Art, Ale and Community Building with Collective Arts Brewing’s Matt Johnston

Matt Johnston:
There’s no shortage of companies out there and no shortage of products out there, so making good products is a base standard. So, what do you stand for beyond that? It’s about finding that nugget that makes you stand out from the crowd and makes you relevant to your consumers.

Mathieu Yuill:
Hey and welcome to the Leading With Nice Podcast, where we want to help you inspire others, build loyalty and get results. My name is Mathieu Yuill, and today I’m super excited because we’re being joined by Matt Johnston who is a co-founder of Collective Arts Brewing. They’re based out of Hamilton, but what I’m really excited is they do some innovative things in both their way of thinking and the way they approach the brand.

Mathieu Yuill:
As you can imagine in beer sales in Canada and the US, there hasn’t been an abundance of innovation, so we’re going to talk to him. But before we do that, I just want to tell you really quickly, right now we’ve just released an online course, which I think is perfect for the time we’re in called Communicated in Crisis. If you head over to our website, leadingwithnice.com, there’s a 15% discount code. What you’ll learn in the course is everything you need to know about how to communicate well during a crisis. Both before it happens, when it initially happens, the maintenance mode, winding it down, and then the post-actions you should take.

Mathieu Yuill:
So without further ado, let’s get into it. Matt’s been on the line very patiently as I ramble on through the introduction. So Matt, thank you very much for joining us today.

Matt Johnston:
Thanks for having me. Excited to chat today.

Mathieu Yuill:
So I want to get into this area in a question or two, and that’s the area of around creativity, community, diversity, but I would really love for our listeners to hear your origin story, which I think was born out of a desire for something greater. Because both you and Bob, Bob, the other co-founder, had backgrounds in creativity and ales, but you wanted something more. Can you just give a little overview of the origin story? I think it will resonate with where some of our listeners are right now.

Matt Johnston:
Sounds good. I like creativity and ales, I’ll use that again. Yeah, we definitely both had a background in those spaces and really simply I approached Bob and said I’m looking to go out on my own, do something new, something different, something with a real soul. Is he interested in that? He naively said yes. So when we really sat down with a blank piece of paper in front of us, we really quickly aligned on the same idea, which is we want to build a purpose-based company that champions creativity.

Matt Johnston:
So that quickly evolved into global call for art, reaching out to artists from all around the world, both visual artists, as well as musicians. Bringing those in, using volunteer curators to help us sort through everything that was submitted and create a series, and then we bring that to life on our packaging and all of our other channels of events and social media and everything. We pay the artists, we take no ownership, we can only use it for a limited period of time and we do everything we can to then go beyond to champion them and help them create additional revenue sources for themselves.

Matt Johnston:
That’s really been what we’ve been all about. So if you’re going to be founded in creativity, as you said, creativity and ales, it needs to also start with the beverages we make, and how do you be creative on the inside, which is what craft beer’s been all about, and then how do you turn that creativity on the outside and connect our experiential drinkers with these amazing artists so that everyone can see past the status quo? So, that’s been our driving force.

Mathieu Yuill:
If you’re listening to this, go skip back 30 seconds and listen to that last bit about being creative on the inside and how do you manifest it on the outside. There’s two articles. If you search Collective Arts Brewing and then Financial Post in Canadian business, there’s two great articles where they dive deeper into that. So if you’re interested in that, go do that Google search, after the show, of course. Certainly not while you’re driving, if you’re driving during this pandemic. If you are driving during this pandemic, again I ask, where are you going? Can I come with you?

Mathieu Yuill:
Let’s go back to that, because I love what you do. For those who haven’t seen the Collective Arts can, they’re adorned with art, Matt talked about it very briefly. They got artists from around the world to submit art. What I love is on the website it actually encourages them. They say don’t create original art for this, because we know how much work it takes, give us something you’ve already created.

Mathieu Yuill:
What I love about that, and I look at what you do, it’s about building community, both with people who buy your beverages and also those who contribute to making the product. I see that as a real bedrock, you’ve said as much, and I see that both in an abstract way and a very tangible way. In a tangible way, for example, you said in the past that bringing brewing back to Hamilton is important for you. You moved into the former Lake Port Brewery, you employ Hamiltonians. I think it’s so important for right now. Tell me more about this philosophy, this importance of this local workforce, this local community you’re trying to build.

