Jack Daniel’s goes back to the 1870s, when the five-foot-two Jack Daniel decided to make a whiskey with charcoal filtering that could be sold at a premium price. Distilling whiskey was common in Lynchburg, Tennessee, where Daniel resided, as was filtering through charcoal, so he searched for another way to differentiate his whiskey from all the others on the market. Daniel decided on using iron-free spring water from his property, filtered through sugar maple charcoal. This allowed him to produce a smoother, more consistent whiskey.
While Jack Daniel’s sales growth was mostly through word of mouth, a feature in Fortune in 1951 helped take the whiskey from a local drink to a drink of the stars. It highlighted the many notable people who favored Jack Daniel’s, from Winston Churchill to famous Hollywood directors to a Nobel Prize winner. Celebrities like Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner counted the drink as one of their favorites, with Sinatra even wearing a patch with the logo for a fictional Jack Daniel’s Country Club.
Jack Daniel’s hit a rough patch in the 1950s through 1970s, where the demand was more than the supply. They promoted their product through advertisements, despite not having the inventory to fulfill orders, and they relied heavily on the image of the common man in Lynchburg to get their brand message across. Jack Daniel’s became the drink for the common man. Advertisements featured people in work clothes, and Lynchburg was featured in the photographs. The Jack Daniel Distillery in Lynchburg was opened to the public for tours, with over 200,000 people visiting each year.
Sales tripled for Jack Daniel’s between 1973 and 1986, and the growth has continued ever since. The only change in the decades-old process of making the whiskey has been a lowering of the alcohol from 90 proof to 80 proof in 1987. Jack Daniel’s now hosts annual barbecue competitions, sponsors racing teams, and even launched a campaign to make Jack’s birthday a national holiday in the United States. The whiskey company was also featured in the song “Tik Tok” by Ke$ha, which was the top-selling song of 2010.