VILLAGEx 2022 Founder Friday: Brewsy
Founder Fridays is a series that spotlights VILLAGEx founders and their startups
Neal Shulman cares about both what ingredients are in the wine he’s purchasing and its supply chain. He found his wine shopping experiences becoming undesirable after the difficulty there was to find specific ingredients on the label. It was in early 2020 when Shulman, along with his middle school friend, Liam Meier, decided to found Brewsy, a fermentation startup that allows consumers to make wine right from their kitchen table in just seven days.
Originally from St. Louis, Missouri, Shulman, co-founder and co-CEO of Brewsy, was exposed to the food industry early in his life, watching his mother run “The Caramel House” candy shop. After he graduated from college, he took a career as an e-commerce product marketer, which is where he fell in love with designing physical products. Shulman’s frustrations with the wine industry and his experiences in the food and product development spaces were the perfect culmination for him to create a wine fermentation product.
“Wine shopping is a bizarre and inferior shopping experience compared to other food in which you can read the ingredients and make a judgment before you buy it, ” Shulman said. Shulman then started thinking about the science behind winemaking, and he concluded that "[if people had a product that allowed them to create their own wine]–which includes having a support system and a community around them– then it would become very successful.”
Meier grew up in southern Illinois, watching his father bring to life his idea to run a small beverage company. After college, he worked as a software engineer until Shulman invited him to join Brewsy. “[Neal] started entertaining me with ideas of Brewsy, and he even once sent me 60 pounds worth of wine grape juice to my apartment in San Francisco and said, ‘Hey make some wine!’ I made wine, and it was the best thing ever. It was delicious. It was fun.” After that, Meier said he was sold and joined Shulman as co-founder and co-CEO of Brewsy.
“Unleashing the home fermentation revolution is what we aspire to do,” said Meier. “And to [also] do so in a way where people can choose exactly what's in their food or beverage while having fun doing it with a community of like-minded people around them.”
Brewsy, a VILLAGEx 2022 startup, has had over 25,000 customers and brought in over $2 million in revenue in as little as two years. For the Brewsy team, they are just getting started. Brewsy has grown to a team of eight since establishing in New Orleans and is continuously innovating to create other fermentation-related offerings for its customers.
Q & A
(Responses have been edited for clarity)
Neal Shulman: “Customers can add a Brewsy bag to their choice of either juice wine grapes that we sell, or a juice they make or buy at the supermarket. Let's say somebody [makes cherry juice from the] cherries in their backyard. They would add the Brewsy packet to that juice and it will create [cherry] wine. What's happening is that there's yeast inside of the Brewsy packet that wakes up when it hits water. [The yeast is] going to eat the sugar and produce both carbon dioxide and ethanol, which has alcohol in it. In about five days, it will turn to alcohol. Then, you basically need to separate the wine from the yeast, which can be done via refrigeration. Afterward, you can cork it and that's everything that a customer needs to do in order to make wine or customers can choose to upgrade and buy wine bottles and things like that from our website.”
Why New Orleans?
Neal Shulman: “It made sense to move to a place where the city would love you back. And I think there's no place where the city loves you back as clearly as it does in New Orleans. It's an incredibly culturally profound place and every day it feels like we're learning something new about New Orleans that we love.
Liam Meier: When I moved to New Orleans in January of 2021, it was such an incredible experience. We're Midwesterners who kind of lived on the verge of the South. And so, in many ways, it felt like home. But New Orleans also has just a great cosmopolitan sensibility to it. [New Orleans is] a city where ordinary people can live and run a business. It's an absolute dream place to be.
What does it take to be an entrepreneur?
Liam Meier: First and foremost, I would say tenacity and grit. And the ability to learn and dive deep into oneself. Entrepreneurship is difficult. It's probably the most difficult thing Neal and I have ever done in our entire lives. It's a matter of setting yourself up such that you can power through and do the hard work that it takes to build a business.
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Brewsy is an at-home winemaking experience that allows anyone to explore fermentation socially with an online community and social app with more than 7,000 users.