Matt Jones – creative strategist, keynote speaker and accidental entrepreneur – co-founded Four Pillars Gin in 2013, helping it grow into the first gin maker to claim the title of World’s Best three times. Below is an exclusive extract from his debut book, Lessons from Gin: Business the Four Pillars Way.
The expansion of our iconic distillery home involved arguably the biggest decisions we had made as a business since first deciding to make gin back in 2013. Having lived for so many years with the twin constraints of space and cash, to be developing a vast new site next door, and doing it with significant capital in the bank thanks to our partnership with Lion, was both a luxury and a source of enormous pressure. This was not the time to get lazy with our thinking.
Instead, we wanted to be really purposeful with making sure our development dollars created maximum value for our business, our brand and our local community.
The first things to get right were the brief and the partner. The brief we wrote for ourselves was focused on four things (as usual).
1. Future-proof our ability to produce world-class gin at scale
We wanted to ensure that we could meet our long-term volume ambitions under one roof while continuing to lift the quality and consistency of the gin we were making.
Cam always believed that our best gins were ahead of us, so the number one consideration was how to create the space and infrastructure to make more and better gin. Top of that list was a new dedicated space for our bottling line and our bottling crew so we could free up space in the stillhouse for two new large production stills and one new experimental still.
2. Expand capacity to host groups of all different shapes and sizes
Traditionally, we turned big tour groups away from our old Distillery door as we didn’t want to spoil the tasting experience for regular small groups. But our ambitions were now to lift our annual visitation from around 85,000 people a year to 200,000 people a year, and to be able to do so in all types of weather.
We also wanted to expand our drinks and food options, offering more substantial food offerings and building an experimental drinks capability that matched what was happening up in Sydney at our newly-opened Four Pillars Laboratory (a case of the new Lab teaching the old Distillery dog new tricks).
3. Create a dedicated retail store for our Distillery
Our original distillery door had a stylish corner for retail, but never enough for our ambitions. After all, a trip to Healesville was only complete if you took a piece of Four Pillars home with you in the form of a bottle of gin and a bunch of inspiration for the drinks you planned to make.
We wanted our new distillery home to be a platform to tell our story to visitors through our products and to act as a model of how best to curate our products, showcasing best practice for our retail partners.
4. Starting with sustainability
For the first time, we had the chance to develop a greenfield site from scratch and were determined to choose a partner who shared both our aesthetic and our sustainability values, ensuring that we took every opportunity to create a better operation and a better experience, while also making sure the whole place was better for the planet too.
Approach the Distillery today and you’ll be met by a stunning copper veil. What Cameron thought was just a wanky name for an expensive fence is actually a highly functional design feature. The top half of the veil (just out of reach so no one scalds their hands) is constructed from 1.6 kilometres of narrow copper pipes acting as a heat exchange to passively cool the water from our stills after distillation. The result saves us huge amounts of energy and allows us to return the cooled water to the still system for future distillations, saving gigalitres of water every year too.
Move into the new Beth’s Bar and you’ll also see an array of copper pipes behind the bar. These are piping gin directly into the bar from the stillhouse, allowing us to save hundreds of kilograms of glass waste every year.
All around the place, you’ll find environmental wins, big and small, with each story told on a black-and-white plaque, ensuring that we do some good for the planet and get the credit for the good that we do. Win-win!
A new era
We opened the doors to Healesville 2.0 in the middle of 2022, just in time for one final year of private ownership before Stu, Cam and I sold our remaining shares to Lion on 1 July 2023. The world remained a challenging place, but the business and brand were both in great shape. So why sell? Why not continue to be owners of the business forever?
Every founder will have different reasons for this decision, including, inevitably, the financial one. To found something means to take risk, a lot of risk, with your money (and, likely, home) and oftentimes with other people’s money too. At some stage, if you can, that risk deserves some level of reward. Particularly, Stu, Cam and I always felt that the Ginvestors who had backed us unquestionably since the very early days deserved to have a good day.
Beyond that, we had created something in Four Pillars that was bigger than the three of us. We had built a business with real heart, a business that had a home in the corner of the Yarra Valley, and an army of people who would lie down in traffic to help it succeed. And around that business, we had built a modern classic Australian brand that deserved to stand and grow alongside other modern Australian success stories on both the domestic and world stage.
At some stage, for Four Pillars to achieve its full potential, it couldn’t be constrained by the energies and risk appetites of three even balder and older co-founders. So, the time came to pass on the baton to the Four Pillars team we’d built, the best 150 people we will ever have the privilege of working with.
And when it came to celebrating the tenth birthday of Four Pillars in December 2023, we did it in the most Four Pillars way possible. We commissioned Australian portrait photographer Mia Mala McDonald to capture ten portraits of the people who had defined the first decade of Four Pillars and who embodied the sense of Four Pillars as a gin family.
Some were solo portraits, like our brilliant Marketing Director Jemma, also the first (and to this date only) person to ever get married at Four Pillars Distillery. Others were pairs, like Scott and Brett who had started in hospitality together. Or like Elton and Nicole, husband and wife legends of Four Pillars. And, of course, there were Cam and Wilma: master distiller and the still named after his mum that had started it all.
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