Robin Clough's first useful tequila opinion was that he did not want any. It was 2012, and the British MBA student was at a roadside café in Mexico with his classmate Sebastian Gonzalez. The owner offered a taste of his personal tequila. Clough had inherited the usual late-night associations: salt, lime, a grimace and what he later called “ritual punishment with your friends.” Breakfast hardly improved the proposition. The owner persisted. Clough took the glass.
The liquid was subtle and complex, something to sip over a meal. Even more unsettling, Gonzalez explained that it was ordinary by Mexican standards. Clough's mental picture of the entire category had been built from its least persuasive examples. The revelation was not that he had discovered tequila. Mexico had understood tequila perfectly well. He had discovered the size of his own misconception, and the commercial distance between what many British drinkers expected and what a careful producer could make.
That gap became Tequila Enemigo. Clough and Gonzalez began work in 2013 with Max Davies-Gilbert, Clough's childhood friend. “Childhood” is almost too loose a term: Clough and Davies-Gilbert were born days apart, and their families had known each other for decades. Gonzalez supplied the friendship and cultural bridge that led Clough into Mexico. Together, the three founders gave the business its lasting geometry. Enemigo's triangle logo represents them, and also recalls the three places from which they worked while the first batch aged: the United States, Europe and Mexico.
A terrible idea, patiently executed
Before finishing their MBAs, Clough and Gonzalez took the premium-tequila concept to an entrepreneurship professor. The verdict was spectacularly unhelpful: the professor called it the worst idea he had ever heard, with extra language for emphasis. The founders kept the line, as founders do when an insult ages into an anecdote. Later, after Enemigo began to gain traction, they offered the professor a lifetime supply.
The cheerful revenge distracts from the more useful part. They did not answer criticism with a launch announcement. Between the idea in 2013 and the British debut in August 2017 came repeated trips to the town of Tequila, hundreds of public and internal taste tests, label design, Mexican export rules, production licenses and British approvals. Four years is a long time to carry an idea whose first academic review included expletives.
Clough's time at the Rady School also gave the idea a practical workshop. He specialized in product management, venture capital and finance, joined the technology, entrepreneurship and consulting clubs, and participated in the student-run Rady Venture Fund. His Lab to Market team won its business-plan and presentation competition after pitching to local investors. In 2014, professors and peers selected him for the Rady Distinguished Entrepreneur Award, given to a graduating MBA candidate for entrepreneurship, leadership and innovation. None of those credentials guaranteed that an English market wanted aged tequila. They did, however, train attention on the unromantic mechanics between a promising taste and a functioning company: who pays, what must be learned, and which claims survive a room of skeptical listeners.
“We spent four years carrying out blind taste tests to ensure that what was in the bottles could speak for us rather than anything else.”Robin Clough
Their enemy was not another bottle. Clough defined it as marketing placed ahead of quality, along with the old shot culture that treated tequila as an ordeal to be endured. The Spanish word enemigo gave the resistance a name. The team used new American oak barrels rather than the used bourbon casks common in the category. Its Cristalino matured for a year, then went through filtration that removed most of the color and heavier oak character while retaining the complexity of aging. The Extra Añejo spent a little more than three years in oak.
The number 89 on the Cristalino is not decorative. It records the recipes tested and refined before the selection. The serving ritual carried the same argument. Clough favored the clear aged tequila neat in a long-stemmed flute, a piece of glassware that asks the hand to slow down. For a longer drink, he suggested sparkling mineral water and citrus. A spirit associated with hurried shots was being introduced with the manners of a patient dinner guest.
The long route to a first pour
Assumption overturned
Company work begins
Test, license, refine
London launch
Let the face change
Days after the British launch, Enemigo 00 Extra Añejo received a Masters medal at the Luxury Spirits Masters. In January 2018, the founders closed an external investment round that valued the young company above $5 million. London placements grew, and requests began arriving from the United States. The plan had been to enter America in 2019, but demand pulled the schedule forward. Enemigo reached New York in 2018, the Hamptons in 2019 and California later that year.
Clough did not pretend the young company could overpower established spirits groups. He described the founders as underdogs entering an industry governed by long relationships. His wager was narrower: quality and credibility could eventually beat excessive marketing, provided people could find the product where they wanted to drink it.
This is where his story becomes less about taste notes and more about human expression. Clough has said his favorite moment at work is watching a new drinker's face change. The person begins where he began, carrying the category's old reputation. Then the glass interrupts it. He sees the same surprise that the café owner saw in him. A founder can spend a fortune describing transformation. Clough's preferred evidence happens silently, in the half-second after a sip.
“The moment that people have when they first try Enemigo is my favorite moment of my whole job.”Robin Clough
He also credits inexperience. “We built Enemigo using our naivety and fundamentally being the unknowns,” he once said, arguing that it gave the team a fresh view. His regret was not ignoring convention but occasionally following other people's expectations. This is an appealing founder line because it does not make naivety magical. The team still had to learn the licenses, laws, production and distribution. Its freedom came from choosing which inherited beliefs deserved to survive that learning.
Selling control, keeping the work
In September 2023, MadaLuxe Group acquired a majority stake in Tequila Enemigo and used the deal to form MadaLuxe Spirits. Financial terms were not disclosed. The founding team retained a substantial minority interest and continued to manage daily operations. Clough joined the new division's executive team and took a board seat. In his announcement, he called Enemigo a brand built with two of his best friends and promised that the first round would be on him.
The transaction joined two kinds of luxury infrastructure. Enemigo brought a product, a spirits network and roots across Britain, Mexico and the United States. MadaLuxe brought distribution and experience moving expensive goods through demanding markets. Clough's public ambition after the deal was expansion without relaxing the product standard. The founders had sold control, but not excused themselves from stewardship.
A year later, the brand announced a long-term partnership with Fulham Football Club and Fulham Pier. Enemigo became the official tequila partner, with a permanent bar at Riverside Market and a place in Craven Cottage hospitality. For Clough, a British founder whose idea began with a Mexican breakfast and matured through London dining rooms, the geography folded neatly back on itself. The spirit that had corrected his assumptions was now being served beside the Thames.
By then, MadaLuxe credited the brand with more than 60 awards across three continents. The tally includes what the company describes as the first double gold awarded to a Cristalino at the San Francisco World Spirits Competition. Awards are useful shorthand in a crowded aisle, but Clough's underlying measure has remained more intimate: does the liquid reverse an expectation?
The discipline inside the mischief
Clough sometimes talks about Enemigo as if it were a person. Its dating profile, he suggested, would describe a mischievous character who exceeds expectations and appears most at home during a celebration. He has joked that a little Enemigo improves nearly any legal party trick. The levity is part of the brand, but it sits on top of an unusually sober development story.
There is the four-year wait. There are 89 recipes condensed into a bottle number. There is the founder who likes a flute because the shape changes the pace. There are three friends made into one triangle, and a majority sale structured so those friends remained involved. Even the company name, outwardly combative, points inward to a restraint: resist the temptation to let promotion outrun proof.
Clough's career began its consequential turn when he allowed a café owner to contradict him. Everything since has been an attempt to repeat that courtesy at scale. The bottle presents an argument, the drinker brings an assumption, and the liquid gets a fair hearing. It is difficult to change a category's reputation. It is easier to change one face. Then another. Then another.