Swansea vodka brand sold to Sazerac in reported £500m deal
Charlie Morgan and Jackson Quinn started Au Vodka in their home city in 2015. Eleven years on, the American owner of Southern Comfort has agreed to buy it.
Sazerac, the US drinks group behind Southern Comfort and BuzzBallz, has said it has agreed to buy Au Vodka, the Swansea brand known for its gold bottles.
The price has not been confirmed by either company. Sky News, which broke the story, reported the deal at £500m, and reported that Morgan and Quinn stand to make more than £100m each.
The two are childhood friends. They founded the business in Swansea in 2015 and, on the account reported, have built one of the largest exits by a Welsh consumer brand.
The first outside money arrived two years in, from the DJ Charlie Sloth. His contacts brought endorsements, and the gold bottle became the marketing rather than a container for it.
The YouTuber Jake Paul had a tattoo of an Au Vodka bottle as part of a publicity stunt. The bottles turned up at poolside parties in Ibiza and Dubai.
Distribution did the rest. When the ready-to-drink market grew after the pandemic, the company moved into cans and kept the same gold livery, and became the second biggest brand in the UK ready-to-drink market.
The brand it sits behind is BuzzBallz. That brand belongs to Sazerac, which is now buying the company chasing it.
Sazerac said in a statement that the acquisition would let it "deepen its presence in the UK". The founders declined to discuss the deal.
The company put its money into visible things. In 2025 it opened a headquarters on a Swansea industrial estate, converted from an office block, with gold-wrapped cars in the car park and a nine-hole mini golf course with golden obstacles for visitors.
Morgan told BBC Wales News in 2025 that the US was the next target and that the company was expanding there aggressively.
The social-first approach has also cost the company. In September 2025 the Advertising Standards Authority found Au Vodka had broken the rules by aiming alcohol advertising at under-18s, and banned a TikTok advert featuring a Love Island contestant, ruling the ads must not appear again in that form.
Morgan is not new to attention. He was 17 and working as a ball boy at Swansea City's cup semi-final against Chelsea in 2013 when Eden Hazard was sent off after appearing to make contact with him while trying to kick the ball away. Hazard apologised. Ten years later the pair filmed a YouTube video together and laughed about it.
For founders in consumer goods, the sequence is the lesson rather than the number. A recognisable bottle, a celebrity investor's contact book, then a fast move into cans when the format shifted — and a buyer that already owned the brand ahead of it.
The regulator's ruling is the other half of the lesson. The channels that build a drinks brand this quickly are the ones the ASA watches most closely.