As American cocktail drinkers continue to embrace the spritz, the founder of one amaro brand is hoping her background in venture capital will help her crack the Italian spirits market. Ana Rosenstein founded Amante 1530 in 2023 after spending her early career in venture capital, focused on investments spanning from CPG to consumer healthcare. We chatted with Rosenstein, who also started a now-closed CBD company while she was at Harvard Business School, about how she’s applying a profit-over-growth mindset to bev-alc, where she sees opportunity for more aperitif amaro players, and why her celebrity investor takes a backseat in the company’s branding (hint: there’s a “message in a bottle”). Answers have been lightly edited for clarity and length.
What learnings from your time in venture capital are you bringing into the business?
Profitability at all costs. I want to deliver a cash flow positive business to my investors in record time. I watched venture turn into this crazy fantasy world of growth at all costs, or rather, growth over profit. That’s not a business. Being on the investor side of the table gave me a front-row seat to this wild landscape where no consumer businesses were even thinking about profitability. I don’t want to be on the endless venture hamster wheel. I don’t want to go raise round after round. I don’t want to hit a crazy sales goal and immediately think ‘oh, we can raise a boatload of money off this.’ I actually want to raise as little as possible and save my investors as much dilution as I can.
How is that approach different from other spirits entrepreneurs?
Everyone thinks I’m crazy for not going out and raising $20 million, sponsoring every major Art Basel Miami event, and sinking a ton of money into marketing. We look at things differently. We think about how each dollar spent turns into an equivalent amount of revenue. Every dollar we spend needs to turn into tangible case sales, not amorphous awareness, which ultimately turns into zero revenue. I want to show everyone who told me I needed to raise tens of millions of dollars that you can build a brand sensibly and still make it a roaring success.
What’s the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?
Domestic distribution, oddly enough. The distribution landscape in the U.S. is so complex. We have the best distributor in New York State, Empire Merchants, and they have been the best partners and supporters from early on in the brand’s life. Other states have been tougher because there’s a lot of consolidation going on in the distribution world. Distributors are merging and cutting their portfolios in half, which makes it a tricky time to get placement in their books. We think we’ve finally cracked it though, which is a huge relief. International markets have been shockingly way easier. We had so much inbound from international distributors, which is beyond flattering. Some of our international markets are quickly turning into markets that might just go head-to-head, or maybe even surpass, the U.S. in terms of case sales.
How do you define success?
It depends on the stage of the business. Right now, it’s the number of cases sold, new points of distribution per month, and our reorder rate (how many accounts that ordered last month order this month). It’s also about never spending money on something (an event, a partnership etc.) unless we are certain it will bring in revenue greater than the initial expenditure.
I also like to look at success in terms of revenue on a per salesperson basis. At Amante we have our own internal sales force in addition to the salespeople who work for our distributor. That has been critical to our early success and a lot of brands don’t think to do it. As we move into our second year in business, I’ll start looking at success in terms of whether each salesperson is bringing case sale revenue that is equivalent to or greater than their salary. We care about hitting profitability, remember?
There are also fuzzier measures of success, which are more fun, amorphous, and anecdotal. For example, someone came up to me and said, ‘I just heard you’re the founder of Amante! The number of people who have been telling me how amazing your product is this week alone is staggering.’ Those kinds of things are exciting because it means people outside of my network are discovering and falling in love with the brand all on their own.
If we’re talking 5 years from now though that’s a different story. Then markers of success turn into how many tens of thousands of cases we are selling per quarter, how many potential acquirers are sniffing around… the bigger things.
Why an aperitif amaro & how do you plan on grabbing share from Campari?
We vehemently believe there is room in this pie for several players. We entered the space because we respect the incumbents and believe the pie can be so much bigger. Obviously, we believe there are customers that aren’t happy with the existing brands and that we offer a less sweet, but simultaneously not too bitter, alternative with a more elevated flavor profile and deeply resonant brand.
We built this brand because we looked around at the tables surrounding [us] one night in Tuscany and each table had at least two spritzes. We dug into the data and saw the astronomical rise in popularity of the spritz as a cocktail, which today sits as the number one most ordered cocktail in the country. Ten years ago, no one in the U.S. knew what an Aperol spritz was. We saw this category bursting with potential and believed we could help grow it even more.
How did the relationship with Sting develop and what’s his involvement?
Sting and [his wife] Trudie Styler are incredible investors in the brand and were part of the founding “group” that came up with the idea. Amante isn’t just another alcohol brand that slaps a celebrity’s face on it, it is made by one of the most respected winemakers on the planet and bottled in one of the most historic distilleries in Italy. We wanted to build the next great heritage brand, not a flash in the pan celebrity brand and it’s something we were all aligned on from the beginning. We built Amante to sit on the back bar for generations, regardless of who was involved from the get-go. It has real gravitas and staying power. While I shouldn’t speak for him, I would say that’s Sting’s (and Trudie’s!) brand too. He’s timeless and elegant. His music will sit on whatever the backbar equivalent is for generations. He’s so supportive of the brand but knows how to do it in just the right way because it’s simply who he is. He’s not just a spectacular musician, he’s also a brilliant businessman so we’re really lucky to have him on the ride.