A Scientist With Spirit

Rowan Leibbrandt trained as a scientist but he ended up selling beer and whisky  in Africa.

A younger Leibbrandt, from the rural Matubatuba, outside Richards Bay in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, did everything right. He was a maths and science whizzkid and earned a university degree. But a career in science was not what he had in mind.

It was in 2012 that an epiphany in Nigeria changed everything for Leibbrandt. At the time he was heading Pernod Ricard’s marketing department, selling whisky brands in African emerging economies.

“Time and again I was with these young and rich Nigerians in focus groups. They were amazed by these whisky brands they had never experienced before. There were two things going on there, these guys attracted to international brands and there was this man with a briefcase representing these companies. I said, ‘hang on, I can be that man with the briefcase’. That was my real epiphany,” says Leibbrandt.

A year later, Leibbrandt found his first business partner in South Africa and he quit Pernod Ricard to return and form a company – Truman & Orange. Jason Duganzich, a former brand ambassador for Glenfiddich, and Leibbrandt launched their distributing business in South Africa with a Scottish blended beer Innis & Gunn.

By 2015, Truman & Orange gained two more partners, an incognito financier in Zurich and Robert Hill, a brand specialist based between India and Britain.

“My insight was that in a lot of these African countries, some of the bigger companies are taking their eye off the ball. Things in Africa are happening far quicker than they anticipated. I thought that’s an opportunity for us. In the spirits front, Africa hasn’t really been there with the rest of the world. So, we have a 10 to 15 year window period while these guys are trying to set up in Africa for formidable businesses,” says Leibbrandt.

The journey began when Leibbrandt made his career switch from science.

“I probably wanted to work with people, so I found advertising quite captivating and I started my career in advertising. At that stage, the advertising agency I worked for managed a very small account for Glenfiddich in the early 2000s. The whole whisky phenomenon was not as big as it is now in South Africa,” says Leibbrandt.

He landed a marketing post at Glenfiddich in London in 2005. After three years, the company sent him to Moscow to set up a joint venture marketing business, which encompassed brands such as Glenfiddich; William Grant & Sons; Remy Martin; Campari and Russian Standard Vodka, in a vodka country.

While he was in Russia, juggling work and an MBA at Warwick Business School in England, Leibbrandt met his wife Nadya Surikova.

“My wife Nadya comes from Russia, a country where the idea of working for one company your whole life is absolutely zero. The safest thing for them is to start your new business. One of the things young entrepreneurs often struggle with is the partner who feels security and safety when they are starting a business,” he says.

It was in Moscow where the idea of entrepreneurship took root in Leibbrandt.

“In many ways Russia was quite similar with South Africa, they had enormous political disruptions in the nineties, and later a mass emancipation of people with money that had been put into the system. You had a drinker who didn’t have a role model, like a father who had money, but is suddenly learning to drink these western products that are affordable to him because he’s making money. I started gradually to get the sense that I wanted to do my own thing. Each time I got promoted in the business, I started to realize that it doesn’t matter how high you get but you are still going to be answerable to somebody,” says Leibbrandt.

Leibbrandt says the craft beer revolution in South Africa taught a few lessons to Truman & Orange.  Innis & Gunn is a hybrid of beer and single malt whisky.

“Innis & Gunn is the cornerstone of our business at the moment, but although it is the important part of our story, it’s by no means the most important part,” says Leibbrandt.

By the end of March, Truman & Orange will be shipping its first sparkling wine and whiskies in Angola, Nigeria, Ghana, Congo and Kenya.

And he could have been a scientist.