The three ‘secret herbs and spices’ Irene Falcone used to turn Australia’s first non-alcoholic bottle shop into a multimillion-dollar business

Back in 2012, Irene Falcone founded Nourished Life: an online beauty retailer that focuses on only natural, toxic-free products. 

What started with $100 quickly grew to a mammoth undertaking, and when Falcone sold Nourished Life for $20 million in 2017 to BWX, she found herself feeling lost — so much so that she was crying in the shower with a bottle of vodka every night. 

“I turned to drinking to fill that hole [of being a business owner],” Falcone told SmartCompany Plus. 

Sans Drinks founder Irene Falcone. Source: supplied

Knowing she was heading down a dark path, Falcone decided to pull herself together and stop the drinking.

“So I went into a liquor store and asked for a non-alcoholic wine. The staff looked at me like I was a bit crazy,” she said. 

It’s been three years since that experience, and the only ‘crazy’ left to describe Falcone is ‘crazy successful’. 

Sans Drinks, which officially launched online in mid-2020, turned over $10 million dollars this past year, and Falcone expects that to grow to $15 million for the financial year 2022-23 — possibly even $20 million. 

How? Through Falcone’s three “secret herbs and spices”.

Key takeaways

1. People will call you crazy. Move forward with your idea anyway

2. Community building is imperative to business success

3. Being a pureplay retailer gives you a knowledgable advantage over your competitors

4. Your biggest secret weapon is yourself

Quick moves, speedy growth

After Falcone’s poor experience in the liquor store, her quest to find some non-alcoholic options herself led her to discover there were quite a lot online, and some to be found in niche bottle-os or supermarkets. 

“I thought, “Wow, can you imagine if I bought all of the goods and got them together to put them into one place?”

The experience in the liquor store had stuck with Falcone, as did this new idea. So she went to her friend, Tony Nash, founder of Booktopia, and asked him what he thought of it. 

“Most people would say ‘Irene, you sold your company for $20 million. Why don’t you just go and buy a boat?’, Falcone says, instead of diving straight back into the world she had (regrettably) left. 

But Nash, who doesn’t drink and is a prominent business owner himself, thought it was “a terrific idea” — and happened to know someone who was making moves in the non-alcoholic alternative sector themselves: the founders of Lyre’s. 

The rest, as they say, is history. 

After speaking with Nash and Lyre’s founders, Falcone knew she had to move forward with the idea: it was going to be another Nourished Life, except for non-alcoholic drinks.

Three months later, by mid-2020, the business was launched in Falcone’s garage and by Christmas that year, it had grown to fill its own warehouse. 

From a handful of SKUs to more than 600

Lyre’s was one of the first non-alcoholic brands Sans Drink stocked, along with some non-alcoholic wines imported from overseas, Edenvale from Australia, and some “big beer brands”, like Heineken Zero. 

All in, Falcone started with about 30 SKUs in her garage, packing 30-40 orders a day for about four months before moving to the warehouse in Brookevale, New South Wales. 

The brick-and-mortar Sans Drinks store in Freshwater, NSW. Source: supplied

As for what Falcone attributes to such growth at the time, she says it’s simply that “you couldn’t get alcohol-free products anywhere else”. 

The non-alcoholic industry has boomed in popularity in the last 24 months, and products can now be found in all major liquor stores as well as supermarkets. Back in 2020, they were few and far between. 

But what Falcone had in the first warehouse was only “the tip of the iceberg”. 

After a few more months, the growth in orders and products required Falcone to move to a bigger warehouse once again. She had gotten in trouble with the council for blocking the road, due to having so much stock that it couldn’t possibly fit inside, and customers lining up down the street to click-and-collect orders. 

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“I went from 30 SKUs to 300 in the first year, to 600 SKUs now — if not more,” Falcone said, adding that the business now receives more than 500 orders each day. 

Lessons from Nourished Life

Falcone applied much of what she learnt at Nourished Life to the Sans Drinks business, which looks to have paid off: at Nourished Life, it took three or four years to get to $15 million in revenue. Sans Drinks is expected to hit that target in half the time. 

Speaking to SmartCompany back in 2017, Falcone said she believed the only way to start a business today is through social media. 

Falcone still lives by this sentiment, having promoted Sans Drinks through Facebook to begin with. Even today, she still spends ‘all of her time’ talking to customers on social media. 

This customer-centric focus may seem impossible for such a large company with such a small team comprised of Falcone, her husband, and “a handful” of casual staff working across the warehouse and brick-and-mortar store. But Falcone says there’s a method to the madness. 

When other businesses pop up, there’s usually a logistics department that is responsible for packing orders; a sales department responsible for selling the product; a marketing department; a customer service department; and so forth. At Sans Drinks, there’s only one department: customer service. 

“If you’re packing an order, and then you’re on your 20 minute break, afterwards you’re on the computer for an hour and responding to customers,” Falcone explained. 

“If I have 20 people on my payroll, there’s 20 people in my customer service department.

“All everyone does all day is make sure our customers are happy,” she said. 

Having one department is a lesson Falcone learnt from Nourished Life, where selling to a bigger corporation saw these aforementioned department splits. 

But Falcone also took three other “secret herbs and spices” with her from her previous business experience, which have contributed to a significant growth trajectory at Sans Drinks. 

Secret herbs and spices

1. Playing in one space, and one space only

   Falcone says her ability to “stand up to the big boys in the market, nibbling at my feet” comes down to the fact that she has a specific focus: non-alcoholic products. 

   Rather than being a liquor store or a giant supermarket, Falcone is purely focused in the non-alcoholic space — meaning she didn’t have to consider anything else when the boom in the alcohol-free market kicked off. 

   “I was already far ahead of the game than anyone that owns a liquor store. I didn’t have to stop and learn a new thing like the liquor companies have to. 

   “I didn’t have to pivot.” 

2. Customer intimacy

   Along with its customer focus throughout her team, Falcone herself knows the customers on a very intimate level. 

   Why? Because since 2010, Falcone has “done nothing — 24 hours a day, 7 days a week — but talk to health conscious women, aged 30 plus”. 

   And 90% of Sans Drinks customer base are exactly that: health conscious women, aged over 30. 

   “Most people know me from Nourished Life. I’m recognisable to those people; they trust me, I know them, and I know what they want.” 

3. Cutting out the middle man

   The third secret to success is cutting out the middle man, the overhead costs, and giving customers what they want. 

   Doing so has seen 60% of Sans Drinks’ total revenue come solely from brands Falcone owns — and has created — herself. 

   “I’ve created my own brands, cut out the middle man and I’ve been able to offer them directly to my customers for a wholesale price,” Falcone explains. 

   And because she knows her customers so intimately, she’s able to create products that are “ticking the boxes” of exactly what they are looking for. 

Ms Sans, created by Sans Drinks. Source: supplied.

Ultimately, Falcone says her biggest secret weapon is herself: a personality, energy and knowledge of her customer base that no one else can copy. 

That’s her advice to other business owners concerned about the “big boys” in their industries, too. 

“People need to find their own personal secret herbs and spices, and that’s where their business can’t be replicated.”