He Played Pro Ball In Singapore. Now He's Selling Gin There.
Before Chris Cameron ever touched a copper still, he spent his professional life doing something else that rewards patience, precision and an uncomfortable tolerance for failure: playing basketball at a level most people only watch on television.
He was a power forward, six foot eleven, recruited out of Melbourne to play college ball at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, then professional in Australia's NBL, including a run with the Singapore Slingers. Singapore, as it happens, is also the first country Naught Gin cracked when Cameron decided the label was ready to leave Australia. Whether that's a coincidence or a decade-old relationship quietly paying dividends is the kind of detail a decent business journalist would want to ask him about directly. Either way, it's a better origin story than most gin labels get.
Chris Cameron of the Naught Distillery
He eventually swapped the paint for a pot still. It took three hundred distillations to get the first bottle right. Three hundred. Most people would have stopped at thirty. That original release, Naught's Australian Dry, went on to win gold at the San Francisco World Spirits Competition and top honours at the Australian Distilled Spirits Awards. In 2024, the International Wine & Spirits Competition, the oldest spirits judging body in the world, handed Naught's Overproof Gin its Classic Gin Trophy, the kind of win that gets quietly framed and hung somewhere near the bar.
None of that is where the story is going next, though.
Naught is currently expanding into New South Wales and Queensland, with MV Retail Advisory spearheading that push into two of the country's biggest and most competitive drinks markets. That alone would be a solid year for a Melbourne distillery still small enough that its owner can probably tell you which barrel every bottle of the barrel-aged Sangiovese came from. But it's not the whole plan.
Beyond the two new states, Naught and MV Retail Advisory are now actively working the ground for a much bigger jump: the United States, Europe, and India. Conversations are underway with potential distributors and partners in each, and retail landscapes in all three are being scoped right now, not next year, not "eventually." Nothing is signed. Nobody is promising a shelf date in New York or Mumbai. But the work of finding out who the right partners are, and what it would actually take to land there, is happening today.
There's a hard commercial logic sitting underneath all this ambition, and it isn't just wanderlust. Australia taxes spirits more heavily than almost anywhere else in the world, a rate that rises automatically every six months regardless of how the domestic market is actually trading. For a distillery Naught's size, every export market it opens is a market where that particular ceiling doesn't apply. Growing overseas isn't just about ambition or ego. It's a rational response to a home market where the tax settings are fixed against you no matter how good the gin is.
"We're thrilled to have MV Retail Advisory as our commercial partner as we take this next step," said Chris Cameron, owner and distiller at Naught. "They understand what it takes to grow a brand properly, at home and overseas, and that's exactly what we need right now."
Naught Gin award-winning Australian Dry Gin
It's worth pausing on how deliberate the sequencing actually is. Most craft distilleries treat international expansion as a reward they'll get to eventually, a slow, patient climb from cellar door to national ranging to, maybe one day, an export deal if a distributor happens to notice. Naught isn't waiting for that. The smarter read on what's happening here is a genuine division of labour: Cameron and his team are heads-down consolidating and strengthening the business he already has, sharpening what made Naught worth noticing in the first place, while MVRA does the work of finding and building the new ground in NSW, Queensland, the US, Europe and India, drawing on the same outsourced account management approach we use with other founder-led brands who need professional commercial representation without building an internal team from scratch. That's the point of spreading growth across several fronts at once rather than betting everything on one: it diversifies the risk, so no single state's retail cycle or single market's conditions can knock the whole business off course. Handled properly, and with the right partner doing the market-opening work, that's not overreach. It's exactly how a small brand builds something durable.
What doesn't change through any of this is the thing that got Naught here in the first place. The Eltham distillery isn't going anywhere. The 800-litre copper pot still isn't getting swapped for something bigger and less interesting. A brand that won a world trophy by tasting distinctly like itself has no reason to start tasting like something built for a bigger, blander shelf, and nothing in how this expansion is being built suggests that's the plan.
If there's a lesson in here for other small, ambitious Australian brands watching this play out, it's this: Cameron's advantage isn't just the gin. It's that he's already spent a career competing at an elite level, on courts on the other side of the world, under real pressure, and won. That's not a small thing to bring into a boardroom. It's exactly the instinct now driving Naught to back itself into markets most distilleries this size wouldn't dare touch, and it's a considerably more useful skill set than most founders in this category are working with.
MV Retail Advisory is working alongside Naught on the domestic and international side of this expansion. If your brand is weighing up a similar move, the conversation is worth having early, not after the decisions have already been made.
