Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Genesis Rum. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Genesis Rum, appreciate you joining us today. So, naming is such a challenge. How did you come up with the name of your brand?

The founders, Joshua Steckler, MacAlister Steckler, Jack Titus and Preju Kanuparthy have all been friends since the 6th grade. They took many classes together and went to the same middle and high school. They were all in the same 10th grade AP World History class with their all time favorite teacher, Mr. Menenberg. In their first week of school that year, Mr. Menenberg had the class do their first word of Vocabulary. The class guessed and guessed the first word and he finally revealed the word – Genesis.

Years later, when COVID happened, all the friends gathered and made the idea for the business yet it had no name. We thought about times that united us and we quickly remembered our favorite teacher and the word Genesis. We had just started our new business and there was no better name to name the rum other than Genesis Rum.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

We are Genesis Rum, a pineapple and lime flavored rum sitting right at 40% ABV. It is delicious, smooth and pairs perfectly with any mixer.

At the time of inception, we were four teenagers with a long standing history in business, working together and ideation who had just gotten sent home due to COVID-19 partway through our freshmen year of college. We were itching to stimulate our brains and we talked one night about our colleges social scenes. We quickly were asking ourselves why people did not drink rum in college and we saw that there were no high ABV, good tasting, flavored rums. We investigated the idea some more and decided to email some distillery in a half serious note seeing what they would say. We emailed some, talked to some, got a few more responses and it eventually led to a snowball effect of further ideating and developing the rum, until it got us to where we are at today.

We are the most proud of creating and launching our rum brand all while being under the age of 21. We are also proud of the fact that we had an idea and made that idea into a reality.

Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?

One thing that we think helps our reputation is that we are real people, real students, real individuals selling a product that we love and enjoy. A lot of times while selling, liquor store owners ask who we work for, if we are just sales reps, etc. and we tell them that this is our brand, a brand made by college students for the world to enjoy and make memories while drinking the rum. This notion helps build reputation because we do deeply care about the enjoyment of the rum and not just numbers/sales.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

A few lessons that we thought were good while building the brand is that sales are everything, revenue is everything, more stores is better. While there may be some truth in being in more places allows the rum to be more accessible and such, one major lesson we learned is that if your product does not move/sell in stores, you won’t be able to return to those stores you initially sold to.

We had to learn that quality matters over the quantity and thats when we truly learned the lesson. Our customers and partners are very important to us and thats what we prioritize over sheer sales volume.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.genesisspirits.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drinkgenesisrum/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/66734187/admin/