On Passion and Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship, for me, is rooted in my love of storytelling. My passion for performance began as a young girl hosting neighbourhood magic shows, with early signs of establishing a revenue model through ticket sales using currency found in nature, like leaves and twigs.

Having attended college during the Great Recession of the early 2000s in NYC, I found myself working in bars and restaurants – sadly considered a formerly more recession-proof option than nowadays – to make a buck. But, as with anything I do, I’m unable to just stick a toe in, so to speak. I couldn’t simply just wait tables and go home. I had to learn every aspect of the business of operating a bar where ingredients and craft mattered; to my fortune of being in the right place at the right time, I found myself sharing this mindset while working alongside some of the greatest leaders of the eventual craft cocktail resurgence. With fresh ingredients, namely citrus, to thank for our passion.

I transitioned to corporate liquor after working many late nights, seeing it as an opportunity to work during the daytime, travel the world, and spread the love of the craft cocktail that my peers and I set forth in NYC. I was given a chance to tell stories for a living – those of the brands I would go on to become ambassador to – as well as the stories from the bar scene in NYC, leading the charge in changing the way people drank around the world. Storytelling became educational; our passions in New York were replicated in bars across the globe. Using real ingredients, real fruit, all I had ever known, was now of utmost importance to this burgeoning new bar scene. To share our passions and methods as a traveling teacher is how I thrived working in well-regarded “entrepreneurial” corporate alcohol jobs. But these roles, as many do in corporations, often expired. However, my passion for integrity in how cocktails and spirits are made, as well as ingredients, only became more paramount.

I held the role as “traveling teacher” (i.e., “ambassador”) for approximately six corporations, some of the very largest in the world, before I found myself leaving my office on Fifth Avenue while shredding my corporate credit card and awaiting my last paycheck in February 2018. While these roles were often sold as entrepreneurial because they were rooted in combining brand endorsement with professional experience, they were far from it. I would come to learn the grit of working for myself the hard way, as I so often do.

I was fortunate to have been able to spend the better part of a year on the ground - healing myself from years of consistent plane travel, late nights, jet lag and dehydration – prior to launching my first product, as well as having my first child. During this year of purposefully slowed-down time, I got to know myself better, my desires, my wants and wishes, but most of all what would eventually become my life’s mission. And so, I prepared my parachute while focusing on my health and athleticism, and for the first time, learning how to “travel” expansively while looking within through meditation, and not leaving the ground at all.

Siponey, my first product in spirits, a premium canned cocktail made with the best ingredients and on an environmental mission, was born about a year after this time upon meeting the key to my keyhole, my co-founder Joseph Mintz. Our first child was born soon after.

While I had taken the time to heal and prepare for what would become the true beginning of my entrepreneurial journey, nothing could have prepared us for launching a new company postpartum during a pandemic. My pregnancy, although apparently textbook, was the hardest time of my life, mainly because I felt I was losing the athleticism that had come to define my approach to survival in an industry that was historically very challenging on health. Postpartum was similar, I was living in what felt like a foreign body that was so greatly relied upon by a baby for survival. Joey and I spent these times building Siponey conceptually, which was challenging for the many numerous reasons creating a new product with worldly ambitions would be. When I was three months postpartum, we planned our first production run. And then the pandemic began.

Siponey’s point of differentiation came largely from the frustration of not being able to make as large of an impact as I would have liked to while working for corporate alcohol companies. I would create concepts in-house supported by large budgets that would still somehow fall short of follow-through because of an overall lack of passion. There is a lot of stifled creativity in corporations across all industries – alcohol is no exception. The various reasons range from lack of diversity to poor leadership, but overall, it’s the idea of this is how we’ve always done it, and this is how we will continue to do it.

Here lies my breaking point: my passions are stubbornly uncompromisable. Innovation is rarely, if ever, truly bred within larger corporations. It’s counter-intuitive to the tried-and-true profit-drivers – no matter how flat the outcome, the old way of doing it usually wins, and the old guard, often painfully lacking diversity, leads that charge. All at a pace which is far too slow for my particular overall passion of changing the way the world drinks.

Siponey is made with the best ingredients and produced in a mindful way that is both sustainable and giving to the environment, as part of its DNA. Our passion for ingredients is born of my time creating craft cocktails and our passion for the environment is born from my co-founder, Joey’s, time studying as a horticulturist. It’s really as simple as our passions epitomized.

Building a successful brand with authenticity has to be a personal journey. Identifying the opportunity, perhaps something largely upsetting to you personally, is where the greatest ideas come from. An honest point of differentiation that solves a problem is what long-term brand vision is built upon. Passion is possibly the only credential needed of a founder.

For us, that passion is people and the planet.