An Interview With Martita Mestey
Your passion will drive you in this industry. Make sure you love what you are doing and can build a tribe of people around you who also share that passion.
As a part of our series called “5 Things You Need To Create a Successful Food or Beverage Brand”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Maria Littlefield.
Maria Littlefield is the co-founder, President and Creative Director of Owl’s Brew. The brand makes award-winning and hand-crafted boozy beverages from only real ingredients. Maria and Owl’s Brew have been profiled by The Today Show, Forbes and The New York Times, among others. Maria has been chosen by Forbes as “30 Under 30” among food and beverage entrepreneurs and is the co-author of “Wise Cocktails” (October 2015), a book about tea cocktails. Maria is a graduate of Skidmore College and resides in New York City with her husband and two young children.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your “childhood backstory”?
I’m an East Coaster — I was born on Martha’s Vineyard and went to school in Connecticut & Upstate New York. I’ve always had a love for the ocean and I’m extremely competitive at heart! I was a horseback rider and tennis player. According to my parents, I have also always loved a good business. I set up many stands over the years — I sold lemonade, crafts, and apparently one of my most elaborate businesses was a shell stand (at the beach, no less), where I sold shells to my fellow beach goers, just in case they couldn’t find one themselves.
Can you share with us the story of the “ah ha” moment that led to the creation of the food or beverage brand you are leading?
I am not sure if there was an exact moment, but a lot of moments that made us realize that we could and should get more from our drinks! We didn’t need to compromise on flavor and ingredients, even when we had a spike or two.
Jennie Ripps (my co-founder) and I met when we were working at a boutique marketing agency. It was during our time there that we started to wonder why we always felt so horrible after a drink or two… and why did everything taste so fake? We were shocked to learn that all these canned cocktails and hard seltzers were made with chemicals, fake sugars and additives. This started us on our journey to founding Owl’s Brew. We believed that there was a better way to drink. Jennie was a certified tea sommelier and we started making cocktails (in buckets!) with tea and botanicals for friends after work. They were light, refreshing and delicious, without any of that weird chemical after taste. We launched our canned version of our cocktails, Boozy Tea, in 2020. At Owl’s Brew, we say Drink Wise.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
I love this question! We’ve learned a lot over the years (and certainly had some funny mistakes). One of the things that comes to mind is right when we were gearing up to launch our first product, we had this idea of making beautiful cobalt blue bottles. We spent quite some time sourcing them, and finding the perfect blue color. When they finally arrived we made some samples and filled them with tea, only to realize that when you fill a blue bottle with dark tea, it is no longer blue! It was in fact, black…
What are the most common mistakes you have seen people make when they start a food or beverage line? What can be done to avoid those errors?
I think the most common mistake is people underestimate how hard it is! I can talk about that a bit more later, but taking your vision or your dream, and bringing it into the world and onto a shelf where people can buy it, is no easy feat. I also think a lot of the time people make the mistake of thinking that once you’ve gotten your product onto a shelf, then the hard part is over. Unfortunately, I’m here to tell you that’s just the beginning 🙂
Let’s imagine that someone reading this interview has an idea for a product that they would like to produce. What are the first few steps that you would recommend that they take?
This is a loaded question! I often describe the experience of creating a product like you are trying to put together a puzzle without the picture to go off of, and then when you finally get to the end, you find out a piece is missing. It’s a journey for everyone, so don’t get discouraged!
With that said, first off, I would work on your why. Why should your product exist? What makes it better? What makes it different? Who will want to drink or eat this and when? This should be your guiding light on everything from your marketing to your actual product and packaging. Ultimately, people have to love your product, so it’s extremely important that you nail what’s inside, and what’s outside.
After you figure our what you are creating and why, you should start working on the product itself (do not compromise on quality!), your packaging and your route to market. Are you going through distributors? DTC? Chain retailers?
Last but not least, you should think about how you are going to market your product to connect with that consumer that you know will love the product.
Many people have good ideas all the time. But some people seem to struggle in taking a good idea and translating it into an actual business. How would you encourage someone to overcome this hurdle?
You have to commit. Launching a company is really hard work, and you are going to have to break down doors and barriers, and challenge norms, and build a team, and fund it. There are a lot of ways to do all of those things of course, but you have to be committed to it and be sure that this is what you want to do. If it is, I say just go for it! It can be really helpful to connect with mentors and other people in the industry to help you pull the initial pieces together, build your business plan, and then develop your product!
There are many invention development consultants. Would you recommend that a person with a new idea hire such a consultant, or should they try to strike out on their own?
