John Paul Dejoria of Paul Mitchell Hair Systems and Patron Tequila…struggling, clearly…

I’ve always had a fascination with brand history as very often the worlds biggest and most exciting brands have very small, humble beginnings, devoid of million dollar start up capital. In the case of Paul Mitchell Hair Systems, the start up was a mere $700. Not bad for the now $900 million a year empire.

And so we will come to learn how Paul Mitchell hair products, You Don’t Mess With The Zohan and Patron Tequila are all interlinked!

Patron Tequila is no doubt the most talked about tequila in the world at the moment, with references in movies, and everyone in Cape Town is talking about it, and drinking it. The next day memories are a little fuzzy, but it’s selling well! All I hear at Chevelle and Karma Lounge is “PATRON!”

And it’s a great story of how it became the tequila of choice for nearly everybody.

Patron Tequila was founded nearly 20 years ago, and it has redefined what tequila really is. In the past it was seen as one of those ‘wrecking crew’ drinks, where you just drank it to forget! You’d slam down a few tequilas and chase it with a beer to get the taste away, then hope it kicked in while you tried to score someone on the D-Floor at your local bar/club.

Patron is the number one tequila in the elite category of top of the line tequilas, a category which it basically invented. Patron is only outsold by Jose Quervo’s line of cheaper tequilas, the same way that Ferrari are outsold by Citi Golfs.

John Paul Dejoria started Paul Mitchell Hair Systems back in 1980, and then came Patron Tequila. This from Entrepeneur:

How did you start Patrón?

I started Patrón in 1989 with a friend of mine. I had put my friend Martin [Crowley] in the architectural business. He had a little bad luck in his life, so he would go down to Mexico, buy stone pavers and furniture and come back to the United States and sell it to architects. I said, “Martin, why don’t you bring back a few bottles of whatever the best tequila is that Mexicans drink down there.” So Martin brought me back the tequila and this bottle he found, that was the same bottle as Patrón today.

He said, “JP, I have this idea; taste this.” I thought, Wow, that’s smoother than anything we’ve ever had. He said “I can make it smoother. I can send a mixologist down. And here’s a bottle we can put it in, and I’ll design this beautiful label for it. What do you think about going into business together?” We made it a little smoother, put it in these hand-blown bottles. So I bought a thousand cases–12,000 bottles. And my thinking was, if no one bought it, I would keep it, because Paul Mitchell was doing good. And for 10 years everybody I knew got one–for their birthday, christening, bar mitzvah, any kind of holiday you could think of. “Here’s a bottle of tequila! [laughs] If you’re too young, give it to your parents.”

Now if you’ve watched You Don’t Mess With The Zohan, you will have seen ‘Paul Mitchell’ on the phone to The Zohan, well this Paul Mitchell is in fact John Paul Dejoria who is worth around $2,5 billion.

The full interview on Entrepeneur can be found HERE, and that is, in short, how you came to drink the best tequila in the world the other night!

It makes a change from knocking back shots of the cheap stuff in Tin Roof before chundering, then hitting Steers, then waking up and remembering nothing!

Click HERE for the Patron website.