Au Vodka: How a kicked ball boy built a £500m gold-bottle empire

He’s having the last laugh

Hazard was sent off, later apologised, and for a fortnight or so the teenager was the most argued-about person in British football. Thirteen years on, the co-founder of Au Vodka is reportedly about to bank more than £100m.

Au Vodka, the gold-bottled Welsh drinks brand he founded with childhood friend Jackson Quinn in 2015, is nearing a £500m sale to Sazerac, the American drinks group behind Southern Comfort and the canned cocktail BuzzBallz.

Sazerac told BBC Wales in a statement that it had agreed to buy the start-up, with the deal, first reported by Sky News, expected to earn each Swansea founder more than £100m. Both declined to discuss it.

How Au Vodka got from Swansea to Ibiza

Two years after launching, the pair took investment from the DJ Charlie Sloth, whose contacts book brought celebrity endorsement to those gold-coloured bottles.

The YouTube star Jake Paul had a tattoo of one as part of a publicity stunt. The bottles became a fixture of poolside parties in Ibiza and Dubai, which is a marketing strategy of sorts, and a fairly effective one.

There was no heritage story to tell and no distillery in a glen, so the brand sold the only thing it actually had: a bottle that photographed well at 2am.

The commercial breakthrough came with the ready-to-drink cans, which carried the same gold branding into supermarket fridges and corner-shop chillers, a category where, as anyone who has ever worked out the best value beer by alcohol percentage will know, presentation and price do most of the heavy lifting.

The gold-wrapped headquarters

In 2025 the company opened a new headquarters on an industrial estate in its home city, converting an office block and filling the car park with gold-wrapped cars.

Visitors were shown round a nine-hole mini golf course with golden obstacles and golden balls. An unusual thing to find on a Swansea industrial estate, and entirely consistent with everything else the brand had done.

For Sazerac, the logic is straightforward enough. The group said the acquisition would allow it “to deepen its presence in the UK”, buying a brand with genuine cultural reach among exactly the drinkers that legacy spirits companies have spent a decade failing to talk to.

Owning Southern Comfort and BuzzBallz gives it scale and shelf space; what it has not had is a British brand that young drinkers pick up without being asked to.

Which brings it back to a boy on the floor at the Liberty Stadium. Morgan earned his early infamy through no real effort of his own; the second act took eleven years of building a drinks company in a city not previously known for exporting vodka.

Whatever else the Au Vodka story is, it is a considerably better ending than the one the 2013 headlines had in mind.