It started in Stilbaai with a still called Meg
● As your mind and body lurch towards the end of the year in that frantic two-step to get things done so that you can finally relax from the stress of getting things done, you are probably thinking how nice a little gin and tonic might be right about now.
It’s just the kind of thought process that Lorna Scott hopes to foster in you. She is the woman who arguably made craft gin a uniquely South African experience, after having the clever idea to infuse her gin with fynbos. In retrospect it seems obvious but at the time, in 2011, it was pretty innovative and arguably sent the whole gin market into an exploding frenzy, one we have been experiencing for well over a decade now.
So much so that in 2019 Pernod Ricard acquired a majority stake in her company, Inverroche. Harvard Business School has written one of its famous case studies on the business, which she still helms and leads with mindfulness. This is the driving principle behind everything it does, she tells me in what used to be her kitchen in Stilbaai, a sleepy town in the Western Cape with a charming beach shack aesthetic that belies the price of real estate in those parts.
The former kitchen is now the front room of the Inverroche distillery, which like the wine farms of the Cape does a very good job at telling the story of the brand while supplying a constant flow of delicious infusions to keep you well lubricated.
We had lunch in the courtyard, which is now open to the public for tastings. We finished it off with Inverroche-infused ice cream, but that may have been a step too far in the consumption of gin for this punter.
Lorna has already introduced me to the still called Meg — a large brass contraption at the heart of the production line — and the production line itself is made up primarily of women from the area. Some 70% of the company is female and more than 45 families have now become embedded in the business and grown with it.
“My principles in creating this brand are not only to tell the story of the origins and our deep connection to nature with regard to the ingredients that we use, which is such a fundamental element to our story.
“It’s also about understanding the human element of our origins that is handcrafted and human-centred. It’s not just about looking into the future for profit. For me, what you have to do is first decide what the centre is, what really matters in your business. And you have to make sure that after you are gone there will always be this taking ownership of what is at the heart of this business.”
She came back to Stilbaai with her two young children after divorcing their father in Scotland, where she had lived and worked for 20 years. It was a return to the comfort and safety of her family roots; they have lived here for generations.
She bought the small farm we are sitting on and recalibrated her future. She is clearly an immensely generative person; she took part in local politics, becoming the deputy mayor while she was leading projects on sustainability, development and tourism. This must have coalesced with the power of gin and tonic to bring people together, in her mind.
The gin was a hobby — she had a small pot still she had bought on holiday in Italy and experimented with for years, and she started playing around in the kitchen.
“It started as a hobby, nothing more. I became deputy mayor and part of my portfolio was to further develop the ‘green’ aspects of the projects I was working on, so I went back to university at the age of 55 to do an executive course on sustainable development. In the process, I realised we have the most incredible potential in our region to bring people together and to create awareness around the need to protect the world’s smallest and richest floral kingdom.
“My business idea was to create a product which could tell a story of a place where man has lived for millennia in harmony with nature, sustained by the rarest of plants at the tip of Africa, a place all humans alive today may call home.”
She has just come back from an intense multicity marketing blast in the US, and Inverroche is now sold in more than 20 countries.
How does she define African luxury, given that this is the space her brand plays in?
“It needs to be authentic, it needs to be original and it needs to have the proof of the makers. You have to see that and you have to own that in the sense that it gives you a link to the place and the people, rather than mass manufacturing.
“So we need to consider our natural resources, which is not only what grows here but also who lives here. For me that is a very important link that we often disregard. A luxury product at its heart is something that has meaning and something that has value and something that is rare.
“So we will never scale up and mechanise. We will start by duplicating Meg [the 1,000litre still we met earlier]. It is the same with our team. For example Andrea, who is our master distiller, started working as a packer in the warehouse in 2017. I am talking about investing in women and in my local community. We don’t just create jobs, we create opportunities and we make leaders.
“It is just extraordinary. I never did any marketing, people just embraced our story from the very beginning.”