Brown-Forman Corporation Class A Barclays 19th Annual Global Consumer Conference

Yeah, look, it always, with Brown-Forman, starts with the geographic expansion of our portfolio, but obviously Jack Daniel's led. Just to sort of put some context around that, I started almost 30 years ago. When I started, we were 80% U.S., 20% international. Ten years later, we were 60% U.S., 40% international. Today, we are 40% U.S. and 60% international. It's been a massive movement in terms of where we generate our sales and our business, where our people are. We are now spread out all over the world. We have many more employees outside of the U.S. than we have inside the U.S. A lot of people think of Brown-Forman as this sort of U.S.-centric company from Kentucky, and it is much broader than that at this point.

So, look, the geographic expansion on Jack over my career is where the value creation has really come from. As the brand has gotten bigger and bigger around the world, it has created an enormous amount of shareholder value. That is going to continue to be priority one for the company. We will continue to do that, although the rest of our portfolio, which I will talk about in a second, also has a big place in that strategic plan, too. Another topic I think that is increasingly important, not only to Brown-Forman, but the industry on whole, and especially in the U.S., is innovation. Innovation, particularly when I started, really was not that honestly important. It was a handful of core brands that continued to grow around the world. Innovation has become immensely more important, whether different categories play well in the world of innovation.

It just happens, I think, that American whiskey, Scotch would be in there, too, but American whiskey and tequila are the two categories that play in innovation the best. A lot of that is because you use barrels to age, and there are different things that you can do to create super premium, ultra premium line extensions off of that. Innovation within the Jack Daniel's trademark range is everything from what we did last year with Jack Daniel's Blackberry, which has been a great success. In the same year, we did something called Jack Daniel's Heritage Barrel, which is really an ultra premium line extension that we sold out of. We sold every bottle we could make, and it is quite substantial, and it was a really great product.

I say all that because I find the Jack Daniel's franchise or the Jack Daniel's family of brands has the ability to do a Blackberry and then an ultra premium in the same year. It is the broad shoulders of the brand that can help to do that. You have Jack Daniel's first. You have innovation and making sure you do things there. Then a lot of the brands that we have not only just purchased in the last couple of years, the Gin Mares and Diplomáticos, but certainly I go back to Woodford. Woodford is now a big brand in the U.S., very small outside of the U.S., so that is another international opportunity. In general, we call them emerging brands, so the brands that are relatively small outside of the U.S., but collectively are meaningful. Excited about the opportunities there.

Well, the first and most important reason that we made the changes was focus. Towards the end, it really started with leaving RNDC, really in California was first, and then it spread to the rest of a lot of other brands. We were the first ones out for the most part, which gave us an advantage in that we'd looked at the rest of the industry and had the ability to navigate without 100 other companies trying to do the same thing, of which all accelerated as the year went on. But focus is so important, I believe, in our business. It's why I do believe Brown-Forman has been successful and not necessarily lost share or underperformed the bigger competitors that we have out there, because focus is that important. Towards the end of the RNDC days, they had huge portfolios.