Matt Johnston:
Yeah, for sure. We have a number of circles that define our community. So for us community is our staff, community is the artists that we work with, community is our drinkers, and then community is the physical geographies that we’re in. So, obviously Hamilton is where our main brewery is, we have a smaller one in Toronto. It’s where our main brewery is where the majority of our staff are, and so we need to give back that much more in each of our communities.

Matt Johnston:
Yeah, it’s been really important, especially as you go through a pandemic, it’s how do you take care of each of those communities from a safety standpoint and a give back standpoint? So, one of the first things we did as the pandemic kicked in is obviously staff safety. How do you get product to our drinkers? So, we turned on eCommerce and then how do we give back to the local community? We started doing sanitizer so that we could give it to the local food shelters and hospitals, and make sure that they were helping to keep the general community safe.

Mathieu Yuill:
You were producing the sanitizer at your location.

Matt Johnston:
We actually worked with a partner to produce it, and then we would purchase and distribute it.

Mathieu Yuill:
Amazing. If you’ve been listening or if you’ve followed Leading With Nice, you know two of the four tenants of navigating from a communication standpoint this pandemic was consumers, the community at large really want to know, they’ve increased the importance of value they place on how your company treats employees, so you want to talk about it and there’s been a real value shift to local. So, they want to know that the businesses in their neighbourhood are caring about their community.

Mathieu Yuill:
If you’re looking for actual examples of how that’s done, Matt just shared with you two ways. If you haven’t done that already, start doing that. Share how you’re caring for your employees and share how you’re caring for your community.

Matt Johnston:
If I may, we did kick off a program called More this year. Bob and I had the idea a year before we actually brewed our first batch of beer and we officially kicked it off this year. More is a multi-faceted initiative, which is very much creativity for a community. So, collaborating with our various artists and how do we give back to those various communities, and it has been very multi-faceted. So we’ve had campaigns around Pride, around International Women’s Day, we’ve done limited release products with those, as well as for local food shelters.

Matt Johnston:
What we’ve recognized is that there’s a gap in government support, and we have such a polarized world right now that we need to have a voice. Companies need to have a voice, need to have an opinion. So for us, we’ve made sure our opinion is very much focused on inclusivity and diversity and really champion marginalized communities. Because really that is the bedrock of creativity, is if you have a inclusive environment, it will foster the best creativity.

Mathieu Yuill:
To be fair, Leading With Nice gave our clients … we love woodworking here, so we made some coasters in our woodshop and we gave coasters and a selection of Collective Arts product to our clients this Christmas. That’s what kind of inspired us to learn more about you and then for us to get excited about talking to you. I had one client text the account manager and myself every day a picture of the different beer he was drinking with a little rundown. It was great.

Mathieu Yuill:
But on your website you have this very powerful statement about diversity and it lists a myriad of traits, more than I’ve ever seen that talks about what can make us diverse, but diversity is hard, right? It’s hard to be diverse in an environment, in a education environment, a community environment, a work environment. It means inviting other voices, sometimes that come with different polarities. So, tell us why it’s worth this pursuit of diversity with such a tenacity as Collective Arts does.

Matt Johnston:
Yeah, and I agree, at first glance it is hard, just even from recruiting. You have to at times go out of your way to look at different ways to recruit so that you can make sure that you bring in diverse applicants that are qualified and come from different backgrounds. So, that continues to be a work in progress for us. There’s some actually great initiatives that actually focus on the craft beer industry in the US, and it is very much about helping us create diversity in our hiring process.

Matt Johnston:
So it does take work and we focused on that, but as far as why it’s important, really the last thing I want is a lot of people have the same upbringing to me, same background as me and same opinions as me. I’m creating an echo chamber and I’m really just going to be talking to myself, and that’s the last thing I want. I want a community in our company where we have those diverse backgrounds, those diverse opinions, and everyone feels very comfortable in that. That will bring the best out in us, but also brings the best out in society.

