Alumni Series: Gabi Weiss
Gabi Weiss graduated from Duke in 2017, where she majored in visual media studies and cultural anthropology and was involved in FORM. After a few years in a traditional corporate role, she grew restless and started looking for more unconventional opportunities in the startup world. Last spring, she made the switch to the early-stage tequila startup JAJA (pronounced “haha”), founded by a group that includes the originator of FuckJerry, the chainsmokers and millennial internet sensations, Arielle and Brandon Charnas. In business development at JAJA, Gabi helps with everything from sales and market strategy, supply chain, to event management. We sat down with Gabi to discuss the realities of working at an explosively growing startup, what it takes to build a brand in the digital age, and JAJA’s irreverent advertising campaigns.
How did you end up as the fourth employee at a tequila startup?
Gabi: I have always been obsessed with human behavior, and so I’ve always been drawn to startups that seem to have capitalized on understanding a particular behavior, niche, or pattern in people that is ripe for change. So when I started to get restless in the corporate world, I started looking for positions at startups.
Since I'm an expert in nothing, that put me in an ideal position to be an early employee at a startup where I would be doing a bit of everything. I have a lot of soft skills and very few hard ones, but I'm happy to figure out how to open up a pop-up shop, take a course on disruptive strategy, or learn Excel.
There’s no formalized process for getting a job in the startup world, so I just started reaching out to a bunch of people who worked in venture or brand strategy for early-stage companies. One of the many people I contacted was Emmett Shine, the founder of Pattern Brands (Gin Lane at the time). I met him while interning at a fashion startup in New York my junior year. At the time, Gin Lane did brand strategy and entered small equity positions at superpower startups like Sweet Green, Harry's, Dollar Shave Club, Smile Direct, Hims, and more. I admired the company for its ability to understand millennials’ desires and find innovative ways to address those needs.
So I reached out to him and said something along the lines of, “Hi, can I work for you? Ultimately, if I can’t work for you, I’d really like to be you. So what do you think I should do in the interim?” As Gin Lane was transitioning their entire business model at the time, they weren’t in a position to hire, but he offered to put me in touch with people at some of the startups they had been involved with. Three weeks later I got an email that read something along the lines of, “How do you feel about tequila?”
We’ve seen the Charnas family repping JAJA on Instagram. Can you talk a little more about JAJA’s influencer strategy?
Gabi: JAJA doesn’t exactly subscribe to the traditional paid influencer model. At JAJA, we have partners in the business that are influencers, brand geniuses, and social media gurus. As a small company, if you want to feel a lot larger than you are, it’s super important to have partners and advisors in various industries that can help you grow. I likely couldn't pay influencers to do what many friends of the brand do for us as a year-old startup on a shoestring budget.
Through influencers, JAJA can connect with their brand and anyone who has a really strong personal loyalty to them. When their followers see them drinking JAJA, those people hopefully think, “Wow, this is something they're eating, something they're drinking, maybe I should try that.” Or at the very least, people are made aware that JAJA exists, which extends some legitimacy to the brand.
Part of my job is to think about how I can capitalize on that same personal interest in certain types of people who mean a lot to certain demographics. For example, I love the Bon Appetit editors, and therefore I'm gifting JAJA to the Bon Appetit editors because I know that's something that resonates with people in my circles. But it would also give JAJA a specific legitimacy in the food and beverage space if those people were to support us. Arielle Charnas drinking JAJA, on the other hand, gives us a cool factor to an entirely different subset of people.
We all seemingly spend a million hours a day on our phones, and when we swipe through our Instagram feeds, we take the time to dive a little deeper into something or someone. I’ve been told that once we see something seven or eight times, we naturalize it as something that should be in a specific space associated with a person whose life and lifestyle we might aspire towards.
What is a day in the life at JAJA like? What would surprise someone about your job?
It’s definitely quite varied… I get to do things like create a sales and marketing strategy for an explosively growing company and work with really, really smart people on how we want to thoughtfully target millennials and speak to people across 30 different territories. But at the same time, I could also be doing something like running to Midtown to get dry ice for a popsicle collaboration or making mailers with vintage rubber stamps. So at times, it feels like my role is somewhere between an executive and an intern.
What has been a highlight of working at JAJA?
Being able to be a part of the conversations on the “Shot on an iPhone” ad campaign was definitely a highlight. I also love it when people send me pictures of the ad or a bottle of JAJA in the venues that I’ve personally sold it into. For context, we did a series of something called “Wild Postings” in downtown Manhattan, which are a subversion of the Apple “Shot On an iPhone” campaign. The team thought it would be funny to make an ad showing a sketch depiction of a literal shot of JAJA on a literal iPhone, accompanied by fake G-Chat commentary. What we had hoped to do with this campaign was to capture the ecosystem of an advertising agency in one sketchy snapshot and put it directly where those people are living and working. The posters themselves are a riff on a historically subversive medium. Our team took the idea of these crazy band posters or tags that come out of a tradition of graffiti and punk and have turned them into branding posters. So we took this subversive medium that resonates with the mid-level creative thought worker and spoke directly to them in the weird office humor they use every day. Like, “Oh my God, wouldn't it be so funny if we just threw it all away and just drew a bottle and pasted some stuff on it and called it a day?”
What’s your dream project?
We just launched an Anejo this October, which is a premium aged tequila, and I’m dying to run this campaign of power women drinking brown liquor. Brown liquor, like scotch and whiskey, has traditionally been associated with men. The idea that brown liquor is for men has become an incredibly interesting and pervasive cultural narrative, so what if you, very quietly, without any pomp, just started continually messaging that brown liquor is for women. No one's ever opened up that conversation before. And that's actually a really fresh narrative. So I would love to run a campaign featuring powerful women like Misty Copeland or Whitney Wolfe Herd, the founder of Bumble.
Men have been messaging positions of power, Mad Men drinking style, forever. And so it is a very subtle, thoughtful flex to change that script and say, you know what? This, amongst everything else, is not just for men. And there’s ownership there. There's power in that imagery. There's agency for the woman in the photograph, in their consumption of something that has historically been coded as male. And this is something that you can do as a thoughtful startup because you're not bound to a legacy marketing plan. So this is an exciting passion project because I feel like we can use social media to make some kind of positive change, even if it is just women drinking.
So when are we going to se JAJA at Shooters?
As soon as I can get it into North Carolina!
