In early 2020, I was 50 years old and wondering if the job I’d left months earlier was the last real one I’d ever have. I was fishing around for an idea, researching Australian botanicals and writing blog posts for my “ginstagram” account, @ginfolly, when COVID hit. At first everyone was on Zoom calls and learning to make cocktails at home. Bars started selling stiff drinks in takeaway containers and the weekdays blurred together. But the novelty wore off when we all realised you can’t drink five nights in a row and feel good about yourself. Low and no alcohol became a trend, and people like me started wondering how to cut back without losing the fun of cocktails.
That’s where the first version of TANICA was born. I was inspired by Haus in the US, who were selling 15% aperitivo drinks direct to consumers in a sophisticated, opaque bottle, with an impossibly cool lifestyle of shag carpets, charcuterie boards and card game nights to match. I called mine Drink Sloe because I thought I wanted to make an Australian sloe gin. Then I realised Australia isn’t exactly famous for sloe berries. In fact, they’d be hard to find. So I parked the formulation and went straight to designing the bottle and the box. As a career marketer who thought she knew everything about packaging and unboxing, that was the fun part for me.
Together with my former Creative Director from Seafolly, I started designing a “no hangxiety” pink world of low alcohol spirits. It was like the Mecca of drinks. We sourced the most expensive bottle we could find in France, then priced it out with a full opaque spray treatment and four colour screen printing. The minimum order was 5,000 bottles at about $6.50 each. We were a little obsessed and completely off the lead when it came to design. The bottle had a rare, large opening, which meant we also needed custom Italian cork stoppers from one of the best suppliers in the world. Another expense. And because we had these beautiful bottles, we decided we wanted a custom die cut, four colour, Pantone matched, glossy delivery box with an insert too. I went to one of my old suppliers from corporate life and placed an order for 5,000 of those as well.
We needed a name, so of course I went to my favourite copywriters in Melbourne. TANICA, short for botanical, was born and trademarked. Because of COVID, we thought our tagline should be “Spirits Lifted,” so I paid a lawyer to register that one too.
In mid 2020, a recruiter contacted me about a pretty attractive CMO role at Petbarn. The puppy boom was in full swing, and I found it hard to resist one more corporate role. TANICA went onto the back burner, simmering slowly but surely.
Eventually I turned to the liquid. I found a contract producer in Victoria, and instead of a distiller, we worked with a food tech specialist in the beverage industry to respond to a flavour brief for two variants. We ran a workshop, went through three or four rounds of samples, mixed a lot of cocktails and arrived at two unique recipes. Salted Plum & Ginger was made for spritzes, and Desert Lime & Thyme for margaritas and “no fomojitos.” Both were 10% neutral grain alcohol mixed with real ingredients like desert lime puree from Queensland, sugar and water. What I didn’t know was how expensive those ingredients would be. More minimum orders. The final cost of goods, including the liquid and components, was around $15 a bottle before excise. I did a rough price chain to work out my profit selling TANICA online and it all seemed doable. I was incredibly optimistic about how much we could sell each month. I was a CMO, after all (haha). I plugged 900 bottles a month into a spreadsheet and hoped for the best. I even visited a 3PL in Prestons for online fulfilment, thinking we’d sell so much I’d need to outsource the picking and packing early on. Boy, was I wrong.
When the boxes arrived, I took out a large storage space down the road, and my husband and a friend jammed about 12 pallets of boxes and inserts into the small but expensive room. The ingredients were ordered, and the bottles were on their way from France to Victoria to be filled.
We launched in November 2021. I talked a distributor into taking us on for wholesale channels like bars and bottle shops, and in December I quit my day job to focus on TANICA full time.
Using the money I’d raised from friends and family in 2021, plus a lot of money of my own, I spent the first six months of TANICA’s life doing what I’d always done in big companies. I gifted over 100 influencers. I hired a PR agency, a content and social agency and a digital marketing agency, all on monthly retainers, and I spent $1,000 a week on Meta ads. We had a huge November and December, propped up by big, inefficient spending, and then we fell off a cliff in early 2022 when the money started running out.
