SOCIAL-izing into the Industry
Leah’s determination to find an alcohol option for health-conscious women mirrored the determination she had to beat cancer. But she realized if she wanted a better option, she’d have to create it herself.
“I called a friend from grad school and said, ‘I want to create healthy alcohol’,” Leah said. “I didn’t know what that meant, but we were ready.”
After getting a team together, they began forming an early concept of SOCIAL through research questions they asked women. They asked approximately 3,000 questions online and 250 in person. Leah and her team ventured to festivals around Chicago and asked questions that fell along the lines of, “What are you drinking? Why do you like it? Why don’t you like it?”
“We found that no matter what it is, there are all these cons to every type of alcohol,” Leah said.
If women didn’t like liquor, it was because they got too drunk. If they didn’t like beer, it was because they got too full or bloated. But Leah and her team found the happy medium in wine.
Within six months, Leah had quit her job to focus her attention on developing SOCIAL and within a year and a half, SOCIAL was ready to be canned and launched.
But it took six more months for Leah and her team to find a brewery to produce SOCIAL Sparkling Wine.
“They don’t want to deal with small people because they’re not going to produce 1,000 cases of one brand when they’re making 15,000 cases in just one flavor of another,” she said.
Despite the scope of the alcohol beverage industry, there are only two canning companies in the entire U.S.
Leah remembers driving seven hours to Coldspring, Minnesota to sit in the lobby and wait three more hours for them to just shake her hand.
But again, Leah’s resolve is unmatched. She has a quiet tenacity that sneaks in when it wants and lingers when it must.
“They would say, ‘We really can’t see you today’,” Leah said. “So I said, ‘That’s okay. I’ll just sit here’.”
The company knew she wouldn’t budge and eventually decided to can the sparkling wine. Leah had sat there long enough.