples’ daily repertoire, that not only takes on
the other players in tequila but also take on the big players in
whiskey, cognac and everything else. That’s how we see ourselves
growing at the rate that we need to.”

In an increasingly health-conscious world, it also doesn’t hurt
that a tequila with lime juice has “a quarter of the calories of
a gin an tonic,” according to Davies-Gilbert.

Drinking it the Mexican way

Enemigo

Davies-Gilbert suggests drinking Enemigo on the rocks or with
some fresh lime juice on the side.

If it’s being used in a cocktail, he added that the brand tries
to “emphasise the liquid” instead of cover it up with sugary
mixers, like you’ll often find in an American-style margarita.

“All of our cocktails are literally just soda water with a bit of
lime or a little bit of lime juice,” he said. “The best thing
about it is neat.”

Clough added: “Go back to how they drink it in Mexico… One of
the things that took my breath away when we first looked into it
[is that] the traditional way to drink it is to have it in a
tumbler, and slowly sip it over your meal.”

Ultimately, the brand hopes to motivate people to sip tequila or
enjoy it with food instead of having it as a shot.

“I’d love to get to the point in the UK where it’s in a shot
glass but you’re sipping it,” Davies-Gilbert said — and the brand
sometimes even serves Enemigo in long stem Champagne flutes to
get the message across.

Taking on New York

Robin Clough (left) and Max Davies-Gilbert of
Enemigo.
Enemigo

Working with New York-based importer MHW, the brand plans to
launch into the US in November — and it has appointed Clough
as CEO and Max Davies-Gilbert as Managing Director for
EMEA. 

While Gonzalez is still based in Mexico where he also works
part-time in banking for a family fund, Clough said the three are
now “very good friends.” Gonzalez was just about to land in
London to help the duo talk to accounts when we met.

“We already have about 15 bars or so who have been asking for us,
and we’ve got five to 10 retailers who said they’re interested,”
Clough said of the US expansion.

“We have some exciting announcements coming out once we launch
around new product development, and that sort of thing,” he said,
adding that because of the success in the UK, the brand is also
“looking pretty good to be seeding investment towards the end of
the year” from the same investors.

“It’s a big confidence boost,” he said. “We only launched a year
ago. It’s going to be a fun couple of months coming up.”