We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Danny Frounfelkner. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Danny below.
Hi Danny, thanks for joining us today. Risk taking is something we’re really interested in and we’d love to hear the story of a risk you’ve taken.
From the moment I had the idea to start a non-alcoholic bottle shop, I knew it would be an uphill climb. I had spent the better part of the last decade entrenched in the beverage industry, working the crazy hours, late night shifts that inevitably ended at a bar. Alcohol was all around me and I had built my entire career around it, but I realized that I no longer identified with it. The alcohol industry just simply didn’t align with my soul anymore. I’ve always been a disruptor, shifting perspectives and energies around me. I’ve had a lot of ideas. dreams and visions in my life but none felt quite as right as this one. I knew I was onto something big. After being furloughed due to the pandemic, I could’ve taken another job and thrown myself right back into it, but I took the risk of listening to my heart and following this dream. I’ve always been someone who seeks deeper meaning in all things and I wanted to learn everything there was to know about this space. Listen, anyone can open up a store, but I wanted to take the time to do it right. Anything less than that would be doing our future customers a disservice. So I spent 18 months connecting with brand founders, hearing their stories, tasting their creations and forming true and lasting relationships. I may have stopped being a sommelier but my search for flavor didn’t end and the products we carry in our store are truly incredible—in taste, ingredients and because of the people who make them.
Little did I know just how many skeptics existed. It took us almost 9 months to find a location for our store. With an unproven concept, landlords simply weren’t willing to lease to us. After what felt like a constant revolving door of rejection, we found the perfect location right near Rice Village and opened our doors on October 16th. Leaving the security of a job and shifting out of the alcohol industry, in fact, going in the complete opposite direction by opening a non-alcoholic shop, was the biggest risk I’ve ever taken professionally. Old colleagues didn’t understand it, felt like I was betraying them somehow by following my heart, my soul and my dream. I’m so glad I did.
It has been an incredible success and has opened more doors than I ever anticipated. I have met some of the most extraordinary people, have made lifelong friends and it has enabled me to show the world that there’s so much more to sober curiosity than ditching the alcohol. SIPPLE is only at the beginning and we’ve got big plans for our future. With every person who walks through our doors comes new opportunity to expand our perspectives and grow in our awareness not only of the risks of alcohol but how making one small change (like ditching alcohol) can have a ripple effect that could change the rest of your life.
Danny, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I’ve been in the service and hospitality industry for over 20 years. I studied wine through college and my early 20s and became a beverage director and sommelier in Houston in 2012. I’ve worked in every facet of this industry from being a consumer to curating wine and beverage programs for top restaurant groups to buying and distributing to manufacturing and producing at a local winery and brewhouse. I have always been a flavor seeker, wanting to find exciting and elevated beverages that excite my customers and bring my own uniqueness to the table.
I’ve never sold a bottle of anything of which I didn’t know the ingredients and the same goes for SIPPLE. We pay attention to the flavor first and the ingredients second. It says a lot when a brand can make something taste amazing without alcohol AND without tons of sugar. We don’t believe in trading alcohol for sugar and our customers truly appreciate that unique approach. We welcome everyone who comes in the store with open arms because taking the step to cut back on drinking can feel daunting. We’re here to show our customers that they are accepted as they are, no matter their reason why. We truly want everyone to be happy with what they’re drinking so we offer everything as single serve. The biggest misconception most people have when they come into the shop is that they’re gonna love everything, but you wouldn’t expect to love everything at a restaurant, bar, grocery store or liquor store, so chances are high you aren’t going to love everything at SIPPLE, either. We have variety to make sure there’s something for everyone and so far, it’s been working!
I think I’m mostly proud of the authentic relationships we’ve built with our brand partners, customers and local influencers who are so grateful that a place like SIPPLE exists. SIPPLE started out as a community, first and foremost, and we’ve never lost sight of that. It’s what keeps us going every single day and we’re incredibly proud of that. We’ve been able to help local non-profits raise money and awareness for their causes and have made many pregnant women happy for 9 months! It doesn’t matter how big or how small our community impact is, we’re here for every minute of it.
Can you talk to us about how your funded your business?
Almost weekly, we have someone ask us if we want to franchise our business and how much it would cost to start up a business like this. I’m not going to lie, when I told my wife about this idea, I wasn’t sure how she would respond or how we would even make it work. She was incredibly supportive of this and ultimately became the co-founder. We didn’t worry about HOW we were going to do it, afford it, make it happen, etc. We just took it one step at a time. We always said we’d never work together but when I started SIPPLE, suddenly our individual strengths came together to form this perfect team. I have the palate, the training, the hospitality and retail experience, the relationships and she had spent her career building small businesses from the ground up and had the marketing, web design and development, e-commerce, DTC and media experience. We were a symbiotic team without even trying to be.
In truth, we bootstrapped the entire operation, using our savings. We looked closely at what needed to be done and determined what each of us could contribute vs. what would absolutely HAVE to be outsourced or paid for. I took care of all things related to the retail space, product selection, tasting notes, site content and social media and my wife, Helenita, built the website, worked on the legal and administrative needs and handled all of the marketing, advertising and PR. That left the bulk of the expenses to our initial product order, setting up our retail space and legal fees. We were able to get the store up and running and profitable within the first 2 months, a feat we’re incredibly proud of.
My advice for anyone starting out is to trust yourself. Know what you know and, more importantly, know what you don’t know. Outsource that which you don’t know and challenge yourself to take on the things you do. Believe in yourself and know that it doesn’t have to be perfect to launch. Build what can be built on a budget to lay the foundation and grow from there.
Have you ever had to pivot?
When we launched SIPPLE, we were naive to exactly what the sober and sober curious world was all about. We found ourselves being asked regularly, “What’s your soberversary?” My wife and I would look at each other and wonder what that meant. Neither of us ever claimed to be sober (because we aren’t). I stopped drinking before the pandemic after years of drinking for my career and felt it simply didn’t serve me anymore. My wife had been drinking a lot during the pandemic and really cut back after doing a 75 day challenge and has maintained a predominantly alcohol-free lifestyle, but she still drinks occasionally. We were familiar with sobriety and were thrilled that we were providing options for those who identify as sober or are in recovery, but suddenly we were thrust into this lifestyle simply because we opened up a store that offered non-alcoholic options.
We had to make a decision on which way to go, what stance we wanted to take on sobriety…we had to decide if we even had a position. This led to what has become the most life-changing course change for both my wife and me. We don’t drink but we’re not sober. But people wanted to know what that meant. For us, it opened up doors to diving within ourselves to explore why we stopped drinking, why were we drinking when we did drink, what are the root causes of addictions and mental health and so many more questions. We were invited to host a non-alcoholic pop-up bar at SXSW for an event that was part of the State of Psychedelics Summit and that opened our eyes, hearts, mind and soul to a world much bigger than a simple word: sober.
Since then, we have explored all facets of sobriety and recovery, working closely with those in the transformative medicine space, specifically as it relates to addiction and recovery. What started as a simple question of whether or not we consider ourselves sober has blossomed into SIPPLE forging beautiful partnerships with pioneers making waves to get to the root causes of addiction and free people’s souls. We never saw this as an evolution of our tiny little bottle shop but we are so here for it.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.sipple.co
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sipple.co/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sipple.co
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dannyfrounfelkner/
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/sipple-houston
Image Credits
Therron Francis @therraunch Quy Tran Photography @quytranphotography