With their single-minded proposition of just one product, Lucky Saint is steadily becoming one of the UK’s favourite challenger brands. A fast-moving business growing 180% YOY, the distinctive blue and gold brand can be found in all the major supermarkets, on draught at over 600 bars and pubs across the UK, and even in the skies on Virgin Atlantic flights.

We met up with founder Luke Boase at The Lucky Saint, their recently opened pub HQ in Marylebone, London, to find out how he’s building an alcohol-free brand we’re proud to order at the bar.

What inspired you to start the brand, what was the opportunity?

Back in 2016, I saw alcohol-free beer and thought, this is the best proposition in the world, but I'm not actually even a consumer of it. And so I was intrigued by that - why am I not? On paper, this is made for me, but I'm not drinking it, and that was down to two things. Firstly, there wasn't a beer that was good enough to bring me into the category. And then secondly, there wasn't a brand that made me feel positive about choosing to drink an alcohol-free beer.

Although the world's changed quite a lot over the last few years, we've all apologised at some point for not drinking. And that, for me, just didn't seem like something anyone should ever have to do. If you can build a brand that people feel proud to order at the bar, then you overcome that. We're challenging the notion that you should apologise if you're not drinking. We're challenging the assumption that alcohol-free beer doesn't taste good.

We've spent several millennia building on social connections around alcohol. And that goes from everything, to how we celebrate, we raise a glass of champagne, all the way back to the festivals of drunkenness in Egypt. This is how human beings have interacted for thousands of years, and they've built social connections. We're now going through this period of very rapidly reappraising our relationship with alcohol. So it's an enormously exciting time to be a brand in that space and, and play a role in how our relationship with drinking evolves over time.

Our ambition is to build this world-defining alcohol-free brand. The North Star is to make Lucky Saint as synonymous with alcohol-free as Guinness is with stout, as Tesla is with electric cars, as Fevertree is with tonic water. That's the dream.

So, how do you make a product that lives up to that ambition?

We’ve got a huge job to bring people around to the idea that there now are great tasting, alcohol-free beers. Taste is the biggest driver of decision-making in the category. So as a result, that quality sits at the top of everything that we do.

It's made from the four ingredients that you're supposed to find in lager, nothing else, there are no flavourings, there are no additives. It takes six weeks to brew. Some macro beers are brewed in as little as a few hours. At Lucky Saint, we have two weeks of fermentation and then four weeks of lagering; it's where the beer is conditioned, and it's where all the flavours come together. It's an expensive process, but by definition, that's what lagers are supposed to be, lagered (which means to cold store). And then the final part is that we leave the beer unfiltered. By leaving it unfiltered, we retain more flavour, body and character in the beer.

Every single touch point that we create for the brand needs to reflect that quality; like our DTC packaging, It's like an explosion of blue and gold when you open it up.

You talk about normalising drinking low-and-no alcohol, how crucial has distribution been in shifting that perception?

Draught is everything, this is a category that's only ever been served in a bottle. And if you're with your mates in the pub, and everyone's having a pint, and you're having a bottle, you immediately feel different.

From very early on, it was always going to be a huge moment for the category when alcohol-free beers are served in exactly the same way as all the other beers in the pub. So suddenly, all beers are equal. The moment has now come for us where the demand is sufficient that Lucky Saint justifies its place on the bar.

We're currently stocked on draught in over 600 bars and pubs, and then we have over 5000 on-trade accounts stocking our bottle, as well as approximately 4000 distribution points across all the major supermarket retailers. We've just launched in Marks and Spencer and on Virgin Atlantic, massively broadening out in terms of where you can find Lucky Saint and where you can drink alcohol-free beer, which is really exciting.

Why is opening your own pub such an important step for the brand?

The pub is one of Britain's greatest institutions. You go back centuries and centuries, and it's where we've made social connections. For so long. One of our core beliefs as a brand is that the greatest reward of drinking is the social connection, not the alcohol. So you put those two things together and say well can we create a pub that does all of the amazing social connection piece, but also shows that you can do that drinking whatever you want to drink. In our pub we serve amazing alcohol-free drinks and alcoholic drinks and it's a place that's inclusive. We don't believe you should have to go somewhere else if you're drinking or not drinking.