Matt Johnston:
At the end of the day, why are we all doing this? You want to put your head down on your pillow at night and feel that you’ve made a difference. If we can feel that we’ve had that impact, whether that’s in Hamilton or in the broader context with our Amplified Voices campaign that we’ve recently kicked off that has meant to cause people to stop and think and change their points of view and get involved. If we can do those things, I sleep better at night, because hopefully I’ve made the world a little bit better.

Mathieu Yuill:
My uncle asked me this question when I was 12 or 14, he said, “Mathieu, what do you want people to say about you at your funeral?” I was like, “What?” I was like, “That’s crazy question, I’m 14.” He went on to explain that that should guide how you live your life. So you’re saying the same thing, when you lay your head down at night on your pillow. Stephen Covey, who if you’re not familiar with The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, he always said start with the end in mind. That’s what you just described.

Mathieu Yuill:
So, I want to take that and I’d love to get a couple of practical tips from you now. I just have two more questions, and the first one is this, we’ve talked about it. Your labels are super unique, they’re very awesome, and also because you invite artists from around the world to submit them, you’re not over the shoulder of a graphic designer creating your label. You don’t know what will come in, but you’ve made this commitment to put them on and feature them. The amount of diversity is crazy, the way they look and the styles.

Mathieu Yuill:
There are people listening right now that have the power in their job, the authority to say, “You know what? I’d like to do something creative like that,” but they may not understand necessarily why, why they might want to invite people to contribute to their business that really are not part of their business.

Matt Johnston:
Yeah, invite that chaos.

Mathieu Yuill:
Yeah, tell me a bit more about that. You’ve talked about it a little bit already, but speak practically now about what you actually get out of it.

Matt Johnston:
Yeah, well, I think from a business standpoint, it’s about creating an emotional connection with our drinkers. If they align with our thinking and we can enlighten them and add value to their day, we’re going to be more relevant to them. So we’ve created what we think is unique, hard to replicate, because it’s about the most complicated idea you can have.

Mathieu Yuill:
Yes.

Matt Johnston:
Minimize your branding, have always changing in the foreground and then match that with a whole collection of different products. It’s not for the faint of heart and it’s not for every business model, but for us because it’s built from the ground up, it’s in everything we do, it works. You can never stand still, it’s always moving forward. You need to truly believe in it, and then you can drive that through the organization.

Mathieu Yuill:
Yeah, so if you’re listening to this and you’re thinking, well, art’s not really our thing. If you run a health club, is it about inviting people that practice athletics that may not be common to North America? A [inaudible 00:14:05] professional that comes in and talks about it or does exercise. There’s lots of ways you could take that same ethos. I have three ideas for clients right now. So I’ve already gained out of this, so thank you very much. Your consulting fee’s in the mail.

Matt Johnston:
All right, good.

Mathieu Yuill:
No, and actually, I think the chapter in your book when you talk about this, your autobiography will be called emotional connection, because that’s really what I think it comes down to, right? The emotional connection with the people that are buying your product.

Matt Johnston:
Completely. There’s no shortage of companies out there and no shortage of products out there, so making good products is a base standard. So, what do you stand for beyond that? So, we chose that one of our communities is about local and that we need to take that very serious and be very authentic about that, but we weren’t building a company that was solely about Hamilton, we were building a company that was about creativity and how do we do that in an authentic way that we can shout from the rooftops? That’s what we focused on. So yeah, it’s not necessarily about art, it’s about finding that nugget that makes you stand out from the crowd and makes you relevant to your consumers.

Mathieu Yuill:
I love that this brewery based in Hamilton has this idea from the same city that Tiny Talent Time was born in.

Matt Johnston:
I remember that show.

Mathieu Yuill:
You remember Tiny Talent Time?

Matt Johnston:
Yeah.

Mathieu Yuill:
Yeah, kids who are musicians, artists, dancers, whatever, go on and showcase their talent. I can only imagine the hot mess that must’ve been getting those kids organized for a live production. But anyhow, nonetheless, finally, I really want some practical tips. So if you’re an executive director, a brand manager, a CEO listening to this podcast and you’re just loving everything that Matt’s talking about, which I would get, because what he talks about, I know you want it.

