Kendall Jenner Spent 3.5 Years Making Tequila in Secret. Then She Won a Blind Competition. Then She Told Everyone.

I used to drink a lot of gin and tonic in Malta. This is not a confession — it's context. Malta in summer is 35 degrees, the sea is everywhere, every restaurant has a happy hour that starts at 5 and ends whenever people stop ordering, and gin and tonic is basically the official drink of "I live on a Mediterranean island and I'm fine with that." I was very fine with that for several years. I don't drink much anymore. But I retain a deep respect for a well-made spirit and a well-built brand. Which brings me, somewhat inevitably, to Kendall Jenner.

The thing she did before anyone was watching

Before the launch. Before the Instagram posts. Before the 300 million followers were deployed. Kendall Jenner anonymously submitted her reposado to the 2020 World Tequila Awards. No name. No face. No Kardashian-Jenner apparatus. She won. "I wanted the liquid and the brand to stand on their own," she said, "and for people to love it without knowing I was part of it." This is the detail that makes 818 interesting. Not the sales numbers, not the celebrity distribution, not the Sazerac partnership — the fact that she spent three and a half years developing a tequila she was willing to enter anonymously into a blind competition. That's not a vanity project. That's a founder behavior. George Clooney did the same thing with Casamigos. He and Rande Gerber spent two years sampling hundreds of tequilas to find the recipe they wanted, ordered a thousand bottles for personal use, and eventually decided other people might want to buy it. Diageo bought Casamigos for $1 billion in 2017. At the time it was moving 170,000 cases a year.

818 is now targeting 200,000 cases in 2025

Revenue went from $10 million in 2021 to $25 million in 2022 to an estimated $50 million in 2024, with 40% year-over-year volume growth while the overall tequila market grew 2%. In April 2026, Sazerac — the Kentucky spirits company behind Fireball and Buffalo Trace — took a stake and secured exclusive US distribution rights. The brand is now valued at anywhere between $200 million and $400 million depending on who you ask. A smart pricing move helped. In 2024, 818 dropped its Blanco from $45 to $29.99 — not because it was struggling, but because Kendall looked at her demographic (Gen Z, not hedge fund managers) and decided volume at $30 beats prestige at $45. It worked immediately.

On the Kardashian-Jenner family

I watch Keeping Up with the Kardashians. I am not embarrassed about this. It is entertaining television and Kris Jenner is one of the most interesting business operators of the last twenty years. Kim has SKIMS, valued at $4 billion. Kylie had her cosmetics company, valued at over a billion before the partial sale. Khloe has Good American. Kendall has 818 and the highest-paid model career of her generation. And Kris Jenner is behind all of it, making deals, managing relationships, turning a family into a brand with a level of strategic clarity that most actual CEOs would struggle to match. I have a theory about the Kardashian-Jenner approach to business: they don't separate the personal from the commercial, and they don't apologize for it. The life is the content. The content is the brand. The brand sells the product. It's a vertically integrated machine running on a family. Kendall is my favourite. She went high fashion when everyone expected her to go influencer. She built a tequila for three and a half years before saying a word about it. She is, of all of them, the one who seems most comfortable with the distance between who she is and what she's selling. Gigi Hadid is also a favourite, for related but different reasons. But that's a different article.

The gin tonic epilogue

Malta's happy hour culture is alive and well. If you're reading this from Sliema or St. Julian's or anywhere with a sea view and a bar menu, you already know this. The gin and tonic era of my life happened on this island and I have no regrets. 818 Tequila has not yet made significant inroads into Maltese happy hours, as far as I can tell. This seems like an oversight that Sazerac's distribution network should address. In the meantime, Kendall Jenner has a tequila that won a blind competition before anyone knew she made it, is growing 20x faster than the category average, and is on track to sell more cases per year than Casamigos did when Clooney sold it for a billion. Not bad for a vanity project. --- FreeMalta covers business, brands, and the occasional tequila empire. The full Off The Record library is here. For Malta's actual bar and restaurant scene, the Hospitality Index has opinions on where the good happy hours are.