When we pour ourselves an adult beverage, we want to make sure it’s well-made, delicious, and the values of the company that makes it align with ours. Effie Panagopoulos’s KLEOS ticks all the boxes, and we sure are glad she created it. Sit back, pour yourself a KLEOS on the rocks, and be inspired by this first Greek woman in history to establish a liquor brand.
GREECE IS THE WORD: Why mastiha liqueur?
EFFIE PANAGOPOULOS: Because mastiha has 3,000 years of history and has never been mass-marketed outside of Greece. I’ve been saying for years that mastiha will be the next açai. It just needs education and awareness to get there. We know mastiha was the world’s first chewing gum, and has all these health benefits for the gut, oral hygiene, and skin care, but it has also been used in alcohol form since antiquity and can be found in old cocktail books from the 1920’s in their spirit lexicons. So, it has a precedence as an alcohol, and the flavor is totally unique and opens up a whole new world of cocktail opportunities.
How did you come up with your idea for KLEOS and what made you sure this was the way to go?
I was the first and only brand ambassador for METAXA in the U.S. That job brought me back to Greece and I was in Mykonos summer 2008 at Nammos, and everyone around me was doing shots of mastiha—and the kicker is: it was all American tourists. I tasted it and immediately knew the flavor to be like the ypovrihio we had as kids. A brand called St. Germain had launched in 2007 in NY, and it lit up like wildfire. It was an elderflower liqueur, and bartenders could throw it in anything, earning it the moniker, “bartender’s ketchup.” I immediately thought, “Mastiha and such-and-such flavor would be phenomenal in cocktails,” and “Mastiha could be the ‘next St Germain,’” which is coincidentally what a lot of bartenders say about KLEOS. The press has been calling it “bartender’s olive oil.” I consulted for an existing mastiha brand, and it didn’t work out financially for us to work together, and also, I wanted to create the next global Greek spirit brand—and a true luxury offering, given mastiha’s rarity and price. The category in Greece has many weaknesses—primarily that most brands don’t even use PDO Chios mastiha, creating a culture that has cheapened the value of the product. The brands that do use PDO Chios mastiha are cloyingly sweet and employing inferior production techniques and packaging. I did many focus groups on KLEOS—on the formula, on the bottle. I did over seventeen formulas before I landed on the liquid in the bottle. I think the biggest mistake entrepreneurs can make is creating a brand because they and their friends like it. You need to have a true understanding of your target demographics and beta test or do focus groups in those targets. The response was overwhelmingly positive from both high-level bartenders and upwardly mobile women—my two targets. So, it was a tremendous amount of market research and twenty years’ experience in the liquor industry—along with having my finger on the pulse of what’s trending and what the future would call for—that made me sure that KLEOS was the way to go. Just like there’s a bottle of Aperol on every bar, there should be a bottle of mastiha on every bar and that bottle will be KLEOS.