We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Julia Tunstall a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Julia thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. How did you come up with the idea for your business?

My story actually starts out as my co-founder and husband’s story. Chris was working as a professional bartender in California and was having a hard time learning “advanced” mixology. He taught himself (the hard way) through lots of research several years before he met me!

Once we were together, we had the perfect team: his expertise and my operational skills. We partnered up to address the lack of accessible, high-quality mixology resources available to those seeking comprehensive training in our industry. Our goal was to provide in-depth training videos on the internet, making valuable knowledge more accessible for aspiring mixologists.A Bar Above was officially born! We started as a YouTube channel and blog in 2013 and added a podcast and training courses in 2014.

At the time, nobody in the industry was sharing the “behind the scenes” look at how to execute advanced mixology techniques. You had to get lucky enough to find a mentor or be hired in a high end bar (which was impossible without experience.) Our YouTube channel set out to open the door for novice bartenders to learn advanced techniques.
It was incredibly rewarding since we were one of the first in the space, and the feedback from the community was very positive and supportive.

That said, there wasn’t a lot of money in it, and it was a real struggle. But over time, we started to get more and more emails from customers who didn’t like their current barware and wanted our recommendations. The short answer: We didn’t recommend any of it! Chris hated the options on the market and wished there were better quality choices.
After a few years of waiting for someone else to do it, we decided to launch our own barware brand, establishing the modern day A Bar Above.

Julia, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I touched upon this a bit earlier, but our brand was founded out of my husband/co-founder’s frustrations. First, we focused on creating educational content to fill a gap we saw in available information for beginning bartenders. Then, we moved into creating premium barware because Chris was so frustrated with the quality of the tools he was using behind the bar. While we still make loads of educational content, the barware brand has definitely become our bread and butter. We’re relentless in our drive for quality in our tools. There are pieces in our catalog that we’ve insisted are welded twice, two different ways. Chris knows exactly where and how every tool breaks, and we’ve worked closely with factories to fix every one of those failure points to make sure our equipment lasts.

But again – we are, at our heart, an education company. We blend education into everything we do. We have two awesome and highly active Facebook groups for bartenders and home cocktail enthusiasts. We still make videos for YouTube, having expanded to Tiktok and Instagram reels; we try to show how simple cocktail techniques are, and we encourage everyone to give them a try, no matter their skill level. Heck, we even include tips and tricks on our product inserts!
I’m so proud to be a brand that’s not just dedicated to making money. Our mission is to “Serve the people who serve great drinks,” and I think we do a great job of that in so many different ways.

How’d you think through whether to sell directly on your own site or through a platform like Amazon, Etsy, Cratejoy, etc.

We actually started out selling our products on Amazon, as we weren’t even sure our barware concept would work out, and Amazon FBA seemed like a great way to test it. It wasn’t until a full 18 months later that we added a store to our own website.

I think there are a lot of pros and cons of selling on marketplaces; but from our perspective, it gave us critical market feedback without bogging us down with launching an entire store. That said, that was 2016. The world of marketplaces is very different now.

Today, I’d say there are significant pros and cons, but more than anything, I’d just say that it’s different:
– Marketplaces bring their own customers, so your acquisition strategy is often paying PPC directly to the platform (which has become extremely competitive on Amazon, for example).
– Amazon FBA drastically simplifies your logistics, BUT you pay the price by not really knowing much about your customer at all. (You don’t even get their shipping information.)
– We’ve found the products that sell well on our own site are also drastically different from what sells on Amazon.

I’d say if I had a choice, I’d keep investing in a multichannel strategy. Every sales channel has its strengths and weaknesses, and by diversifying, I know we definitely reach more customers than focusing on one single strategy.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

Our whole business is a pivot! As I mentioned in our story, we started as an education company and tried to “get by” selling online courses and advertising partnerships with liquor brands. It was hard. We were in such a small niche that sales volume was difficult to come by, and we were constantly pressured to “advertise” instead of educate during our brand partnerships.

But when our customers started asking us for barware recommendations, we had a feeling they were onto something. In 2016, we invested the last of our savings into 1,000 Boston shakers and shipped them to Amazon. They sold out in 30 days! It was clear we’d finally found the business model that’d support us AND allow us to keep providing the bar education we loved.

Contact Info:

• Website: abarabove.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/abarabove/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a-bar-above
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/abarabove
• Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@abarabove

Image Credits
Melanie Tornroth and Emmanuel Lozano