It put up a sign on the door of a distillery on Northwest Wilson Street in Portland, Oregon, on June 28. It said: “Thank you for all the memories, Portland. Stay weird.” The Aviation American Gin visitor center was finished in an instant. A celebrity co-owner, four years of business, and a tasting room that Ryan Reynolds once called “Disneyland for adults” came to an end with a note that felt more like a band breaking up than a company closing down a building.
Diageo, the London-based beverage company that bought Aviation in 2020, quietly announced the closing. It has gotten a lot of attention, in part because Reynolds’ name is still linked to it. But what ended wasn’t the most interesting part of the story. The way it was built and what it looks like were both meant to sell.
Reynolds bought shares in Aviation American Gin in 2018. He admitted that he hadn’t spent years learning about the liquor business. He tried the gin, liked it, and joined in. But what came next was not at all casual. He didn’t just put his face on the line. He was in charge of the marketing’s creative direction, was in all of the ads, and changed the brand’s voice so that it didn’t sound like a product pitch and more like a joke he was sharing with the audience. That’s a difference that matters. A lot of celebrity liquor deals are business-like. Reynolds made Aviation seem like his real hobby, which made it seem real, and in the market for high-end spirits, realness is very valuable.
Diageo agreed to buy Aviation and a few other brands for up to $610 million by 2020. Reynolds agreed to be the gin’s face for another ten years. It’s still not clear how much of that deal was based on Aviation’s actual sales numbers and how much was based on Reynolds’s reputation, but the fact that Diageo signed him to a 10-year deal suggests they knew they were getting both.
As the Portland closure happened, it seemed like the visitor center was always more of a symbol than a building. It opened in 2022, two years after the company was bought, and was more of a physical representation of the brand’s identity than a serious place to make things. Since last year, Diageo has been moving the production of gin from Portland to other company facilities. The last part of the stage set to be taken down was the building on Northwest Wilson Street. Reynolds had already cashed out, of course.
Reynolds knew, maybe more instinctively than strategically, that personality, not product, is what makes a brand valuable today. There was more than one craft gin on the market in 2018. In a crowded and often hard to tell apart category, it competed. The guy who kept showing up in sarcastic ads making fun of himself and, indirectly, the whole idea of celebrity gin was what set it apart, not the botanicals. Being self-aware was the result.
Diageo is facing what its CEO has called its “biggest challenge” right now: slow sales in North America, which make up almost 40% of the company’s net revenue. The closing of the distillery in Portland is part of a larger plan to change how they get supplies in North America. Cutting a small visitor center isn’t important for a company as big as Diageo. But it does make me wonder what happens to a brand that is based on personality once the quirks of production are standardized and the founder’s energy fades into corporate management.
Reynolds got out just in time, or very just in time. He quickly made something that felt real and then sold it to a big company that was willing to pay for the feeling. Close of the Portland distillery is, in a way, just the last part of a deal that was pretty much done years ago. Still, the “Stay weird” sign was a nice touch. Very true to the brand.