This is completely dependent on who you are, how and why you are making this product. I think a lot of time food & beverage founders have been creating the products on their own for family or friends, so may have a sense of the recipes they want to make and how. Sometimes they just need help scaling their recipe to full production and making it commercially safe (I.e. is it pasteurized, etc). While others, who just have an idea they want to bring to life, may have more success working with a food scientist from the beginning.
What are your thoughts about bootstrapping vs looking for venture capital? What is the best way to decide if you should do either one?
This is a very personal decision and it goes back to your business plan, your goals, and what you are trying to achieve with your company. Do you want to create a brick and mortar cupcake shop that you grow slowly? Do you want to create a national brand and exit it quickly? Do you want to create a small business that you build over time?
Of course, all of these can be true as well and the business plans can change, but I think it’s good to think about your north star when you are thinking through how your fund your company. Most commonly though, people bootstrap until they feel like they have a good foundation of sales and a proven story, and then go raise money to scale it!
Can you share thoughts from your experience about how to file a patent, how to source good raw ingredients, how to source a good manufacturer, and how to find a retailer or distributor?
First off, whether you are filing a patent, a trademark or structuring you company, I suggest finding a good lawyer with an expertise in the space. These type of structural components are critical to your business and it’s much easier if you get it right at the beginning!
In terms of sourcing and manufacturing, there are many ways to go about this, and again it depends on the kind of product you are trying to create and what that means in terms of what goes inside. Mentors and industry insiders can help point you in the right direction in terms of partners and if you are planning to contract pack. There are also a lot of commercial kitchens and incubators that can help you get started as well!
With retailers and distributors, start locally! You can sell in to stores in your neighborhood or city, and begin to test your product and the responses. Trade shows are also an incredible place to meet retailers and distributors in this industry.
What are your “5 Things You Need To Create a Successful Food or Beverage Brand” and why?
1) Your why
1) I talked about this a bit before, but understanding why your brand or product deserves to be on the shelf (instead of something else), what makes it different and why do consumers want/need it in their life!
2) A great tasting product
1) It has to be something people want to buy again and again, so make it super delicious!
3) A great package
1) This is your more important marketing tool! Make sure it stands out and communicates your why!
4) Passion
1) Your passion will drive you in this industry. Make sure you love what you are doing and can build a tribe of people around you who also share that passion.
5) Resilience
1) This will be a journey, and it won’t be a straight line. Stick with it. Be resilient. Keep going.
Can you share your ideas about how to create a product that people really love and are ‘crazy about’?
For us, it’s always been about creating a product that we wanted in our lives but we couldn’t find. We wanted to drink that was delicious; that we could just crack open; that was made from good ingredients and didn’t taste like chemicals or sugar substitutes; and that didn’t make us feel like sh** the next day. When we launched Owl’s Brew, we committed to making delicious products using only real ingredients that you would find in your kitchen. We will never stray from that (regardless of how many people tell us we should make our products in a lab!).
My best advice to make a product that people really love, is you have to stay true to why your product was created and exists in the first place.
Ok. We are nearly done. Here are our final questions. How have you used your success to make the world a better place?
Community is so important to us. When Jennie & I came into this industry, we realized that we were a minority, and the numbers are pretty startling when you dig in in terms of women in the workforce. We wanted a way to give back and shine a light on other awesome women, so we launched a platform called Wise Women Collective. We have two ongoing partners that we support, Keep A Breast and Women’s Voices for the Earth, and we also support local women’s charities and gatherings throughout the year. Our hope is that we’re just getting started here!
You are an inspiration to a great many people. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.
Less chemicals in our world. Somewhere along the way, the consumer goods world got really lost in making things the “cheap way”. Products started being made in labs with chemical concoctions instead of using real ingredients, and marketing campaigns started hiding chemicals with misleading headlines around “natural” and “fragrance”. And all of this is all at the expense of the consumer and our planet.
This is across industries — from food & beverage, to kids products, to beauty to cleaning supplies. As an example, alcohol doesn’t even require a nutrition panel (at Owl’s Brew we always publish a full panel and ingredients even though we don’t legally need to). Can you think of another product that you consume that doesn’t have the ingredients listed? Crazy, I know. Don’t be fooled either, it’s not because everything is so pure! Alcohol brands are full of chemicals, dyes, sugar substitutes, additives and stabilizers.
So in terms of a movement, I don’t think it’s realistic to think that in the near future we will have a world without chemicals, but wouldn’t it be nice to put the decision back in the hands of the consumer? I believe that we can move to a world where brands need to be transparent, and the consumer can make their own informed decisions.
Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.
Maria Littlefield Of Owl’s Brew On 5 Things You Need To Create a Successful Food or Beverage Brand was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.