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

Théa, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?

Ice Cream Social was born out of a conversation with my best friend in early 2021 about what our dream job would be if we weren’t limited by any resources. I had been trying to get a job in live music since graduating from college a year and a half earlier (without much success, thanks to covid shutting everything down), and Alexis was working a job she didn’t really love, so the ideas started flowing pretty quickly. We landed on owning our own music venue together and started talking about what would make it different from other venues, which is where ice cream came into the equation. It was a really casual conversation, but then my mom came into town the next week and told us we needed to start writing things down because it was actually a good idea. So a brainstorming wall of post-its appeared above our kitchen table and lived there for the next 2 years, until we moved out of that house.

All that being said, the vision for Ice Cream Social we came up with is an ice cream shop with a stage in the back room that mainly focuses on helping small local artists get their start in the touring industry, by creating a space for the community to get to know each other and come and support bands from their town.

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 started playing piano in kindergarten because my mom wanted me to be able to read music, but I kept playing because I liked it so much (and I was pretty good at it which didn’t hurt). I transitioned to clarinet in middle school so that I could join marching band in high school, and that band director quickly became the most influential teacher I ever had. I decided to major in music in college partly because I had spent most of my life in and around music, and partly because he was so good at his job. Shout out to Mr. Widener!

I went to CSUN and majored in Music Industry, which gave me the opportunity to explore the various facets of the industry and decide which way I wanted to go, since pretty much all I knew when I started was that I didn’t want to play clarinet professionally. In my junior year I had the privilege of leading the events department of our student-run record label, and I knew I had found my corner of the music world. I love how live music creates and encourages community in a way unlike anything else, and I wanted to be a part of putting together the shows and spaces that led to that.

That community focus is what I hope will make Ice Cream Social stand out from other venues. I want to provide a place for people to get to know their neighbors and make new friends, and I think local music is a great catalyst for community building. The people–from the ones just buying ice cream to the ones up on stage–are always going to be more important than the paycheck. I hope that the atmosphere at Ice Cream Social will be one that draws people back again and again because they feel like they’ve found a place to belong.

Can you talk to us about manufacturing? How’d you figure it all out? We’d love to hear the story.

I knew I wanted ice cream to be part of this business from the get-go, but figuring out how to actually make that a reality has been a really fun journey. My husband Danny (who is the reason Ice Cream Social actually got started at all) and I were gifted a little 1-quart ice cream maker for our wedding, and it came with a couple of recipes in its instruction booklet. So our first step was to learn how to make that Cuisinart vanilla, and then we started adjusting it to make it taste better and better. Once we landed on a recipe we had to figure out how to produce enough of it for a couple hundred people, which required borrowing a few more ice cream makers (thanks Lisa and Brianna) and getting a Costco membership (pretty much specifically for heavy cream), among other things. We’ve gotten into a routine of making at least one batch a day, sometimes 2 or 3 if we’ve got the time. When our freezer gets full we move the few gallons over to the venue freezer and then start again!

I’ve learned that experimentation and risk are naturally a part of creating a good product. The best flavor isn’t something found in one attempt. You have to be willing to try things that might not turn out well and result in throwing a batch away. It’s also a lot more fun to play around with recipes and come up with your own good ideas than it is to strictly follow someone else’s instructions all the time!

How’d you meet your business partner?

This has to be a 2-part story because my cofounder and current business partner are two different people–I’ll do my best to keep it brief!

As I mentioned previously, I initially had the idea for Ice Cream Social with my best friend Alexis Colson. We were randomly assigned roommates in the dorms at CSUN. I wish I could tell whoever worked in housing in 2016 and made that decision how incredibly well they did!! We wound up living together for almost 7 years, until I got married in 2023. She is the one who was on calls with our college professors asking if this was a good idea with me, who helped fill up the brainstorming wall, who spent so many of her non-working hours doing a lot of things that felt like work to make our first two shows in our backyard happen. This idea wouldn’t exist without her and I am so grateful to have had the time we did working on this together. Alexis is a synch manager at BMG now and is absolutely crushing it, so she’s had to step away from being a part of the planning for Ice Cream Social, but she will always be my cofounder and first partner. I still run a lot of ideas by her and she’s our biggest supporter!

The business partner slot has been filled by my husband Danny, who I met at church in early 2021 and who has been pushing for the creation of Ice Cream Social since I first told him about it. We were friends for a year before we started dating, and that year was the same one in which Alexis and I had the idea and were starting to figure out what we could do with it. When we decided to host a concert in our backyard in 2022, Danny is the one who made sure we actually did it–he asked us if we were free the last Saturday in August and then started telling people we were throwing a show that day so that we would plan it for the people who said they would show up. Now he is the social media/marketing genius, as well as the other ice cream and decision maker for Ice Cream Social. Pretty much everything that makes it on our Instagram is something he made, he designs all our flyers and merch, and he has spent more days than probably anyone else in the world wearing a pink suit jacket so people will ask him about it and he can tell them about Ice Cream Social. It’s been really fun getting to start and run a business together, and I absolutely couldn’t do it without him.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.icecreamsocial-la.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/icecreamsocial.la/

Image Credits

Ana Miller, Tyler Disney