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So, exactly how committed was consumer-packaged goods entrepreneur Dee Dee Bryant in her new product Boozy Bites?
As part of her boot-strapping the endeavor, she sold her house and moved into the manufacturing warehouse she rented near Dripping Springs.
“I lived in the manufacturing warehouse for the first year,” Bryant says, “until [staffers] said we need to put a pallet there. We needed the space.”
The burgeoning company had also outgrown its office space. It found new space in downtown Austin.
“I live in top floor of the office now,” Bryant says.
Dee Dee Bryant
Welcome to life as an entrepreneur.
But Boozy Bites, a vegan and wine-based bite made in the spirit of the Jello shot formulated by a Frito-Lay scientist working on the side, is moving product a little more than two years after launching. In the company’s first year, in 2020, it did $1 million in revenue as solely and e-commerce business. Today, now in wholesale as well, Boozy Bites is in 300 doors, including bars and restaurants, with the help of Republic National Distributing Company. They can be found in Dallas-Fort Worth at select Specs, Goody Goody Liquor, and Liquor Depot.
Bryant put her company on display last week at EOSERA's EmpowHERment Pitch Competition, a new annual competition for women-led companies held during Global Entrepreneurship Week every November.
After pitching for eight minutes with four minutes of Q&A, three judges selected Bryant and Boozy Bites as the first winner. With that came a first prize of $10,000.
“We are thrilled for and proud of Boozy Bites for being the first to win the EmpowHERment Pitch Competition,” says EOSERA CEO Elyse Stoltz Dickerson in a statement announcing the winner. “Congratulations to all the finalists on their incredible pitches. You're inspiring other women entrepreneurs to get out there and believe in themselves. That's no small thing.”
The other finalists were Heralogie, a company that manufactures tree-based, breathable period panties, and PWR WMN, which make blazers with pockets. PWR WMN was choice of the people. The company won the people’s choice award and $2,500.
Judges were Stephanie Hicks, Abe Minkara, and Karen Noseff Aldridge. Hicks is the Worldwide New Products and Portfolio Strategy Director at Novartis. Minkara is founding partner at Legacy Knight, an independent, family and partner-owned multifamily office providing exclusive investment access and tailored advisory services to ultra-high net worth families and family offices. Noseff Aldridge founded Rebel Athletic in 2013. The company is a leader in the all-star cheerleading apparel market and has expanded into dance and athletic wear.
“I love creating products that make people smile,” says Bryant, who has a degree from Notre Dame and an MBA from Washington University in St. Louis. “There’s nothing that brings people together more than food and beverage. When you think about connection it’s always around an edible of some sort. There’s something very special to me about those products and what they can do to people’s emotional states and be that catalyst for connection.
“We live in this world of convenience and fast pace, and Twitter and Instagram. We’re doing all this stuff on our screens, and at the end of the day, as humans what we need is connection. This is one small piece of that.”
Bryant had worked as a consumer-packaged goods professional with a few companies, including Conagra and Dallas-based Frito-Lay, before starting Boozy Bites, which has received outside capital, she says. Bryant says she launched about 13 products at Frito-Lay.
Boozy Bites employs five full time, with some hourly staff, too, she says.
She has some experience in pitch competitions. Before this one, she had competed in the Dell pitch competition. She won a round there, which netted her $10,000 in Dell technology, which was put to use to upgrade the company’s manufacturing systems.
The money won here will be spent here, she says, building out the company’s Fort Worth marketing in the first quarter of the new year. The objective is to penetrate into Fort Worth bars, restaurants, and concert venues through partnerships.