A Dram with Ken Grier

For twenty years luxury brand guru Ken Grier did wonders for The Macallan, elevating it to untold heights among single malts before setting up his own creative agency in 2018. Tom Bruce-Gardyne listens in …

It's a bit early for a dram when we speak, and besides, Ken Grier's thoughts are elsewhere. "I'm writing a Tequila presentation, so I've got my head in Jalisco at the moment," he tells me. But, come the evening, his drinks cupboard is well-stocked with Scotch, and there are open bottles of Bowmore, Balvenie, Pulteney "and always some stuff from the old days, always some Macallan 18."

For years he was the great marketing whizz behind The Macallan, and helped propel it to the very top of the premier league in value among single malts. His proudest moment at its parent company, the Edrington Group which he joined in 1998, was the opening of the new Macallan distillery twenty years later. 

"It was my idea," he says of its conception in 2011. "It was when I was sitting talking to Robin Gilles, our director of distillation, and we realised we needed more capacity." A new stillhouse plus a handful of wash backs could have been assembled for a modest sum, but Ken was thinking big.

"I took down a copy of 'Great Wineries of the World', pointed to the picture on the cover of Bodegas Ysios, and said 'we should build that'," he recalls. Employing a 'starchitect' such as Santiago Calatrava to build a brand temple like Ysios in Rioja is not unknown in the wine world, but no-one had done it in spirits, let alone in Scotch.

Having the idea was one thing. Having the drive to make it happen was something else. "You've got to keep pushing," he explains. "I never settle, and I'm still pushing ahead, pushing boundaries, because that's how brands become truly great." Though he is quick to credit the team effort required to get such a huge project over the line.

"We had fantastic support from the Edrington board, and from our partners at Suntory and William Grant's," he says. "They saw the potential to make a real statement, something that fitted the brand and its luxury positioning. Something that was brave and distinctive, and that really set a new horizon in terms of the visitor experience." 

Such grandeur of ambition does not come cheap, and at £140 million, the new distillery was somewhat overbudget, but in truth the old Macallan with its boxy, glass-fronted stillhouse required more than a face-lift by 2011. "We realised we needed to invest and do something spectacular, and that has absolutely paid-off in terms of the sales of the brand," he says.

The Macallan had something else up its sleeve. When it sponsored a Royal Photographic Society event, Ken met the film producer Michael Wilson who invited him to see his whisky collection at his Hampstead home. As co-producer of the Bond films with his half-sister, Barbara Broccoli, Wilson was soon offering the brand a role in Skyfall in 2012.

"Suddenly I'm in a box at the Royal Albert Hall for the film's global launch," he recalls. "And, when you have that famous line from Javier Bardem [playing the Bond villain] – '50 year-old Macallan, a particular favourite of yours …', I just about fell off my chair." To have your brand mentioned in a Bond movie and actually attributed to the man himself is beyond the wildest dreams of marketing folk.

Heineken allegedly spent £45m just to be seen in the same film. Ken won't divulge the deal he struck except that it was considerably less and was "a very sensible arrangement." If it really did reap "about half a billion dollars of publicity in the first year" as he claims, it sounds like a bargain.

Rubbing shoulders with 007, hanging out in Scotland's most luxurious distillery and smashing auction house records, might go to your head. "I'm a very humble person. I was born in Dumfries and my father was a pharmacist with a little shop," he replies, slightly missing the point. I was talking of the brand getting too puffed up. 'Macallan's been drinking its own bath water' is a comment I've heard more than once, though maybe there's a whiff of jealousy there from rivals.

There's been something of an arms race on pricing that has caused grumbling from once loyal drinkers left behind. But Ken is unrepentant about the rare releases, and says: "We put them out at very sensible and fair prices, and the market took them up. We had to react to the simple point of supply and demand. Given the craft and the number of years of maturation, they had been very much underpriced for so long, and I think it was a matter of us catching up, and the whole market catching up with us."

With the new distillery in production and open to the world, "I thought it's a great exclamation point to finish my time at Macallan on a high," he says, but for the man who never settles, retirement in 2018 was never going to work. "I hated it! And thought to hell with this, I'm going to start another business." And so was born De-Still Creative where "I give specialist advice to the drinks industry on strategy, creative brand building, innovation and collaborations."

Clients hoping for a sprinkling of the old Macallan magic include Suntory, Interbev, Lalique who he helped acquire Glenturret, and various high-end Mexican brands – hence the Tequila at the start. As for Bond, well so far there's been nothing new on the movie front, although Ken did get his Aston Martin to bed down with Bowmore.