My favorite new brand story from the SXSW Interactive conference last week actually came from a brand that I thought I knew fairly well. At a small workshop called “Booze Blogging,” we tasted various cocktails and got to hear from Beth Bellanti-Walker, who worked on the start-up Tito’s Vodka brand, which is based in Austin, Texas. She filled in some blanks on the brand and shared some insights into the challenge of taking a small, meaningful brand to the big time.

Several years ago I first heard the fascinating story of Tito’s Vodka: A man named Tito Beveridge was a geophysicist with a side hobby of making flavored vodka for his friends. After years of friends’ encouragement and talking with bartenders who said they would love a smooth vodka that people could drink straight, he decided to learn how to distill his own liquor. Thanks to his scientific skills, passion for perfection, and 19 maxed-out credit cards, Tito got the first distillery license in Texas created a brilliant vodka that is distilled six times for a pure taste. One day a fan of his new vodka suggested that he enter it into the World Spirits Competition. Beveridge couldn’t attend himself, so he sent up a few bottles. It was named a Double Gold Medal winner.

Over time word of mouth fueled the expansion of Tito’s Vodka. Sales went from 1,000 cases in 1997 to currently more than 200,000 cases each year. During our session at SXSW, I learned a few other stories of the world of Tito and its bootstrap marketing. Beth essentially worked for free and spent most of her time stoking fans’ passion by responding to emails, managing a blog, and sending vodka to parties. According to Beth, “Everything about Tito’s marketing success has come from people’s love for the brand.”

She told us how Tito designed the label and logo for the brand by himself on his basement computer. Tito seems unconcerned with selling out or taking the world by storm. He is a complex guy who has several other hobbies and has some clever ideas about clean energy and improving the world.

I personally tried Tito’s roughly five years ago after reading about it on a marketing blog (that I can’t remember now), and I became one of these rabid fans. I enjoyed ritually mixing my martinis at home with Tito’s and loved taking friends down to my basement bar to give them a taste of this mysterious Texas concoction. I even enjoyed the process of finding a place to order it online, and waiting for a package to arrive weeks later. My friends would see or hear about Tito’s Vodka and say, “Hey, that’s the brand Bob loves.” And I enjoyed being the first guy to turn my friends onto the brand. The closest thing I can compare this to is when you become a fan of an upstart band and enjoy introducing the music to friends.

But my Tito’s fandom hit a bump a few years ago. A buddy of mine shot me an email and told me to look in The New York Times; he had just seen a full-page ad for Tito’s Vodka. Unfortunately, I wish he hadn’t told me about the ad, because it broke my heart. Here was my great little vodka brand advertising in one of the largest newspapers in the world. Tito’s Vodka had sold out.

In the two years or so since I saw this ad, I have reached for Tito’s Vodka less often in my liquor cabinet after a long day. I no longer raved about it to friends, and when I need to resupply I was more likely to grab Absolut at the nearby package store rather than order a Tito’s shipment. So I was eager to ask Beth why she and Tito embraced mass advertising on a brand that had such a special place in my heart. Her response, in a nutshell:

“That was a difficult decision for us and a large expense—our first advertisement in 12 years of making vodka. But our main challenge is that while people are discovering Tito’s through friends and blogs, the liquor market is dominated by wholesalers and distributors in individual states across the country. We had to get their attention by using the traditional advertising that they still believe is the key to success.”

Upon hearing this my love for Tito’s was rekindled. The print ad campaign made perfect business sense to me and I no longer felt that the brand was selling out. I happily ordered a Tito’s martini at my hotel bar that night. By hearing this inside story of how the brand was forced to embrace some amount of traditional advertising to keep its momentum going, I personally reconnected with Tito’s.

While this level of openness at the SXSW conference with 50 people was great, it shows that Tito’s Vodka and other small brands trying to make it big should be more careful when they risk losing the core fans that drive their early success. I wonder if Tito’s could have dumped the newspaper ads and worked harder to get its fans to call distributors and liquor stores to ask for the brand. Or Tito’s might have done more to let its fans know that the newspaper ad was coming and why.

I know it might sound strange to ask a brand to apologize for putting full-page ads in a newspaper, but in this new world of meaningful marketing it becomes critically important to think of your core fans first.