Today we’d like to introduce you to Sarah Puil.
Hi Sarah, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
Like most people, it wasn’t a direct route and I didn’t know I would end up here, but when I look back, everything I’ve done has prepared me to be right where I am. My career started out in digital media at the New York Times Company. While there, I got interested in the intersection of tech, media, people and service. That curiosity eventually led to my running global strategic partnerships for Apollo Education Group and that is where I got my first taste of the excitement and draw of entrepreneurship. My second was at Strayer Education, where I created its first product innovation lab, focusing on employee development and new customer lead generation. That led me to Civic Entertainment whereas a senior VP, I used my fluency in experiential marketing to develop growth strategies. This all set me up perfectly for taking the leap fully into being a founder. In 2019 I was named a Next Coast Ventures Entrepreneur in Residence here in Austin, and that’s where this new journey began.
But my love of wine began years before that.
When I was growing up, my dad traveled for business, and as I got older, I would often travel with him. In my early 20s, he took me on a trip to Chile. We were invited to tour the historic Vina Santa Rita, a gorgeous, world-renowned, old-growth vineyard in the Maipo Valley. I fell in love at first sight and as I listened to their winemaker tell us the story of the ancient carménère grape, I was hooked. From that moment on, I saw winemaking as an art and sought out local wines wherever I went. For many years, it was just a hobby, but during a trip to Europe in 2019, I was sitting at a cafe with my husband and I kept thinking about the house wines we’d experienced and how it was so simple to order a wine in Europe. The menu, if there is one, is short and sweet (not like in the US where we have huge, overwhelming wine lists) and no matter what house wine you order in Europe, you know it’s going to be delicious. I wanted to create that experience in the US. My vision was to simplify fine wine and how we drink a glass at home.
During my time as an Entrepreneur in Residence, I brought this idea to one of my mentors and he just said, “Stop thinking about new ideas. This is the idea. Move. Go.” And BOXT was born.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
It’s been a rollercoaster ride for sure, but that’s part of the fun of it. It was important to me to use everything I’d learned in my previous leadership roles and bring them to my own company. Sustainability, diversity, people first and giving back, these are all foundations of BOXT. Creating that from scratch is inherently going to bring obstacles, but I see obstacles as opportunities and challenges as ways to learn and do better. I believe there are no mistakes, only things we learn along the way. Everything is hard when it’s new until one day it’s not. Each impactful and powerful micro moment of learning informs our path to growth.
A great example of this at BOXT is from the early days. We didn’t know what would work and we didn’t pack the boxes well enough in the beginning, so when we first started shipping, we had some breakage. We went through four weeks of drop kicking boxes to test the best packing materials. It was comical. We tried every material you could imagine. We finally decided on biodegradable peanuts and sent our members a humorous “pardon our peanuts” note with the new packaging. We felt proud of the peanuts until we had to start summer shipping. The ice packs we use to keep the wine at temperature melted the biodegradable peanuts for a few of our members and our gorgeous wine got delivered in a cocoon of cornstarch mush. But since we have such a close relationship with our members and have carried them along with us on this journey – its ups and downs – they had a sense of humor about it.
Backing up a little, a few years ago, two major intersections challenged me to my core – marriage and motherhood. I have an incredible and supportive husband and a very happy 4-year old daughter. But in the same way, I realized that in my career, going all in was the only way to create the work-life I wanted, the same goes for my family life and that is very hard. It is very hard to be 100% present in all the areas – and well, I am far from perfect, but juggling BOXT and family is starting to show me the way. Seeking balance is not really the solution, it’s more like constantly reprioritizing and optimizing for the best outcomes for all that I have decided to take on – personally and professionally.
Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
All of those years spent in high-level leadership roles in fast-growth industries taught me how to hire and motivate, how to scale, how to encourage and mentor and how to model the kind of leadership and organization I want to create.
One of my biggest passions is mentoring. The team who works with me inspires me, and my passion for making BOXT a success is paralleled only by helping them reach and exceed their goals. From the very start, we set up an internal mentoring program at BOXT, and I also work with entrepreneurs locally and around the world as a mentor. One of the most valuable tools we have is the ability to give and receive expertise and knowledge.
Stedman Graham, my personal mentor, gave me some of the most impactful advice of my career over a decade ago – advice that made me the leader I am. We had the opportunity to work together back in 2010 when I was at the Apollo Education Group. We went on a 14-city tour to talk about jobs in the new economy while attending career fairs across the country. It was during this time that he told me two things that would become central to my leadership style. First was, as a young executive with a lot of responsibility early on (I joined the executive team of a publicly traded company by 32), that if I put my head down and worked hard the work would speak for itself. We would meet for sushi and talk about his passion – identity leadership – and where I was in my journey. Those conversations were everything. He taught me nuanced lessons of personal responsibility and accountability. One of the biggest things I learned from him was deciding how I want to define myself and then being consistent.
Second was to meet people where they are. He instilled in me the belief that the power of people is everything. He showed me how to make time for people, to get to know them and what matters most to them, and be open enough to let them learn what matters to me. He taught me that when there are mutually beneficial opportunities to collaborate or connect, incredible things can happen.
