Jesse Wilson, 32, is the founder of Jubel, a craft beer infused with fruit. Wilson came up with the idea while at an après-ski event where he was given beer topped with peach syrup. In 2022, he sold a minority stake to investors including Magners owner C&C Group for £2.7 million to help fuel its growth. Tesco recently said the brand, which launched on April 1, 2018, is driving a fruity beer trend in drinkers aged 21 to 35. Jubel has just sponsored the Snowboxx festival in Avoriaz, France, for the third time. To transport 100 guests and colleagues to the event, Wilson chartered a plane and threw a party on it.
Chartering a plane was cheaper than I thought
We phoned up British Airways and said, “We’ve got 100 people. What’s the best way of sorting flights?” And they said, “Well, we’ve got a 98-seat plane, if you fancy, you can book out the whole thing.”
Because we filled every seat on the flight and baggage was included, it was basically comparable to if we just booked 100 people on to commercial flights.
We started to get quite creative off the back of realising this is really quite practical, and thought more about what else could we maybe do with it that makes it a bit more fun.
So we had a massive Jubel-branded screen right behind the check-in desk. It looked like you were just checking into the Jubel flight. We called it “The plane that rocked”.
The party started just after take-off
As soon as the seatbelt sign turned off, we set up the DJ decks in the middle of the flight. We had speakers at either end so the whole flight could participate and people were just standing up and down the aisle partying away.
Air stewards came down with a drinks trolley and were just handing out Jubels at the start of the flight. They kept us at three beers a person, which felt like a very reasonable amount for an hour-and-a-half flight. Everyone was wandering up and down, Jubels in hand. It popped off a bit with the DJ. It was a bit once in a lifetime.
As soon as they said we’re beginning our descent we had to wind down the DJ. There were lots of claps and chants for one more song, but it’s like “No no no, you’re not allowed, seatbelts back on, sit down”.
It did go really really quick. I thought, an hour-and-a-half flight would feel like we’ve got quite a long time to have a bit of a party, but honestly it just went by in a flash. I kind of wish there were some delays or some bad weather at the other end so we had to do a bit of circling around but unfortunately we didn’t get to do that.
Who did you invite?
We put an incentive in place in the autumn for clients to win places on the trip. We had lots of bartenders. It’s nice that we don’t just get the head honcho from pub companies. One lady I was chatting to said: “I just work in one of the venues. I pull pints. I sold the most pints of Jubel for the pub company in the three months.” I said, “How many did you sell?” and she said “I sold 900.” Some people clearly get quite behind it.
Keeping authentic to brand and audience
The response on social media was overwhelming. One video hit 28 million views, but we posted some others as well. One of the others got reposted by so many accounts on Instagram who had millions of followers each that the video just went nuts. The comments section is quite funny because there’s debates about whether the flight was even real.
From a brand standpoint it really fits our authentic organic approach. We just love to have a good time. Don’t try to be someone you’re not: just be authentic, be yourself.
I used to work on Maltesers for Mars before Jubel. Big corporate marketing can be so dire and boring. I thought actually, as a brand, it feels a lot easier when you’re authentically just having a good time, you’re not trying to stage anything.
Did anything go wrong?
Not enough toilets. Three beers each and two toilets on the whole plane was not a good combination. The queue for the loo was almost as long as the queue to get in front of the DJ.
Jesse Wilson was talking to Niamh Curran, reporter at The Times Entrepreneurs Network
