It’s Been A Year, Drink to That: An Interview with Helena Price Hambrecht, Founder of Haus
No pun intended, but Haus has become a household name in the past few years. Its beautifully-designed bottles take center stage on home bar carts, and the aperitifs are served on their own or splashed into a cocktail for heightened taste. Trying to stake a claim against the conglomerates of Anheuser-Busch and Heineken Holding, who have substantial stakes in a whopping $62 billion market in the United States alone, according to an IBIS World Report, is not an easy feat. However, this has not stopped the Haus team from launching a membership club, partnering with iconic restaurants to create exclusive aperitifs to raise relief funds as a result of COVID, and educating consumers on the benefits of low-booze beverages.
In this interview, co-founder and CEO Helena Price Hambrecht, with a cameo from husband and co-founder Woody Hambrecht, share stories of the founding journey, the process of educating and creating a new brand of alcohol for the American palate, and the rollercoaster fundraising journey.
What sparked the idea for Haus?
Helena Price Hambrecht: I always joke that Haus is the result of a techie marrying a winemaker. Before starting Haus, I spent my career doing brand work for companies in Silicon Valley: from smaller startups to the Twitter and Googles of the world.
Meanwhile, my husband and co-founder, Woody, has been making wine and spirits for the past decade. I observed his work from the sidelines and quickly learned that the alcohol industry was incredibly archaic. My Silicon Valley brain just kept wondering why there was little to no innovation in booze.
Long story short, there’s a three-tier system that requires alcohol producers to sell through distributors who then sell your product to retailers, bars, and restaurants. Ultimately it’s a system that keeps the power in the hands of corporate alcohol producers and distributors, who control where products show up in the market. This means drinkers are stuck with their choices, and indie brands have little opportunity to grow or connect with the people drinking their products.
At the same time, I was experiencing my own drinking dilemma. A big part of being a career person is connecting with people over drinks, at networking events, conferences, or just catching up with friends. Most of our generation isn’t drinking to get drunk, but it’s not uncommon to find yourself drinking almost every night of the week. I love the ritual of having a drink, but the downsides were really getting to me. My sleep was suffering; my joints were hurting. It wasn’t sustainable, and I wasn’t the only one who felt this way about drinking.
This got me thinking, “There has to be a better way to drink.” I started to research alcohol and consumer trends and quickly realized there was a massive opportunity.
Our generation is looking for transparency, convenience, and authenticity. They care about their image and are very conscious of their health. At the time, new categories like the Aperol Spritz and White Claw were gaining popularity, and there was so much space to create something better. It just so happened that Woody had been making aperitifs, a type of low-ABV liquor that checks all the boxes for what modern drinkers were looking for.
Now, we just needed to figure out how to go around the bureaucratic system I mentioned earlier. You haven’t seen a Glossier or Warby Parker of alcohol before because direct-to-consumer is generally not an option in alcohol. You typically have to sell through distributors.
As Woody and I were talking about the idea, he mentioned that, actually, there was a way to sell direct to consumer. If you’re creating a grape-based aperitif that’s under 24% ABV, you can legally sell your product online. We already knew how to make this type of aperitif — filled with quality ingredients and made with care and transparency. Now we just needed to introduce this type of beverage to the American market in a much bigger way.
So we launched Haus, with a vision to build the alcohol brand of the future.
Our generation is looking for transparency, convenience, and authenticity. They care about their image and are very conscious of their health.
Haus has received such positive reviews because you have curated an incredible experience around a well-designed brand. What was the thought process in building the brand?
Helena: I’ve always been obsessed with consumer trends — what people want and how they think. When it came to building Haus, I knew exactly what it needed to look like to get people’s attention.
Today’s consumer has more options than ever, and I wanted the brand to be completely different from everything else out there. We also knew we couldn’t lead with “aperitifs.” No one knew what they were or why that product would be a fit for them. Instead, we focused on explaining why someone would want Haus and the problem we were solving.
We took on the burden of education. Not only did we need to explain why someone might need this product, but we also had to educate the consumer on an entirely new product category during their customer journey. Visual brand and storytelling were critical. We wanted our visuals not just to be beautiful but educational. I wanted people to look at our brand and know how to drink Haus, who to drink it with, and what they were consuming. We tried to fill as many holes as possible and avoid leaving the customer guessing.
The brand itself was heavily inspired by nostalgia and old print magazines. It needed to feel as tactile as possible. And it was a balance of being familiar and approachable while still feeling elevated. The bottle itself was inspired by ceramics and the modern home aesthetic. It was designed to be not just the vessel for Haus but also feel like a piece of art that you want to display in your home.
You’ve raised over $4.5M from the likes of Brianne Kimmel at WorkLifeVC, Alexia Bonastos at Dream Machine, and a myriad of other investors. What was your thesis/thought process in picking the investors for your round?