I had a ton of delivery boxes, a ton of stock, expiring ingredients in a contract producer’s warehouse and very little in sales. We sold hard at market stalls and events, and I started making a name for us in the female founder and craft community. My daughter Darcie and I made a great sales duo, with a pink polystyrene display built around us. Adoring early fans at Finders Keepers and Big Design bought once for the bottle design, but hardly ever came back for a second.
I let go of all the agencies, and of my original cofounder, who went back to work elsewhere after maternity leave. I faced the reality of what being an entrepreneur really meant. Over 2022, I drew down on my mortgage and put thousands more into TANICA $5k or $10k at a time. My husband remained patient and supportive, but anxious about what this all meant for our savings and our way of living. I couldn’t let TANICA go after learning so much about what went wrong. I also had my pride, a reputation to keep, and an inner fire that didn’t want to pull up stumps. There was a lot on the line.
In November 2022, I got a message from Holly at Distill Ventures. She was scouting minority and female founded alcohol brands around the world to invite to pitch for Diageo’s new pre accelerator program. She happened to be in Sydney, and we met over coffee in Surry Hills. I brought TANICA along and told her my story. A few months later, in March 2023, I sat at my laptop at 3:00am with a full face of makeup, pitching TANICA to the Diageo investment committee in the UK. Straight after the pitch, I got a call from Distill Ventures. TANICA was one of just five brands outside America accepted into the program. Diageo had never even tried the liquid. I got in on the story, the proposition and the conviction behind my idea.
TANICA got a second chance, and I was finally able to pay myself a wage for the first time since the start. We began with consumer research, running focus groups in Melbourne and Sydney, where I sat behind one way mirrors watching women react to the original TANICA bottle, taste it and talk about what they wanted and needed in their lives. I realised there was no such thing as a low alcohol spirit. There were aperitifs like Aperol for spritzes, and non alcoholic choices, but very little in between. We had been beautiful as a design but pretty crappy as a proposition. No wonder no retailer knew what shelf to put us on, and bartenders didn’t know how to make a drink with us. We were a UFO.
Instead of a marketing plan, and with the help of commercial, brand and product experts at DV and the mentoring of Tom Baker from Mr Black, I began with a market plan. I needed to hit a price point, a margin, an ABV and a serve on a menu. I needed to fill a gap, solve a problem or be distinctive. This time the proposition came first and designing the “thing” came second. I pivoted into aperitifs and learned everything I could about them.
Next, I set out to find the best distiller in the country to create a spirit featuring Australian botanicals. Together we came up with a unique method. We presoaked, strained and distilled six botanicals like a gin without juniper, then used the distillate to steep native plum. Strawberry gum leaf was a must, one of my all time favourite flavours and aromas. Everything was built around its cherry sweet aroma. Davidson’s plum brings tartness, orange brings fruit, mint adds freshness, cinnamon and angelica add warmth, and orris binds the flavours together. The first version had no bitterness at all, but I realised aperitifs are by definition bitter, so we created a gentian tincture to blend in at the end, along with 100% Australian cane sugar in a viscous format for mouthfeel. We had created a truly Australian style of aperitif. Not another Aperol. Made with botanicals you can only find in Australia and nowhere else in the world.
For all of 2024, after relaunching TANICA as an aperitif in April, I worked by myself at home, with a wall of post it notes on Kanban boards as I juggled production timelines, bookkeeping, sales outreach and marketing plans. I stayed up late on calls with the team at DV two or three times a week for two years. With some funding under our feet, I experimented with trade activations using a freelancer with PR and events experience in Queensland. I hired a very experienced part time Finance Director who transformed my commercial analytics, cash flow forecasting and month end reporting. The whole idea was rapid test and learn, hitting KPIs for velocity and sales to show traction, and keeping our funding going with Diageo.
