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

Megan, appreciate you joining us today. How did you come up with the idea for your business?

About 5 years ago I was the General Manager of a restaurant/distillery in New Orleans. One of my employees was participating in a cocktail competition and the drink she had chosen to make was a Strawberry Basil Gin Sour. She reached the level of the competition where she needed to make 400 of her drink at an event. She had previously been muddling fresh strawberries and basil into the drink, but doing that for 400 people was going to be far too time consuming. She wanted to make a syrup to speed up the process but was struggling to use fresh ingredients while getting the right consistency and flavor.

We explored the options on the market at the time and all of them included multitudes of chemicals, fake ingredients, or “natural flavoring”. I started experimenting at home with getting the recipe right, and my husband, who was a bartender in the French Quarter, also joined in. What we came up with is now our flagship syrup flavor, Strawberry Basil. We use only fresh fruit and herbs, raw organic cane sugar, and water to make our syrups. No preservatives, added flavors or fake ingredients. We decided to turn it into a business because we believed bars needed better options for flavored syrups, and home consumers did, too!

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?

I got my start in the bar industry working as a bartender on the New Orleans parade route. I love coming up with creative cocktails and providing an excellent hospitality experience. I eventually worked my way up to General Manager of a restaurant/distillery, which is where I started making fresh fruit and herb simple syrups. My husband was a bartender in the French Quarter and between the two of us, we kept a good rotation of delicious homemade drink mixes stocked in our fridge. We started to become known as a house where French Quarter bartenders could stop and have a drink at the end of their shift, and people always wanted to know what new flavors we had to make drinks with.

I have Ehlers-Danlos, a hypermobility syndrome, and I was experiencing some pretty severe symptoms towards the end of my restaurant career. My husband and I moved to Virginia to be closer to family while I took a break to heal. We started selling our syrups at the farmer’s market, then got picked up by a few local stores. What sets us apart is our use of all real, fresh ingredients and no preservatives, additives, or “natural flavors”. We’re still the only simple syrup company that can say that — everyone else uses some sort of stabilizer like citric acid, tartaric acid, etc. I’m really proud of that and I look forward to creating more bar products with the same values.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

My motto for social media marketing as a small business is “be useful to your customer.” That’s all I think about for our social media channels — how can we show up for our customers here? What questions do they have about our product? What value can I add that will make them want to follow us and engage with our posts? Since we’re a simple syrup company, we focus on educating our customers on how to use our product. We create reels of how to make different cocktails and mocktails, make sure all of our posts of pretty drinks have a recipe included, and suggest ways to use the syrups outside of just making cocktails.

This has ended up serving two purposes — on the one hand, repeat customers comment on it and follow for inspiration. On the other, we’re able to direct new customers to our social media whenever they have any questions. Not only does this save us time answering the same questions repeatedly, but it introduces them to all our flavors, and gets them using up product quickly!

We’d love to hear about you met your business partner.

My husband is my business partner, and we created the company together from start to finish. We met while bartending on the Mardi Gras parade route — I actually trained him to be a bartender! So we’ve always shared a love of making drinks. When we started creating simple syrups we both brought flavors to the table, and we workshopped all our ideas together. I think it can be really difficult to own a business with your significant other but it really works for us. We have opposite skillsets outside of bartending; he’s incredibly good at sales, logistics, and efficiency, and I’m better at finances, organization, and operations. Having different skillsets but the same passion means we’re able to divide and conquer while still being 100% onboard with the overall dream of our company. What keeps us functioning well is that we don’t bring our ego into it — we know what each of us is better at, and we allow the other person to take charge of those areas. I think it’s vital in business to know your strengths and weaknesses and be willing to ask for help.

Contact Info:

• Website: crescentsimples.com
• Instagram: @crescentsimples

Image Credits
Halle Kennon of Wild Heart Creative