First and foremost, the pub is the whole building. So it's our head office, it's a home for our team, and where we build culture. Secondly, it's a physical manifestation of what the brand stands for; somewhere where consumers can come in and experience the brand. Whether they're drinking Lucky Saint or not, when they walk in the door, the welcome that they get, the aesthetic and the building, the lighting, the music, everything about that experience is a reflection of Lucky Saint. Then the third piece is we're going to use it as a data and insight engine, to figure out how we can make the category as successful as possible.

Do you have any plans to extend the product range, or move into other categories?

We've been very singularly focused on doing one thing well. If we had more products, we'd be a bigger business. But I'm not sure we would be with the power of the brand diluted.

We've been very singular in building around lager. Lager is the world's most popular beer style by miles - over 80% of the world's beer consumption is lager. So the view has always been and continues to be, if we want to build the world's defining alcohol-free brand, we will do that with lager. Ultimately, as we build a bigger and bigger platform over time that does open up opportunities, but anything we ever did would always have to come back to all our beliefs around social connection and quality.

Tell us about your company values. What are they? Why do they matter?

Our values are: Be Generous, Stay Humble, and Get Lucky.

‘Be Generous’ is all about being generous with one another, with customers and consumers.

‘Stay Humble’. We've just tipped into year five as a business, and we've had an amazing month. But you never know what's around the corner. This is a brand-new category. We don't have all the answers to it. And staying humble means that we have to stay curious.

‘Get Lucky’ is all about entrepreneurial spirit. So there are now 60 of us in this business, but nothing happens unless someone does it. If you have an idea, if you want to make something happen, then everyone takes responsibility for making that stuff happen.

While our values are how we behave, we also have our mantras:

The one that sits at the top, which is the call to arms for the whole business is ‘Break Rules, Honour Traditions’, which is all about retaining and understanding what's brilliant about beer, but breaking enough of the rules so we stand out and recognise that we are different.

‘Do The Right Thing’. Well, that we talked about earlier. We're a single product and incredibly focused on that. But then that's such a useful mantra to run across everything that we do.

The third one is ‘Find the Devil in the Detail’, from a marketing perspective, and from a brand perspective. We can't always iterate work forever, because there isn't the time or resource to do that, the creative just needs the Lucky Saint touch which brings it to life. For me, often, it's a little red tag with a golden ladybird on it. And you put that at the bottom of a piece of work, it just completes it. That also refers to being all over it, basically, and making sure that the details are good.

And then the final one is to ‘Make Sustainability Second Nature’. This came out as we were embarking on our B Corp journey two years ago – we certified as a B Corp at the end of 2022. And the wording in that is very purposeful, it's a journey that we're on, and it's a journey that will never finish. We need to continue being on a journey of continuous improvement, we have to constantly remind ourselves that this is about building sustainability into all of our decision-making.

How do you make sure everyone is living those values and behaviours, especially as you grow the team?

They're not up on a wall anywhere. People always say, ‘values aren't something that live on the wall’, so maybe we should make that an intention not to put them up anywhere. But it's a big part of our onboarding processes, explaining the values, because how you interpret them is as important as knowing what the words are. If you were here years ago and were involved in putting them together you have an amazing understanding of them versus someone who walks in the door, because they haven't had that context. Our onboarding is landing those values.

The more we've embedded the values and mantras in the business, the more powerful they become, and the bigger tool they are for us as a team, like driving culture and understanding ways of working. So yeah, they've been the gift that just keeps on giving.

Maintaining cultures as we grow is all about those values and mantras. The more we embed them, the stronger our culture will become.

And for sure, opening a pub helps.

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Images courtesy of Lucky Saint.

‘We've been singularly focused on doing one thing well’: Lucky Saint founder, Luke Boase