By the end of 2024, on the back of doing my own sales and a short stint with one rep in Sydney, TANICA was in over 100 bars, restaurants and bottle shops. We had a new off the shelf bottle, a new label and a new brand world. The liquid was excellent, winning a gold medal at the San Francisco World Spirits Competition in the aperitif category at launch, and it was being poured at some very reputable venues. It was moving, but not fast enough and not often enough. Something still wasn’t quite right.
Tom Baker asked me a critical question. He said, “If you look in the mirror and ask yourself if it’s as good as it can be, what’s the answer? Remember, you’ve got no one to justify it to except yourself.” As much as I loved the bottle, even after hand labelling the first 5,000, and as much as people told me they loved it too, I knew it could be better. I gave it an honest seven out of ten.
I realised that in corporate roles, when you’re the CMO and you launch a new product or campaign, you spend a lot of time justifying and defending it to save face. You’ve just spent months and a big budget telling your boss or Board how and why it’s going to work, and if it doesn’t, there’s no culture of acceptance. When you’re your own boss, you can be more honest with yourself. You can scrap it and start again if you know it can be better.
So that’s what I did. But it was a risk. In early 2025, Diageo ended all of its early stage accelerator programs, and Distill Ventures went with them. There was no more funding and no pathway except the one I could pave for myself.
With the last of the investment I had in the bank, I decided to move ahead with a custom bottle and an updated brand world. The market was spot on, but our COGS were high and we hadn’t reached that iconic, world class status I dreamed the brand could achieve. Together with an agency called Soft Machine, we designed a new TANICA. One that was sophisticated yet relaxed, with an origin story based on my love of Sydney. I wanted to spark a new appreciation for what we have in our own backyard. An aperitif that was made here, and feels and tastes like here.
On pure persistence, by August 2025 I had launched TANICA into 10 Dan Murphy’s stores in Sydney through local ranging. Ten turned into 15 within months, and I got casual staff and myself doing instore tastings every weekend to make it work.
The first order of glass bottles was a 40 foot container of 26,460 bottles that arrived in September 2025. It was a risk I had to take to save 37% on COGS and drop our wholesale price by $10, so we could sit closer to our competitors on shelf. And all this when we were only selling about 5,000 bottles a year. I was still distributing it myself, and off the back of the new bottle launch in December 2025, we had solid sales both online and in trade. I archived our whole Instagram and started TANICA again. We were in 150 locations and climbing.
In 2026, I knew we had to do three things. Get a distributor, break into Duty Free and export, and get into more Dan Murphy’s stores. Two out of three have been achieved so far. In July, after 12 months of chasing my ideal partner, Iconic Beverages agreed to take TANICA into their portfolio. With 10 reps on the road, I could loosen the burden of self distribution and land our first Duty Free retail location with Lagardère at Western Sydney Airport. The disappointing news that we didn’t get nationally ranged at Endeavour was a bit of a blow, but we soldiered on, making the 15 stores we have absolutely sing.
But cash was depleting fast, and I had to face the inevitable task of crowdfunding in August this year. Working with Birchal, I raised $178k from 92 new investors. It was a mountain of work and a test of my resilience, but we got there. Capital raising is not for the fainthearted. But it’s a great way of going past the point of no return and committing even harder to your vision of becoming a global brand.
As I head into the peak trading period of November and December, it’s a good time to pause and reflect on all we’ve achieved. I recently listened to the book 10x Is Easier Than 2x, and one point in it stuck with me. As a female founder, looking at the gap between where you are now and where you hope to be can feel insurmountable. I hope to grow TANICA 10x someday soon and attract a strategic investor in the industry who can acquire us and scale us to our highest potential. The gap is big, but when I look back at what we’ve achieved since 2021, I see the gains. We’ve 10x’ed before. We’ve more than 10x’ed. So yes, we can do it again.