After meeting 17 years ago, the two sisters now lead the nation’s largest black-owned liquor brand.
Andréa McBride, a 16-year-old girl living in a foster home in New Zealand when she received a phone call from her biological father in Alabama. He tells her that he is dying of cancer and wants to do one last thing before he dies: connect her with another daughter he has – her sister, Robin.
In the 17 years since that fateful call, Andréa and Robin not only met, but in 2005 they formed McBride Sisters Liquor CompanyBiggest Owned by black people liquor companies in the United States – and they did it without any seed money from investors.
‘Sisters’
Andréa said the phone call was the first time she spoke to her father in six years.
“The phone rang, I picked it up and the person on the other end said, ‘Hey, Andréa, that’s your dad.’ And I definitely lost my breath,” Andréa recounts.
Her estranged father shares his diagnosis of terminal stomach cancer and how he wants to use his remaining energy to help her find Robin. He died seven months later, before he could find Robin (he had lost contact with her after his divorce from her mother).
But he had already connected Andréa to his family, and she had traveled to his home state of Alabama for his funeral, in which family members vowed to fulfill his dying wish.
“It was crazy and horrible at the same time. It’s all about feeling,” she said. “Having lost his father, he was one of 12, meeting his family and a lot of people that I had never met before but looked a lot like me. It’s great. They’re all really focused on helping try to find Robin. “
Andréa never doubted their intentions or efforts, but she thought their goals were vain.
“I left there and grew up in quite difficult circumstances, so I don’t really expect too much of that,” Andréa said. “There was one thing in my head that was like, OK, yeah, yeah. But like, what are the chances we find this person in the world? ”
Andréa did not visit family in Alabama again until two years later. At that time, the family had been searching for Robin for 5 years and redoubled their efforts after finding Andréa. The family mailed every Robin McBride in the phone book until one finally delivered to their intended recipient in Monterey, California. Robin accidentally called the attached number while Andréa was in Alabama. Their aunt answered and, after praising the Lord, immediately gave the phone to Andréa so that the sisters could talk for the first time.
Robin said: “Andréa was on the phone and we were both quite stunned and shocked that no one would have thought this was going to happen at this time because according to the letter she is in New Zealand, she is not in Alabama. “So I didn’t know I was going to talk to my sister as soon as I made the first call.”
Robin recalls feeling more surprised than Andréa. “We laugh to this day because Andréa is so excited because of course, she has known about me for a long time. I really only got to know her a few minutes before I called… And she has so much to share with me.”
One of the questions about their icebreaker is: Where did you grow up? And it turns out they both grew up in small farming towns known for their winemaking – and both were passionate about wine. So in a cohesive effort, they went on a wine tasting and vineyard tour. And in the end, they decided to start their own liquor company together.
“A lot of our experience has been about us being curious about wine and how we are treated while in the tasting rooms and those are really a lot of the foundation of what our company does. built today, it’s about making wine accessible to everyone, andréa says.
‘It’s definitely an old boys club’
With the idea for the McBride Sisters Collection officially rolling out, Robin and Andréa pooled an initial seed money of $1,800 just to cover the licensing procedures. The company now supplies products across the US and New Zealand and has more than $5.5 million in revenue for fiscal year 2020. according to Nielsen data cited by Wine Spectator.
The process is a crushing one. Robin said the industry is “very complicated” by being so dependent on gatekeepers – wholesalers, distributors, retailers and more – before it even goes into production. Meaning, all of those people have to buy the idea, grant access to the next row, until the final product hits the shelves, where a profit can be made. According to Robin, that chain of command is the main challenge.
“We had to figure out how we introduce new people to wine and then do this chain business instead of the more traditional way, which is buy your way to reach the consumer. Robin explained.
Another challenge was the lack of any investors or advisors at the start and how the wine industry is “notorious for being on guard,” says Robin. “I think we really underestimated that.” The sisters felt discriminated against when young black women tried to enter an industry in which they were a small minority.
SevenFifty Daily, an online magazine about alcohol business and culture, surveyed 3,100 industry professionals in 2019 and found Of the respondents, 60% are male and 84% are Caucasian. According to BloombergThere are more than 8,000 wineries in the country as of 2020, and 0.1% of them are owned by black people.
“It’s definitely a club for old boys,” said Robin. “A large portion of the industry is run by a very small group of older white wealthy people. There are many dynasties in wine. There are many clans that still run everything. And a big part of opportunity and success comes from being with those people and those families. And it was clear that for us to come in the opposite direction – really everything, up until that point had succeeded in the world of alcohol, it was an older white male – we were definitely considered is not only not belonging, but actually incapable of succeeding. ”
The sisters say they’ve gotten over the oddities, but that it’s not going to be that hard for black or minority women to get into the alcohol industry.
Open to other women of color
The sisters say their current career goal is to help usher in a more diverse generation of winemakers.
They launched She Can Fund in 2019 and has invested more than $3 million to date in women — specifically Black women and other women of color — in the food and alcohol industries. In March, they launched a new initiative that funds scholarships for women in agricultural programs at Southern University, a historic black college in Louisiana. Companies that fund the fund include Morgan Stanley, the Wine Institute, and Silicon Valley Bank. The fund also doubles as a mentoring program.
“We have been in business for many years. We still don’t see a lot of women, a lot of people of color,” Andréa said. “…There is so much basic access to information that we don’t have that we feel it shouldn’t be one of the things that could make or break our company,” so they are teach it.
The sisters said with the doors they’ve opened, they’re committed to doing their part in leaving them open and helping others through.
“When we first started, (the wine world) was definitely a place where we didn’t feel like we belonged,” says Robin. “And now we do.”
at Blogtuan.info – Source: nbcnews.com – Read the original article here
