As she began yet another meeting with yet another venture capitalist, Denverite Kristin Taylor took a deep breath, looked her mark in the eye, and launched into the pitch she had spent months perfecting: Under the branding of Mom Juice, Taylor and her co-founder, Macie Mincey, would make low-sugar, affordable, delicious wine with minimal ingredients, all of which would be clearly listed on the label. They would market it to consumers sensitive to gluten (or any of the 40-plus undisclosed ingredients and additives in many mainstream wines); to new mothers with nursing-induced dietary restrictions; and to anyone looking to pick up a cute gift for Mom. As millennial women of color, Taylor and Mincey would ensure their product appealed to young, diverse populations that the industry, with its pretentious sniff-and-swirl culture, had long ignored. When Taylor finished her spiel, the potential investor didn’t inquire about the company’s profit margins or advertising plan. Instead, he asked, “What about Dad Juice?”

“We pitch to a lot of old white guys,” Taylor says, “and that’s the number one question they bring up. What are you doing for men?” Taylor and Mincey can support their demographic target with statistics (women in America control or influence 85 percent of all consumer spending) and proven demand: Following the late 2021 release of its first wine, a Pinot Grigio, Mom Juice did $98,000 in sales over the following year on a marketing budget of less than $4,000, Taylor says. Still, investors seemed wary of backing a product with an intended audience as narrow as mothers (and anyone who has a mother). “ ‘Moms are a niche.’ That’s always what we hear, which is crazy,” says Mincey, who lives in Charlotte, North Carolina. “If people don’t believe in marketing to women, then they’re not the investor for us.”

5280 August 2024
5280 August 2024
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Thanks in part to high-grossing pop culture successes such as 2023’s Barbie movie and Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, projects catering to female audiences are increasingly being seen as bankable, and by mid-summer 2024, Mom Juice had raised nearly a million dollars (including a $20,000 prize from Pharrell Williams’ Black Ambition fund). Taylor and Mincey have expanded their line to include a rosé, a Sauvignon Blanc, a red blend, and a Cabernet Sauvignon, which are available in 400-plus stores across Colorado, North Carolina, and Tennessee. “You’re really putting your investment in the founder and your belief in what they’re trying to do,” says Paige Goss, the founder and CEO of Denver’s Point Solutions Group, a cybersecurity systems integration firm. She’s also an angel investor who’s provided capital to more than 20 mostly women-led companies, including Mom Juice. “I met Kristin and I was like, Well, she’s gonna pretty much do anything she wants.”

What Taylor wants next is a lead investor to write a big fat check, an act that would spur others to do the same through a new round of funding. That money would underwrite Mom Juice’s larger ambition to create more products, including a nonalcoholic wine, and secure shelf space in retailers across the nation. But even putting aside the historical disadvantages facing people who look like Taylor and Mincey (in 2022, women founders received less than two percent of investment dollars in the United States, and women of color got just 0.39 percent), now is a tough time for anyone to raise money in Colorado, Goss says. Not enough of the homegrown businesses that received lots of investment during the pandemic have gone public or been acquired, which means money isn’t flowing back to angels or VCs. “We’re all cash-strapped,” Goss says, adding that uncertainty around this fall’s presidential election is also creating hesitancy to invest.

Over the first half of this year, Mom Juice went through the due diligence process with multiple Denver VC firms. Again and again, Taylor says, they were told that they had passed the vetting requirements and that investors loved the product, but no one was willing to sign a deal. “What we’re seeing is everyone [talking about] women in venture funding. We should get women more funding. We should fund more businesses that are profitable. We should fund Black women,” Taylor says. “But when it comes to doing the work, no one wants to actually do that part. I need someone to step up.”

When the pandemic hit, Taylor worked for DISH Network’s in-house creative agency. After going remote, she found she had time to take on freelance marketing and branding consulting gigs, one of which was launching the Guilty Grape, a Black- and woman-owned wine brand based in Dallas. Taylor’s proficiency and passion for the project had colleagues and friends asking why she didn’t start her own wine business.

“I told my boyfriend about it over a glass of wine in the kitchen, and he was like, Well, you obviously can’t do it; you’re too scared, and you don’t want to be in the spotlight,” Taylor says. “My boyfriend is in mental health. So I realize now that he was using reverse psychology. Back then, I literally said, ‘Fuck you. Yes, I can.’ ”

While growing up in Virginia, Taylor watched her mother—a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy—bring home wines from around the world. A childhood trip to Italy reinforced Taylor’s appreciation for a culture that prioritizes gathering to break bread and clink glasses. As an adult, however, she quickly realized many of the wines she was consuming did not love her back. “I’m gluten-free. I also have some of the fun female things, like endometriosis, and all of that really affects your diet and how you process food,” Taylor says. “Additives are really hard for me.”

Kristin Taylor. Photo courtesy of Mom Juice

So when she started dreaming up what her wine brand would look like, Taylor thought about how difficult it was to find out what was in the bottles she saw on liquor and grocery store shelves. The U.S. Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, which regulates wine, doesn’t currently require boozemakers to list ingredients, although it’s widely speculated that it may soon.

