Anyone who saw Kendall Jenner’s post about her new tequila brand in February 2021 didn’t stop to look at the bottle. Within hours, there was already a strong, loud, and personal backlash. People who didn’t like her said she was stealing someone else’s culture and turning a traditionally Mexican product into another Kardashian-Jenner money-making scheme. It was the kind of social media pressure that has shut down whole brands before. 818 did not fall down. If anything, it became more clear.
The name of the brand comes from the area code for Calabasas, California, where Jenner grew up. That one detail made a lot of people angry. There’s nothing Mexican about it—no reference to Jalisco or the agave fields where the spirit is said to have been born. Someone on Twitter called it “gentrification.” Someone else saw it as a white celebrity “making money off of our traditions.” Even though the words were strong, the anger was real. This wasn’t the first time a Kardashian-Jenner project had walked into a cultural conversation without fully understanding what was going on.
What really made things tricky, though, was that Jenner wasn’t breaking the law or even normal practices in her field. According to strict rules, tequila can only be made in certain parts of Mexico, mostly in Jalisco. This means that any company selling tequila has to get its alcohol from Mexican distilleries, even if the company isn’t owned by a celebrity. When she spoke out about the issue, Melly Barajas, a Mexican tequilero and founder of Vinos y Licores Azteca, said the same thing. She wasn’t happy about how globalization was changing her business, but she also knew that Jenner’s fame could turn people off of other drinks and onto tequila. That makes sense from a practical point of view, even if it doesn’t fully ease the pain.
Jenner was said to have been working on 818 for almost four years before it came out. The brand had already won a lot of awards, including ones from the World Tequila Awards and the Ultimate Spirits Challenge. That’s simple to miss when the story is about who you are and what you own. The quality of the liquid in the bottle didn’t come up much in the first few weeks of the story. Most of the time, it was about who had it.
Something had changed by September 2021. Jenner went on The Tonight Show and talked about a project her brand was working on in the background: a way to turn agave waste fibers and water runoff from the distillery into sustainable bricks that would be given to communities in Jalisco to build homes. She also said that a hospital was being built. The company also said it would give 1% of its profits back to the area. There’s no way to know for sure if this came from real thought or from a crisis communications playbook. Most likely a mix of the two. It was concrete, though, and that’s important.
In one version of this story, 818 is just another project for a famous person to show off their skills, linked to a spirit that people already love. That version isn’t completely wrong, though. But there’s also a version where the fast and harsh backlash actually made the company take responsibility, which they might not have done otherwise. The brick project isn’t a small matter. Agave waste is a big problem for the environment in Jalisco. What critics wanted was a response that found a use for it and sent resources back to local communities, even if they didn’t think they’d get it.
Kendall Jenner’s 818 Tequila business is still going strong. It dealt with early controversy without backing down, changed without completely rebranding, and found a way to stay in the conversation for reasons other than celebrity rumors. Is it going to be taken seriously by people who drink tequila, people who work in the industry, and the Mexican communities whose work makes the product possible? That is still up in the air. What 818 builds in Jalisco over the next few years might be more important than anything they ever said in ads.
