The Most Elegant Business Opportunity

“The most elegant business opportunity is one in which there is no competition.”
- Paul Shipman, founder, Red Hook Brewery

Red Hook ESB Print Ad, Red Hook Brewery

While living in San Francisco’s Mission District, I found no shortage of neighborhood pubs serving up a broad range of the best craft beers on the market. Each pub and each brew had their niche at a time when the term “niche” was as fresh as the beer drawn from any number of taps fastened into the walls behind the bar.

It was at Zeitgeist at Valencia/Duboce St., one of these pubs that catered, especially, to the bike messenger crowd where I discovered Red Hook ESB, a buttery-flavored ale that ruined me for every other beer against the wall on any late Sunday afternoon following a full day of high-speed motorcycling along Hwy. 1, north or south. Even my beloved Guinness took a backseat to this northwest upstart. Red Hook was one of the first craft beers to develop a following large and fast enough to give Budweiser, Coors, and Miller a legitimate scare and, ultimately, force them into giving way to a new market for a 9,000 year old commodity.

Zeitgeist Bar, Valencia/Duboce St., San Francisco, CA.

Yet, while reading a profile of one of the founders of the Red Hook Brewery, Paul Shipman, in a popular business magazine three years later, I was both tickled and relieved to read the quote above by a man who had reinvented beer for so many hooligans like myself and turned a complacent industry on its ear. Not only was Shipman’s statement an endorsement of the enduring value of Pirsig’s Quality in wherever it may be found, but perhaps, and most importantly, it unlocked with just a few words an important secret of the successful marketing of Quality. You need to believe and know

The confidence of knowing that you’re so distinctly excellent in every way when you take yourself to market is at the essence of every great brand.