If that happens, Mom Juice will be ahead of the rules. Taylor has insisted on including everything that goes into the brand’s bottles—eight or fewer ingredients and additives, compared with the dozens of mystery components beyond grapes that are commonly used to flavor, clarify, and stabilize wines—on her labels from the beginning. “[Listing ingredients] is very rare for wine,” says Brian Kosi, Mom Juice’s Napa-based director of winemaking, who previously worked for big-name Sonoma County brands Kendall-Jackson Wine Estate & Gardens and Kenwood Vineyards. “You don’t see it. But I thought it was a brilliant direction, for moms or just anyone who wants to keep their bodies clean.”

The term “clean” doesn’t have an official industry definition, but consumers have started using it to describe lower-sugar, lower-calorie wines. “We want to make sure it’s clean in terms of allergens—no animal products, no gluten, no dairy,” Kosi says. “Those are things I have in my toolbox, but now, with Mom Juice, I don’t use them.” In alignment with Taylor’s vision, Kosi sources most of Mom Juice’s unfinished wine from women-run vineyards (including in California’s Lake County, although the brand is in talks to do a line with the Western Slope’s Sauvage Spectrum). He also balances quality with pricing—$20 to $24 per screw-top bottle—that middle-class moms can afford.

“There aren’t many women winemakers or wine producers out there. [Taylor and Mincey’s] enthusiasm and just their go-get-’em attitude—I was like, I’m in. I’m hooked,” Kosi says. Hooking real moms on the brand, however, proved to be trickier than Taylor and Mincey anticipated.

Although Mom Juice’s commitment to transparency is what sets its wines apart, Taylor knows it’s not the ingredient list on the label that catches shoppers’ eyes, but the name. “It came from listening to my friends,” says Taylor, who does not have children. “You know, baby reaches for a glass of wine and everyone goes, ‘That’s your mom’s juice, don’t touch that!’ People say it all the time, and I thought it would be fun.” When Taylor first contacted Mincey, a seasoned tech entrepreneur she’d met at a blind business lunch date in Charlotte, for consulting help in launching her brand, Mincey liked the idea so much she asked if Taylor would consider bringing her on as a co-founder.

Together, they began crafting marketing materials that spoke directly to women and reflected the realities of the day-to-day lives of moms. The vibe would be youthful, approachable, and a little sassy. They soon discovered that there is a fine line between the seemingly innocent suggestion that moms deserve to relax with a glass of Pinot after a long day of breaking up sibling fights and the darker side (think: Chardonnay hidden in a Yeti cup) of mommy drinking culture.

“I was always taught that you should drink wine because you like the taste of it, but I realized that we were stepping into something else, and we had to really adjust fast,” Taylor says. “How do we nurture community without promoting this very unhealthy form of drinking?” For help, she turned to a website and brand design Facebook group of thousands of women she was a part of and made a post asking them to tear Mom Juice apart.

“Tell me what feels triggering. Tell me what doesn’t feel right. This is my intention. Tell me what’s not coming off correctly,” Taylor says, recalling the ask she made that day. “We had 77 comments in about three hours.”

Although some women objected to the branding wholesale, most provided constructive criticism, asking for more information about the actual wine on the website and identifying the phrase “Get Under the Influence,” which featured a collaboration with an influencer, as problematic rather than funny. “Intent doesn’t always equal impact,” Taylor says. “It’s the perfect example of why having a diverse group of humans with diverse perspectives at the table is so important.”

The feedback helped Taylor and Mincey hone a message they hope makes moms feel less alone and celebrates the chaos of motherhood versus one that leans into “my kids drive me to drink” negativity. The rosé label, for example, reads, “We see you making moves, kicking A**, and taking names.” The Cabernet Sauvignon is described as “fruit-forward, spicy, and a little bit feisty—just like you, Mama Bear.” “If I’m in my kitchen by myself after a crazy freakin’ Wednesday—I mean, I have four kids, anything could happen—I can read the back of our bottle and feel like I’m being surrounded by the mom community,” Mincey says. “We believe that moms deserve their own things.”

Even as Taylor and Mincey have been searching for more funding, they’ve kept creating those things. In February 2023, they launched OnlyMoms, a podcast hosted by Mincey that features no-subject-too-taboo interviews with a variety of influencers and experts (e.g., a pelvic floor physical therapist) in the parenting sphere. This past spring, Mom Juice debuted in 40 Target locations in the founders’ home states of Colorado and North Carolina. A Mom Juice companion card game with conversation prompts is in the works. And Taylor has spent the past two years researching and conceptualizing a nonalcoholic, low-sugar sparkling wine she hopes to launch as soon as possible—once enough dollars come through to produce it.

That cork might soon pop: At press time, Mom Juice was close to an agreement with a Colorado VC firm, according to Taylor. In addition to bringing a nonalcoholic wine to market, Taylor would use the infusion of money to grow her sales and marketing team and expand the brand’s presence at tastings and festivals throughout Colorado. Doing so would create not just more visibility for the wine, but also for its founders’ success breaking into both the alcohol industry and the VC world, two traditionally white, traditionally male spaces.

“I love the wine. I drink the wine. And, you know, I’ve called my own wine ‘mom juice’ 150 times,” Goss says. “But this is about something bigger than just wine. If you put money into specific markets, they grow; if you put money into specific founders, they grow. They’re setting the stage for women of color to make a bigger impact.”

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