“I think it worked in our favor, not that I wouldn’t have wanted to have my sister my whole life, but the fact that we did come together later in life, and then we quickly started a business together… We had a shared business, but also a shared mission and vision for what we wanted to do, and we were learning together. So we were learning about each other and building our relationship as sisters, while we were building our business in a very close and tight way,” Robin recalled.
“And when you learn things together with people, it’s bonding, right?” She continued. “So even though we had missed each other for a good portion of our lives — because we met when I was 25 and Andrea was 16 — we don’t get that time back. But as young adults, we were able to have so much intense time together over the last 20 years, really building something meaningful that we’re proud of. And we did it together.”
What’s more, Robin says that because they had to navigate two new relationships, the business and their sisterhood, simultaneously it pushed them to have more patience, which isn’t always the case when families who were raised together, so to speak, decide to launch a company.
Despite it all working out in the end, Robin does admit that there were some early frustrations such as when investors couldn’t pinpoint why her sister had a New Zealand accent and she did not.
“Everybody was so curious when we entered the room being the way that we were, and it bothered us at first because we were like, well different than what people usually expect to see in terms of a wine company owner or sales rep or whatever, that we kind of created this comeback, this little elevator pitch to kind of blurt out the story quickly based on what people had asked before so we could move on to the business at hand,” she shared.
They did so reluctantly but soon realized that this vulnerability of being different in more ways than one in the wine industry worked to their advantage.
Now, it continues to work in their favor, Robin says, as they have the largest Black-owned wine company in the U.S. and are now the owners of a 12-acre vineyard that they are currently cultivating to take their business to the next level.
