The Sailor Jerry brand was featured in Brandweek's Brand on the Verge spotlight! Learn more about Quaker City Mercantile's unique approach to marketing the SJ empire, with some help from our CEO, Steve Grasse- read the full article below!

By all traditional tenets, Sailor Jerry Spiced Navy Rum should have been a sinking ship. Since launching in 1999, the tattoo-artist-inspired brand has steered away from the mainstays of the booze business-print, TV and on-premise marketing-and favored a distribution network of mom-and-pop stores.

And when mainstream celebrities such as Jessica Alba or Jack Nicholson showed interest, they hardly got the Von Dutch Treatment: Instead of lauding their brand-ambassadors, Sailor Jerry promptly ridiculed them on its Web site or sent a curt rejection letter.

"Celebrities ruin everything they touch, they're whores," said Steven Grasse, CEO at Quaker City Mercantile, Philadelphia, which owns the Sailor Jerry "lifestyle" brand of rum, apparel and, soon, more. "They're way too overexposed and I don't think they'd add anything to our personal mission or our brand philosophy."

Loose lips may sink ships, but this Sailor ain't sunk. He's going full speed ahead. Sales have surged from 40,000 cases in 2004 to 230,000 in 2007. This year, brand execs are expecting to double that and reach 500,000 cases.

When Sailor Jerry rum launched, it floundered at retail. It picked up a few accounts, but made no major sales. Then, suddenly, it caught fire in Madison, Wis., and its popularity quickly spread through the Rust Belt states thanks to word-of-mouth.

A nontraditional approach has been the mainstay of Grasse's work with Quaker City Mercantile, which has had gigs with Puma and R.J. Reynolds, but the Sailor Jerry brand is the proof in his proverbial pudding. So is the overexposure-and subsequent flameout-of such lowbrow art brands as Von Dutch and Ed Hardy: He sees them as parables about the risk of overexposure. Though the temptation was great, Grasse shirked off some quick-exposure hits from brands that were looking to tie in with Sailor Jerry to cash in on the tattoo craze.

While the brand was built on the heritage of a tattoo artist, "Sailor Jerry is not a tattoo brand, which ebb and flow in popularity in our culture," Grasse said. "Sailor Jerry was an American folk artist, and we have taken great steps to make the brand about a lifestyle rather than about tattoos, and a big part of that lifestyle is the music."

Music has been Sailor Jerry's rum runner. The brand has provided spirits and shirts to a variety of rock and punk bands, from the Buzzcocks to the Eagles of Death Metal and Art Brut. Bands are featured on the Sailor Jerry Web site, which gets about 300,000 hits per month, according to Grasse, and the product is promoted through the bands' MySpace pages. Quaker City Mercantile (formerly known as Gyro Worldwide) shoots concerts and posts footage-featuring flashes of Sailor Jerry branding-on YouTube. The Philly flagship doubles as an impromptu venue for street concerts.

"Most of our clients [at Quaker City Mercantile], have never had money to advertise or have been restricted from doing advertising because of their products," Grasse said. "When it came time to create our own brand, we wanted to find a way to launch the whole thing, and have it be successful without going down the traditional avenues of TV and print."

The latest "marketing" initiative is a documentary dubbed Hori Smoku Sailor Jerry, which will be unveiled at the SXSW music festival in Austin, Texas, next month.
The film features interviews and oral histories about the brand's namesake character, Norman "Sailor Jerry" Collins. Though it cost roughly $100,000 to make, Grasse is sure that it will more than pay for itself in increased sales, especially if it gets picked up for distribution by IFC, which he believes is likely, given its subject matter.
"It's a documentary that's basically an 80-minute ad for the brand," said Grasse. "It reinforces the authenticity of the figurehead behind the brand. And of course, when [people] see it and are interested, they'll Google the name. And then, boom, they discover our brand."