Spirit of imagination: From dentist to gin distiller

A dentist and an accountant walk into a bar… How a chance meeting in a London pub led to side-hustle success and a multi award-winning gin business for 2 friends who have learned to play to their personal strengths.

Simon Wilson says that having complementary skills and clear communication is what has seen his gin brand Imagination, founded with close friend Chris Charteris, flourish during 6 stellar years in business.

“I’m the one coming up with 500 million ideas, while Chris is deeply entrenched in the numbers and figuring out if my grand plans are financially viable!”

Both MAS Members from early on in their careers – Simon as a dentist and Chris an accountant – the pair met in London at Chris’ farewell drinks. He’d been learning the art of cheesemaking in Europe and was heading back to Nelson for a job in his new profession. “We agreed we should catch up again once we were both home,” recalls Simon. “That was about 12 years ago, and we’ve been mates ever since.”

Chris deadpans that in New Zealand’s prime hops-growing region, if you don’t make beer “you literally have nothing to talk to people about”, so once Simon returned and was working at Nelson Hospital, the pals bought a brew kit and started giving it a try “most weekends, after work, and whenever we weren’t out hunting”.

Size does matter

However, when it became clear that in the highly competitive beer world, commercialising their output would be challenging, they made the switch to gin. Boutique distilleries were an emerging trend and Chris felt it was a great time to jump in.

Which they did, boots and all, ordering an enormous 450-litre still from America for $30,000. Whoops.

“It didn’t make it out of its box,” confides Simon. “It was gigantic, and we had nowhere to put the thing! So, here we were, 2 larrikins from Nelson with a 2.5m-tall garage and 3.4m-high still.”

Luckily, he says, they nabbed a much smaller second-hand kit on Facebook Marketplace and got to work, using their intuition and “the University of YouTube”, says Chris, to craft some very good, and some “bloody awful,” gin.

“Different ingredients create different flavours, just like baking a cake,” he continues. And some cakes taste better than others.

“Chris was flatting with some of my hospital colleagues,” recalls Simon, “so we’d get them all together, throw in some other doctors and house surgeons, put a bottle of our gin in one brown paper bag and a bottle of a commercial gin in another. They’d try both and give us their opinions.”

Making the call and learning from mistakes

When their friends began telling the pair they were really onto something, and it coincided with a drought jeopardising Chris’ day job making cheese, what was once a part-time hobby suddenly scaled up. Simon says they left Nelson, taking the boxed up, big still with them, and found some disused but crucially consented sheds in Kāpiti to house it in. They just needed to secure the lease and they’d be away.

“It’s so typical of me,” laughs Simon, who shares a Paraparaumu dental practice called Care Dental with a colleague and MAS Member Dr Gary Lawrence. “All I had to do was make one phone call to the owner and negotiate a rate, but I was so bloody nervous! He was really sweet about it, though. He said, ‘Come and have a chat and we’ll work something out.’ And, coincidentally, the very next day I had him as a patient in my chair! He got that filling really cheap.”

Crunching the numbers is Chris’ forte, says Simon, and in the early days of Imagination gin – which was then known as Indiginous – Chris decided the boys should make a big batch that when sold, would cover their first 3 months’ rent. It was gone in one weekend.

So that’s when the pair got serious about growth, marketing, a sales strategy and putting Chris into the business full-time. There was that rebrand along the way, too, after cultural appropriation accusations forced a rethink. “It was just horrible, actually, because we’d had the initial name and designs signed off by the Māori Advisory Committee at the Intellectual Property Office,” Simon tells. “But we accepted we’d made a mistake, and we learned a lesson.”

A highly rewarding job

As co-founders, Simons says playing to each strength and being kind is the key. “We’re making big decisions, often on the fly, and we truly respect one another’s opinions. At the end of the day, every choice is either going to be right or wrong, but you do your best and see what happens.”

If there’s any secret to their success and producing 25,000 litres of globally-awarded craft gin each year while Simon still works his day job, it’s that they’re “actually just a couple of good buggers doing a good job,” Simon reflects. “It’s given us a creative outlet and we’ve been able to get really nerdy about the technicalities of making gin, finding solutions to problems and fixing stuff ourselves. We both really enjoy this other world that we get to step into.”

And Simon says as much as he loves dentistry and has no plans to leave, being out on the road at trade shows, awards shows and “just having a gin with someone” is extremely rewarding.

“A respected dentist once told me, ‘Do good dentistry and you won’t need to worry about the money.’ I subscribe to that, both in dentistry and in making gin. Chris and I try not to take the journey too seriously, because no matter what happens, it’ll be a good story for the grandkids.”

Simon and Chris’ tips for start-up success

• Be resilient: We’ve weathered the storms of a full rebrand, Covid-19, and now an economic recession, but there’s always a way forward.
• Be realistic: When the good times are good, they’re never as good as they appear, and when the bad times are bad, they’re never quite as bad as they seem.
• Be collaborative: There are always others in your industry to learn from, and people are usually very happy to share. Give back to those coming through the ranks when you can, too.
• Be creative: We’re always bringing out new varieties and flavours because it keeps things interesting, and it aligns with the values of our name and our brand.
• Be careful: It costs more than you think to run a business. We took out a $20,000 loan to get started and spent it before we even sold our first bottle.
• Be great to do business with: Our company motto is “don’t be a dick”, and for us that means being good humans as much as possible. New Zealand is small and reputation is everything!