BUSINESS PROFILE

Co- founders of Digby Fine English sparkling wine

Digby Fine English

When Jason Humphries and

Trevor Clough met, back in 2000, UK- born Jason was working in Boston as an engineer in speech- recognition technology, while Trevor was building companies through private equity. Years later, after moving to the UK and getting married, they decided to go into business together. But it was not until a trip back to Trevor’s native US that the lightning bolt struck. While visiting a winery outside Seattle, the pair decided to bring English sparkling wine to the luxury market. Four years after bottling their first vintage, they launched in Selfridges in 2013 and won Best English Sparkling Wine at the Champagne and Sparkling Wine World Championships a year later. Here they discuss their learning curve, their expanding empire, and the joys of running a family business.

How much did you know about winemaking when you started out?

Trevor: We know how to learn and this is one of the key things about being an entrepreneur; you don’t have to know at the beginning how you are going to do it. You have to have a core idea of what you are going to do and who is going to love you for it, but you can learn along the way. We went to Napa and sought out mentors. We were open to the unexpected and that is exactly what we got. They told us not to plant a vineyard and not to build a winery. England has good years and bad years, so we were much better placed building a portfolio of growers under contract and blending. In the wine world we are known as a négociant, which is the standard in Champagne and other wine regions, but we are the first one in this country. We pick a vineyard that we think is world- class, but we don’t rely on just that one, we bring about half a dozen vineyards together to achieve an international level of quality to the wine. We bring this fruit to our winemaker and he turns each parcel into separate base wine, and then I am the head blender.

Jason: It turns out Trevor’s got quite a good nose. He has an aptitude for the blending side. We have different fruit coming from

Kent, Sussex and Hampshire and they create a rich palette for an artist to make something quite special with.

T: Part of luxury is complexity and richness, length and balance. It is really about having all these different things that come together, like being an architect of wine. We are the creative directors managing the style and the quality and we have an amazing team of partners to help us fulfil our dream of making England world- famous for making fizz.

Is it liberating not having a vineyard?

J: It gives us flexibility from a style perspective, but also a scale perspective.

T: We can focus on what our wine is going to be like and how it makes the customer feel, as opposed to: we’ve got this fruit, we better make good wine with it.

How did you create a unique brand identity in a crowded marketplace?

J: We didn’t want it to be about us; we wanted it to be about our customer. You look at a bottle of Digby and you can see the references to British tailoring, and the quirks that we put into it. We named it after Sir Kenelm Digby, who is dotted through the history books. He was a scientist, engineer, philosopher, a cook, a patron of the art world — a real polymath. One thing he did to change the alcohol world was to invent the wine bottle, before which wine was stored in barrels and decanted; he solved the 17th- century middle- class problem of wine going off in transit.

T: We have a mood and tone that are the heart of the brand. There is an important mischievousness for us that is key. We did not want to be bland, generic, nice Britishness; we wanted to be forward- thinking and humorous. Our job is to give people an escape — magic and fun, reconnections and memories.

Is it daunting going up against Champagne?

T: Champagne has a lot of infrastructure but because it is mature it has settled. When creating and helping to lead a new category you are often compared to the incumbent, but building something new is so fun. We are here today celebrating five years since we went on sale and it is the end of the beginning. We also have to be true to English terroir and to tell the story of what England means in the glass — why it is unique, why it deserves respect.

When did you know you had a successful product on your hands?

T: Before we launched, Oz Clarke, the wine critic, tasted our wine and asked if he could help us. I said, “Yes, an introduction to Dawn Davies, the head buyer at Selfridges, would be great.” In that meeting ten days later, she tasted the wine, asked us the price, and we didn’t have one. She said, “£ 39.99, one penny less than I sell Moët. You are the quality of vintage Champagne with English expression and I’m going to sell you at non- vintage luxury Champagne prices.” Boom, that was step one done.

What has been the biggest challenge of being a couple who work together?

T: We are really lucky that our brains are so different. The company heavily relies on both of our skill sets.

J: I’m from a very operational background, delivering customer excellence, whereas Trevor has been more the strategy, marketing and sales guy.

T: It has been a classic start- up journey and there have been days where one of us is head in hands and the other one has to pick him up, and vice versa.

J: You are always living it, breathing it, talking about it; there is no concept of going home and getting away from it. I don’t have trouble switching off so I don’t mind.

T: Whereas I have to do a lot of running [ to clear my head].

J: We have a son and I think the real challenge is keeping the balance between family life and the demands of the business, which has pros and cons for him. I’m comfortable with the balance. Every day is different, but the

“We want to tell the story of what England means in the glass — why it is unique,

why it deserves respect”

upside for him is he gets to go to some crazy places and do some really fun things. How many kids who are six years old get to go on a road trip in Napa, visiting wineries?

T: And he sees us achieving our dream.

Has being gay ever aff ected you at work?

J: We have been very lucky. Both of our previous careers were very gay- friendly.

T: In our crass, corporate world it was very matter- of- fact and that is how it should be. What we didn’t have in our previous careers was scope for creativity, design and real outside- of- the- box thinking. Having been through the process of being in the closet and then thinking about who we were as people and how we wanted to craft our post- coming out identity, I think all that life experience has given us a lot of drive, creativity, fl exibility and even empathy to think about how certain actions will be received. I think we ploughed all that human feeling into doing a start- up in a creative, consumer sphere. We couldn’t imagine having done what we have done without being gay as well — it is the silver thread through the whole thing.

What is your plan for the next fi ve years?

T: We work from home and it is the two of us, with other people helping us with bits and pieces. The core of the business is us and we have achieved it so far by bootstrapping everything. Now it’s time to get closer to our customers and their customers.

J: Having established distribution routes to all these diff erent markets [ such as America, Australia, New Zealand and Japan] is amazing, but they all require love and attention.

T: It is time to grow up, it is time to build a place where people come and experience it. We want to build an operations team to allow us to focus more on networking and being creative.

What’s the biggest lesson you have learned?

J: Don’t worry when things don’t go quite as you had hoped.

T: Know what you are about and just hold on to that.