I seek out collaborations with other founders, especially other Austin women-led businesses, whether it’s raising money for Alzheimer’s research in partnership with Morgan Perry of @vinovinyasayoga or partnering with Kristen Carson of Inn Cahoots to supply showers and drinking water to Austinites in need during the snowstorms of February 2021 or raising funds with Alexa Curtis for POPS Clubs, which supports kids who have an incarcerated parent or loved one.
I also seek the power of people who are different from me. One of the tent poles of our foundation is inclusion and diversity. I’m a first-generation Cuban American so this subject hits home for me. Our team is over 85% female, 45% POC /minority identifying, 45% parents and 5% LGBTQ+. More viewpoints and more perspectives at the table raise everyone’s game. When you bring in women and people of color, when you support gender and neurodiversity, when you cultivate a team with individuals from a wide range of backgrounds, you get stronger and different ideas, which makes us all better and sharper leaders and innovators.
We knew going into this that we not only wanted to change the conversation and experience around fine wine in the US – taking the exclusivity out of wine-speak and bringing equity to the conversation and business of wine – we wanted to be part of the solution to climate change and be a leader in environmental stewardship in the wine industry.
One BOXT is equal to four bottles and generates about half the emissions of a single bottle. If the US switched from bottled wine to boxed (for the 97% of wine that is made to be enjoyed right away and not aged) we could cut greenhouse gas emissions by the equivalent of retiring 400,000 cars.
At BOXT, every single day, we’re talking about our environmental impact and we are continually hard at work refining the ways that BOXT can further reduce our carbon footprint and still provide a luxury experience for our members. We’re always optimizing while we learn and grow, and as a start up, we’re nimble enough that each day we’re making small decisions and changes around choosing the right things for our members’ experience, the product and the environment. We’ve partnered with Native.eco to offset our carbon emissions and from the start, we’ve planted a tree for every BOXT we make. In 2022 we will launch our refillable BOXT – fulfilling one of our biggest early-stage environmental goals.
We’re making a product that people love, that helps simplify their lives and also one they can feel good about buying. We’re proud to be a female-founded and run, venture-backed company. We handcraft our wines in Napa, our operations are based here in Austin and we’ve created a first of its kind wine club, designing a luxury wine experience and delivering it directly to our members’ doorsteps. We’re inspired by the simple and delicious house wines of Europe, and we are on a mission to change the way we all enjoy a glass at home.
With that in mind, we’ve designed our wines based not just on varietals, like chardonnay or merlot, but on the tastes and textures consumers love most in a wine, so we can create instantly loveable wines that are excellent, easy to access and so good, they become everyone’s go-to glass of wine.
BOXT ends the nightly “to-open-or-not-to-open” debate, with our on-tap wines staying fresh for up to six weeks once opened, allowing you to pour exactly as much or as little as you like. One eco-friendly BOXT is $74 for members, or $89 a la carte. BOXT’s monthly membership-based subscription service includes shipping, a personal wine concierge, purchase discounts, access to limited releases and the flexibility to change profile, redirect shipment or pause or cancel at any time.
What was your favorite childhood memory?
Well, this is just one of my favorite childhood memories and it seems appropriate to tell it here since we’re talking about my startup that sells wine. I was one of five kids and we traveled a lot as a family because my dad worked for Marriott. When I was about seven, we moved to Barbados when my dad took over the GM role for Sam Lord’s Castle. The resort sat on a gorgeous, secluded bay, the perfect place to be a kid. The hotel staff would put together beach Olympics for the guests – and since we were all living in the hotel until our new house was ready, we joined in. We loved the beach Olympics and we were really good at them. We won prizes all the time, but we never knew what to do with them. We called them our trophies, stuffed them in the closet and went back out to the beach to play. One day, about five months in, we were all getting ready for school and we were late, so there was a big commotion, all of us getting in each other’s way, and my dad comes in to help us get it together. The closet is wide open, our clothes are everywhere and he sees all our trophies. He stops us and just stares at the closet, then stares at us and says, “What are you doing with 40 bottles of rum in your closet?” We all shrugged, “Those are our trophies, Dad! From winning all the beach olympics, you know? We don’t know what they are, but we didn’t want to just throw them away, they look cool! So we’re storing them in the closet.” He looked at us, looked at the rum and started laughing. Remember, this was the early 80s on a small Caribbean island. We never drank any, we really had no clue what rum was, but we loved getting them. Maybe winning those pretty bottles was a seed planted in my head way back when, and 40 years later, it sprouted into the idea for making BOXT gorgeous, simple and something people look forward to receiving every single time.
Pricing:
- Á LA CARTE $89 per BOXT. Same as $22.25 per bottle. One BOXT = 4 bottles.
- ONE BOTTLE SUBSCRIPTION $74 per month. Same as $18.50 per bottle. One BOXT = 4 bottles.
- TWO OR MORE BOTTLES SUBSCRIPTION $70 per BOXT monthly. Same as $17.50 per bottle. One BOXT = 4 bottles.
Contact Info:
- Email: hello@drinkboxt.com
- Website: www.drinkboxt.com
- Instagram: @drinkboxt
Image Credits:
Personal Photo credit: Romina Olson Additional Photos credit: Paige Newton