Mathieu Yuill:
I get the emails, I talk to you every day in my business, that you’re looking for something that gives more meaning, that gives you your employees and your colleagues something to get them excited about, get out of bed. Often when I have these conversations, I’ll ask the question, what you’re really asking me is you want your place of employment to be life-giving.

Mathieu Yuill:
So Matt, I don’t recommend any company just copy and paste what you’ve done. So if you were sitting down to start over, who would you get in the room to have a conversation? What steps would you take to kind of figure out your thing? Which was ultimately around really inviting the community and the artists into your business, but what were the steps you take to get to that answer? Just give maybe two or three things you would do if you could start over again.

Matt Johnston:
Sure. I think obviously you need to look at your product and is your product your unique point of difference? Is that your message or is it the ethos of the company beyond your product? If it is, then obviously looking at who your consumers are and what is something that you’re passionate about? Because as we all know, entrepreneurship and business is not easy, so you better want to still be doing it in two years time. So, what is it that’s important to you and what’s important to your consumers, and how can you deliver on that commitment? If you can’t deliver, if it just is going to be a flashy marketing ad, we’ve all seen so many of those, people will see past it.

Matt Johnston:
So, Nike coming out with a Colin Kaepernick. The first thing you’re looking at it was, okay, that’s an amazing ad. You’ve taken a point of view, which is fantastic. Do you live against those points of view and are you following through with that? That comes all the way through to how they as a company donate politically and everything, because they need to champion that point of view and they can’t speak it at both sides of their mouth.

Mathieu Yuill:
So, identify the thing. Is it your product, is it something about your organization? Then look into maybe have you even shown a history, maybe not formally of doing this thing? Then three, what you just talked about with Nike, that was a great example, is develop how you would live this out, maybe write down some actual applications. That can grow and expand, but those are three solid tips, I think, if you want to get into this.

Matt Johnston:
Yeah, take a look at Patagonia. There’s no better company I can think about there that lives and breathes it every day. They’re a clothing company, but they’re so much more than that. So, though those are the companies who have really figured it out and created a long-term stability for themselves. You don’t have to be perfect and it doesn’t have to be the sole thing you talk about, but you do need to be committed to it for it to be authentic and genuine.

Mathieu Yuill:
So for those of you who are not familiar with Patagonia, again, they’re a clothing company, but two stories I love about them. One, when the recent administration, the former administration in the US gave a tax break to companies to basically allow them to pollute more, Patagonia took that, it was about a million dollars to them, they took that money and gave it right back to environmental causes to lobby against that tax break. It was great. It was a tax break that was supposed to help the environment and blah, blah, blah.

Mathieu Yuill:
The other thing is for two months during the busiest purchasing season of Patagonia, on the front page of their website which took up the whole page was the founder’s book that just talked about his ethos for the love for the environment. Not sales on sweaters or why our shirts are great, but it was his Jerry Maguire moment, right? His mantra on the front page was so great.

Mathieu Yuill:
Well, listen, Matt, thank you so much for coming on. I want to say thank you to a few people that put us together in the same room. First of all, Cindy Craig, who books and schedules these podcasts, Naomi, who helps me get ready for them, Austin Pomeroy’s our audio tech, he does all of the editing and the reason I don’t sound like a chipmunk right now is because he slows my voice down and gives me some bass. Jamie Hunter’s going to take this story … hey, he’s in Dundas, by the way, he’s local to you. Jamie Hunter’s going to take this content, put it out on social, read a great blog post. Carrie Cotton, today specifically when a problem came up, she said, “I know you have a podcast, I’ll handle it.” So I want to thank all those people, but Matt, especially thank you to you for coming on today.

Matt Johnston:
Yeah, thanks. It was a lot of fun, really appreciate it.

Mathieu Yuill:
The URL is collectiveartsbrewing.com. You can find them in the LCBO, definitely online. They do deliver, their delivery is huge. Have a great day, man. We’ll talk again soon.

Matt Johnston:
Thanks, you too.