Helena: Our first million dollars came from 50 different people, and that was not on purpose. We couldn’t raise more than 25k at a time in the beginning. When we started fundraising, people thought that our idea sounded stupid or crazy. We heard people say, “You don’t need to raise money for this mom-and-pop business.” We didn’t let that discourage us. Now we have over 100 investors on our cap table, and they invested in us because they related to our story and were incredibly excited to support our vision.
While certainly nontraditional, having a bigger cap table has had some major advantages. It allowed us to spend the early days building our own playbook, knowing we had the freedom and support to build the company we believed in.
A few months ago, we closed a $3 million investment from Coefficient Capital, which brings us to $9m in total. Since the very beginning, we’ve been in conversations with their team, which in itself was significant since they only invest in startups from Series A onward. They’ve deeply understood our vision since day 1. With their expertise in helping brands like Oatly and Vita Coco grow, they’re a great partner for us as we scale.
We heard people say, “You don’t need to raise money for this mom and pop business.” We didn’t let that discourage us. Now we have over 100 investors on our cap table, and they invested in us because they related to our story and were incredibly excited to support our vision.
Haus has positioned itself as a beverage that offers the experience of quality alcohol without the terrible after-effects. How do you see the role of Haus as a brand in drinking culture?
Helena: There’s so much happening in the broader beverage industry right now — from non-alcoholic beverages to CBD to keto drinks. Although we use responsibly sourced ingredients from the best purveyors and farmers in America, alcohol is still a vice, and we don’t necessarily see this as a “health product.”
For us, it’s really about bringing alcohol up to speed with where food is. There’s no reason that the same principles we apply to what we eat — quality, locally sourced, farm to table — shouldn’t be accessible in what we drink too.
We work hard to find the highest quality ingredients because it makes for an even better product. There are tons of additives, artificial ingredients, and sugars in corporate alcohol. We created Haus without any of the fake ingredients, resulting in something fresh, clean, and easy to drink.
At the end of the day, Haus is made for people who enjoy drinking. It’s for people who want to enjoy a few cocktails over the course of their evening but stay in control of their drinking experience.
For us, it’s really about bringing alcohol up to speed with where food is.
What’s one part of the business that’s changed since you started it?
Helena: We hired an operator as COO early — shortly after we launched. If operational experience is not your superpower, this hiring decision will make you a better founder. We hired Glossier’s former Head of People, Amy Snook, as our COO within the first few months post-launch, and it made a world of difference. With her extensive experience managing people at Glossier, she gave structure and process to our ideas. As we started to build our team, Amy’s experience became invaluable because she helped us build an incredible culture. Working at startups is tough enough, but we wanted to be proactive about ensuring our employees’ happiness and mental health as we work hard to get Haus products out.
What has the biggest triumph and the biggest trial been in building Haus?
Helena: Fundraising is definitely one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. I will definitely have PTSD from the experience. There is so much money out there and so many people with it — especially with a Silicon Valley network. When other entrepreneurs ask me for fundraising advice, I always tell them that you have to be ready to ask *a lot* of strangers to give you money.
I thought that fundraising would be easier than ever since I had connections from my work in Silicon Valley. But almost no one I knew personally gave us money. However, those nos turned into introductions, and we kept telling our story until we met people that aligned with our mission. The people who believed in us from the beginning are the reason that Haus exists.
A couple of years ago, people laughed at the idea of an alcohol brand sold on the internet. Our business grew by over 780% in 2020. We’re proud to have proven our idea for a totally different type of alcohol brand that’s aligned with our values today.
What advice would you give to a founder starting a CPG company?
Take your time. You may feel this rush to launch your product and get it to the market as quickly as possible. But you will come out a stronger founder if you take the time to sit back and observe the market you’re entering. Consumer is different from software. Whatever you’re making needs to look good, taste good, or work in the best way possible — you only have one chance to launch, so do it right.
Do your research. We launched Haus after a year of cooking up the idea, and we spent a lot of that time researching our concepts. We put tremendous care into every detail, from the bottle to how we taught customers to consume Haus. Every little piece of your product needs to be amazing, and your customers need to feel inspired to buy your product. Nothing’s perfect, but you should strive for being exceptional.
Finish the sentence: The things getting me through quarantine are…
Therapy. Woody and I think that every set of co-founders, married or not, should have a therapist or business coach. It’s essential for learning how to communicate and constantly self-improving in your relationship.
Cooking. Even before quarantine, we were cooking a lot, but now with more time at home, we’ve really improved our skills in the kitchen. We live very far from restaurants, so we’ve learned to cook food we miss from the city — mostly Chinese, Vietnamese, Indian, and Thai.
Childcare. We are lucky to have our kid in a tiny at-home daycare right now. We’re all practicing safety protocols and hoping for the best. Haus literally would not exist without it.
