We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jared Wierman. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jared below.

Hi Jared, thanks for joining us today. One of the things we most admire about small businesses is their ability to diverge from the corporate/industry standard. Is there something that you or your brand do that differs from the industry standard? We’d love to hear about it as well as any stories you might have that illustrate how or why this difference matters.

It’s exciting to get to participate in a time period where the ‘industry standard’ for most things is actually pretty awesome, compared to decades ago. With that being said, being able to elevate it and create new standards that drive the industry (thus becoming the new standard) are radical. It’s kind of how underground art becomes pop culture in 10 years… innovation is basically doing things ‘wrong.’ Sourcing ingredients from farms and using tradition, stripped down, honest, methods and ingredients is ‘wrong’ but it’s natural and it feels punk because of that. It’s exciting when you can strip things back to their ‘roots’ (literally in some cases) and get to the heart of something more valuable by being yourself.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

My name is Jared Wierman, I work with Pink House Alchemy in sales and development and have ran some incredible bars such as The Foreman for Onyx Coffee Lab, The Tower Bar at the Momentary and have worked with Vault, The Meteor, Yellow Rocket, and some other amazing groups through the years. I am also a musician and designer! I was very lucky to have a lot of amazing mentors in my professional (and personal) life, so that definitely helped to set the standard for the work that I worked to accomplish. I come from a design background so the beverage industry (specifically “craft” cocktails and coffee) were a really valuable space to be able to engage with creative endeavors. Something that is so beautiful about the food and beverage hospitality industry is that you get to interact with your clientele in ways that you don’t get to with architecture, art, or music. I loved and still love working on super high end cocktail menus that create stories and romance and narratives about sourcing and beauty and art… so it was with that context that I came to work with Pink House. Basically I approached Emily (Lawson, founder, owner and CEO of Pink House Alchemy) as someone who I look up to and wanted to learn from with some ideas about how I could take those cocktail menus and put them in bottles for lots of people to enjoy and then we just started a conversation and that grew into a shared interest, (one that she and her amazing staff had been working on for 10 years already) which is creating something useful and beautiful for people from pure ingredients and raising “the bar” on flavor and quality in ways that we don’t really see in the ‘flavor house’ industry. So with that context of bottling a whole universe of cocktail menus and creativity, I am super happy to collaborate with the Pink House team. To use the farm to table approach toward flavor (Farm to Bottle) is radical and i’m super stoked on it..

How do you keep your team’s morale high?

Morale and positivity are at the heart of being part of a team, whether you are leading the team or helping to send vibes back up to your leadership. It’s amazing that it’s mandatory now that we have to be super good to one another professionally. Kindness, joy, gratitude and respect are at the heart any project that is going to succeed. It’s a privilege (and the new industry standard) to be able to work with people that share that mutual respect and positivity. For Pink House Alchemy, I think that it’s important for people to come to the table and be delighted from the product and process, and I think that it would be really hard to make a product that is intended to bring joy and not want to share that same joy in the working conditions and relationships of the team. Having a ‘Rad work / life balance’ was literally written into my contract. Practicing gratitude is mandatory. Servant leadership is as well, it’s gotta be a ‘what can I do to help’ kind of attitude across the board.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

I want to talk about the products here specifically because of what happens when you get to effectively create a product that hundreds and thousands of people get to enjoy. It could be a painting or a song or a bottled product. For me it’s wonderful to be able to stand in front of a product that is at once quintessential, honest, raw, and minimal. I look at the existing line of Pink House Alchemy products like primary colors (specifically water colors) that people can then use to blend and create their own compositions. I saw a documentary recently and there was a line that said “Everything in the universe is just raw energy” so it’s awesome to be able to work with ingredients that literally came from trees and the earth and seasons and farms and that our little community put together. I can’t personally take credit for developing any of the classic varieties of our line, but in working on new, experimental releases we talk about the same set of criteria: natural ingredients, harvested from ethical places, using traditional methods and no additives, and then iterative testing until it’s perfect. So it’s so rewarding to be able to work on a product with a team and see it as something that could exist forever. Hard work is the most rewarding thing, but even more so if it’s work that you love doing.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.pinkhousealchemy.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pink_house_alchemy/?hl=en
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PinkHouseAlchemy/
• Other: https://www.pinkhousealchemy.com/wholesaleform

Image Credits
(all photos are labeled shot by) The first profile photo of Jared Wierman (with the mirror) was shot by Keetun Pierce. All other Photos were taken by Kat Wilson.