After years spent helping Dish Network, Sling TV and Tito’s launch brands, Kristin Taylor’s friends double-dog-dared her to launch her own business.
“My whole team looked at me and said, ‘what is wrong with you?’ And ‘why do you keep building brands for other people?’ ... Which I realized now that they basically double-dog-dared me into taking this leap,” Taylor said.
She called her friend and business partner Macie Mincey, who just exited her tech company, to launch KT Winery, an attainable brand for the modern wine consumer.
“We want to shift wine culture and community,” Taylor said.
After forming the company’s LLC in September 2020, it wasn’t until a year later that KT Winery officially launched its first brand, Mom Juice.
The name Mom Juice came from telling kids “don’t touch that, that’s your mom’s juice” — a common phrase said during girls' night.
“I realized it was an actual colloquial saying that moms had been using forever,” Taylor said, adding that the name wasn’t trademarked.
Taylor and Mincey leaned into the name and began serving moms and other underserved wine consumers. The company’s goal is to move from the “stuffy” and “unattainable” Napa Valley wine culture into a more affordable and attainable one, Taylor said.
KT Winery’s website and social media pages educate consumers about wine. Resources range from articles about how to store screw-top wine to pairing guides and an explanation of Mom Juice ingredients compared to traditional wine ingredients.
Product descriptions on its website are also consumer-friendly. The description for its cabernet sauvignon, for example, explains “mouthfeel” as full body and suggests pairings like popcorn and “hidden bedside table candy bars.”
Taylor said more educational resources are coming in 2024.
Part of shifting the wine culture includes going back to the roots of winemaking, Taylor said, by using simple ingredients rather than additives and chemicals.
KT Winery is also pushing for ingredient transparency. Mom Juice bottles have a label with ingredients on the back for this reason.
Mom Juice is made at a facility in Napa Valley and uses California grapes. Brian Kosi, a previous winemaker for Opus One Winery, Kendall-Jackson Wine Estate and Freemark Abbey Winery, makes the wine.
Although launching a business through a cross-country partnership with Taylor in Denver and Mincey in North Carolina wasn’t the original plan, it’s proven to be successful.
During its first year selling wine in 2022, KT Winery produced under 1,000 cases. This year, it’s on track to produce more than 9,000, Taylor said.
To keep up with this growth, KT Winery will continue hiring staff and partnering with distributors. It added three distributors this year, whereas, in 2022, Taylor and Mincey were self-distributing.
“Imagine a truck full of cases of wine and me driving around Colorado delivering them. I looked insane. It was wild,” Taylor said. “But now we have a team. I think all in all we have 46 sales reps.”
Today, Mom Juice is sold in more than 500 stores and online.
KT Winery will also continue raising funds to keep up with the demand for its product. The startup has secured $890,000 to date and plans to close a larger round by the end of February.
Most of the capital raised thus far has come from women angel investors and $119,000 came from a WeFunder crowdfunding campaign. KT Winery also received $20,000 in November after being named a Pharrell Williams’ Black Ambition winner. This award helped propel the startup’s fundraising efforts, Taylor said.
“Colorado’s ecosystem is typically very tech-heavy or health tech-heavy for investing so as a CPG company, it’s really cool to see that the funds are trying to make it work, even if we don’t perfectly fit into their portfolio,” she said.
While VC funds and other investors have expressed interest in investing in KT Winery, Taylor said she hasn’t really found a local community or industry KT Winery fits into. She said she’s started to find a community at Tarra, a Denver-based, women-focused coworking space, over the last few months.
“There are other women wanting to find community,” Taylor said. “[It’s] not even just women, it’s people in CPGs, people in food, and it’s just so disjointed. I think there has to be something that isn’t tech available for founders.”
Future plans for KT Winery include launching single-serve options for its Mom Juice brand and a non-alcoholic cocktail in Q1 of 2024.
