Katy Perry & Morgan McLachlan On Securing $4M In ‘De Soi’ Funding, Offer Advice To Other Female Entrepreneurs

Katy Perry is no stranger to knowing how to draw a crowd, but over the past few months, her business focus has expanded ever since the January 2022 launch of De Soi, her new line of non-alcoholic apéritifs, a beverage brand she has co-founded with experienced entrepreneur Morgan McLachlan. What began with De Soi bottles and cans being available for purchase on the De Soi website, as well as with initial wholesale businesses like Foxtrot, Erewhon, Boisson, and Total Wine, De Soi is now reaching new heights by receiving $4 million in seed funding led by early stage capital investors Willow Growth, with participation from leading entertainment and sports agency Creative Artists Agency (CAA).

“It just means expansion,” Perry tells me over Zoom about what this latest funding will do for their growing brand. “It means the availability to get to more retailers, to have more shelf space, to have more awareness – just to be able to use all that to expand De Soi and the whole experience and we’re really excited. We’re grateful for Willow and all the capital that they brought us and it’s great because when you’re in the black, it feels good. When you’re building a boutique business that’s now getting bigger – I mean, we’re only seven months into this business. We started in dry January, which is the best launch for any non-alcoholic beverage!”

With Perry’s superstar status and McLachlan being a longtime Master Distiller with AMASS, this De Soi leading duo have combined their individual strengths to bring their non-alcoholic products to market. Perry goes on to tell me that she wants consumers to see De Soi as an elegant experience, with adaptogens and natural botanicals included in each product’s creation, making it a healthier alternative to alcohol, while still providing a desired mood-boosting effect.

“Katy and I are actually in similar positions,” McLachlan shares with me. “Late thirties, new moms, and there are certainly challenges that go along with that. I like to come home from work and have a glass of wine. I was finding even a couple glasses of wine on a Tuesday and then getting woken up at 5am in the morning on a Wednesday – it’s not cute. So, we really wanted to have that special moment and that sensual beverage experience and that celebratory beverage.”

While Perry and McLachlan find themselves well within the mix of a booming $820 billion dollar non-alcoholic beverage market, I wondered what has been the greatest challenge for them in bringing De Soi to shelves and striving to get their brand the public awareness that they have been seeking.

Perry says, “I would say that obviously launching anything at the tail-end of Covid with manufacturing, with distributors – just securing the makers and figuring out also how to bottle correctly because we’re putting ingredients that are alive in our bottles and we have to figure out the science between bottling something and making sure it’s fresh upon consumption. There’s a lot of trial-and-error and I’m a very specific person and never mix my words, so when we were going through the tasting process and the testing process, there were so many different iterations, so that took a lot of time.”

According to McLachlan, the process these two co-founders went through together to create these De Soi products the way they had envisioned took over a year to complete, but she looks back on those efforts being worth the wait, adding “We wanted the product to have a lot of integrity.”

With De Soi being a women-founded company, I asked Perry and McLachlan what advice they might have for other female entrepreneurs who might have a promising business idea, but simply do not know how to get it off the ground.

Perry responds first with, “I would just say don’t take no for an answer. You got to be an enthusiastic salesperson. There’s no shyness in this industry. Also, find your niche and carve it out to be a big space, because I really do think that this category in beverage is new and exciting and not over-done. It’s growing by multiples every year. People are so conscious of their health & wellness experience and their bodies coming out of a pandemic. I would just say to all those young women out there that are starting their own businesses, I think that we have a really high intuition and I think we’re given that intuition to really be able to read the room, read what people want – we know what our kids want before they even know it or why they’re crying. So, I think we can use that for other people’s desires and capitalize on it.”

McLachlan follows up by saying, “I am a serial entrepreneur. Every mistake I made, I wasn’t trusting my gut. So, I think trusting your gut – you have to believe in your vision, 100%. You have to be completely in it.”

With Perry continuing on with her PLAY Las Vegas residency and her successful background with companies like Katy Perry Collections, I wondered what joys Perry gets out of her efforts with De Soi these days that might be different from her other active areas of business.

Perry responds, “Well, I’m learning a ton still. I’m learning about the business behind launching a beverage, building a brand, building a great team, and how board meetings are supposed to flow (laughs). I’m just kind of putting my business cap on, as I always have with everything I’ve done. The music stuff comes very naturally. Also, the health & wellness adjacent stuff is very authentic and natural to me growing up in California, having an always organic mom, the one that went to the farmer’s market. I’m always influenced by her and we end up becoming our parents in a lot of ways. I’m just my mother’s daughter, I think.”

As De Soi looks to utilize its newly acquired capital in expanding their retail footprint and meeting consumer demands by bringing their products to more shelves nationwide, I wondered how Perry and McLachlan have noticed the ways of business and their own professional mentalities evolving in 2022.

McLachlan says, “Culturally, we’re embracing entrepreneurialism a lot more. There’s a culture that understands entrepreneurialism and supports it, where 10-15 years ago, it was different.”

Perry continues with, “I think it’s just a freeway of opportunity now. There used to be a lot more gatekeepers. Now, if you have an idea and some capital and it’s a good idea and you know how to sell it, you have a real shot. I think it’s anyone’s game now, which is great because there’s equal opportunity for everyone. You just have to be bold.”