Tequila has been the fastest-growing spirits category in the United States for much of the past decade, and that growth has drawn in an unusually wide range of tequila brands: multi-generational family distilleries, celebrity-backed entrants, founder-led startups solving a specific consumer problem, and multi-brand holding companies built for scale from day one. Getting a foothold still requires navigating the same three-tier distribution system and state-by-state compliance requirements that every other spirits category contends with, along with a regulatory landscape now shifting around additive claims, tariffs, and agave supply.
Tequila’s rapid rise means brands are entering at wildly different starting points and with wildly different resources. The five brands below took very different routes to where they are today, and each has something to teach about what it actually takes. Park Street Imports is the back-office and importing solution for alcoholic beverage brands entering the U.S. market.
Teremana Tequila: Building a Global Brand Without Skipping the Fundamentals
Teremana launched in March 2020, days into the onset of the pandemic, timing that conventional wisdom said should have delayed the brand. Founded by Dwayne Johnson alongside industry veterans Ken Austin and Jenna Fagnan, the brand had spent years preparing before that launch date, and the team decided the groundwork already in place was worth the risk of moving forward despite the uncertainty.
That groundwork included a distillery built in partnership with the Lopez family in Jalisco that produces Teremana exclusively, an unusual structure in a category where fewer than 200 tequila distilleries supply more than 3,000 brands. Johnson worked through 113 distillations before settling on the final profile, insisting on smaller ovens than the industry standard and copper pot stills only. The bet paid off quickly. The brand sold three times its projected first year volume and reached nearly 900,000 cases by the end of 2021.
Richard Black joined as CEO in September 2022 to help manage that momentum. His priorities included building out a team capable of supporting continued scale, expanding capacity through a distillery build-out to the same exacting specifications as the original, and pushing into international markets including the UK, Australia, the UAE, and Germany, with roughly ten more countries planned for the following year. By 2024, Teremana had become the fastest premium spirits brand in US history to reach one million cases sold in twelve months.
On the domestic side, Black pointed to a handful of specific, unglamorous decisions as real growth drivers once he came on board: adding a 1.75 liter size the brand had been missing, a format that represents roughly 10 percent of the tequila category on its own, building out longer lead time national account relationships, and investing in bartender education so on premise gatekeepers understood the production story well enough to sell it themselves.
On the supply side, the team worked to diversify its agave sourcing by contracting directly with multi-generational farmers years in advance, a necessary hedge in a category where agave takes six to eight years to mature and where the brand had already seen both a shortage and, more recently, a surplus swing in raw material prices.
Distribution has run through a single strategic partnership with Jägermeister from the beginning, a family-owned company the founders felt matched Teremana’s values and offered an existing global sales network without the risk of the brand getting lost inside a larger portfolio.
Black has framed authenticity as the throughline behind the brand’s growth, breaking it into three deliberate pillars: a purpose beyond the product itself, consumer-first decision-making even when it complicates the route to market, and community engagement that starts small and expands rather than being imposed top-down. In practice, that meant a deliberately narrow lineup of just three core expressions, each a different type of tequila defined mainly by aging time (Blanco, Reposado, and Añejo). The brand also made an unusual choice to list ingredients on the back label, alongside a personal touch etched into the packaging: the word “Tijassy” stamped on the bottom of every bottle, drawn from the first two letters of Johnson’s three daughters’ names. Johnson himself took a hands-on role, including personal outreach to distributors and buyers and a rolling food truck program that fed first responders early in the pandemic.
Tequila Fortaleza: A Slow, Deliberate Return to a Family Legacy
Guillermo Sauza’s family has been making tequila since 1873, when his great-great-grandfather Cenobio Sauza built one of the earliest tequila export businesses in the country and is often credited as the first to send tequila north to the United States by wagon. The Sauza name became one of the largest tequila brands in Mexico for generations, growing to roughly 2.5 million cases a year under Guillermo’s grandfather before it was sold to an outside investor group in the 1970s. The sale came with a specific structural lesson attached: Guillermo’s grandfather retained a minority stake without an anti-dilution clause, and that stake was gradually diluted down from 30 percent to roughly 16 percent over the following decades as the new owners loaded the company with outside expenses. Guillermo, then in his twenties and building a career in aerospace and IT in the United States, has pointed to that experience directly when advising other founders considering a partial sale: negotiate protection against dilution before signing, not after.
Guillermo began quietly restoring one of the family’s old, shuttered distilleries in 2000, working with a former employee who had operated it decades earlier, and produced Tequila Fortaleza‘s first distillation in 2002, importing into the United States a few years later. The brand deliberately rejected the industrial roller mill process that had come to dominate the category, using a tahona stone mill and copper pot stills with a slower fermentation, a method that at the time only a small handful of distilleries in Mexico still used at all, and one Fortaleza has run around the clock ever since. That commitment to visible, verifiable production became the brand’s core differentiator once the craft tequila movement caught on years later, with the distillery kept open to tours precisely so buyers and consumers could see the process for themselves.
The route to market took time to figure out, and not without cost. Fortaleza’s first importer went bankrupt, costing the brand lost inventory before it found Park Street to handle importation and state-level compliance. Guillermo has also cautioned other founders against picking an importer based purely on the distributor relationships they claim to have, noting that many importers overstate how much true reach they can deliver relative to what they charge.
Early growth ran almost entirely through on-premise relationships, at points as much as 80 percent of sales, with distributors like Wine Warehouse in California introducing the brand to a sales force of roughly 200 people. Guillermo’s son, Billy Erickson, joined full-time in 2013 and has since pointed to hiring a dedicated, full-time salesperson as one of the earliest high-value decisions the brand made, since it freed his father to focus on the distillery and production side rather than splitting attention across both.
Billy expanded the brand from four states in 2011 to roughly 30 states and 20 countries today, while keeping wholesale pricing largely unchanged for nearly two decades even as demand has pushed some retail shelf prices well above suggested levels.
He has also credited early trade show strategy as an underrated growth lever, describing how standing next to other small brands at events like WSWA led to informal distributor introductions swapped between companies who each had gaps the other could fill.
That patience has extended to ownership. Fortaleza has turned down multiple acquisition approaches over the years, choosing to remain family-run, with Billy’s own children now representing a potential fourth generation. Both Guillermo and Billy point to the same lesson for other brands entering the market: it is easier to build genuine momentum in one or two states before expanding than to spread thin across many at once, since the harder problem is not opening new markets but getting product to actually move once it arrives.
The brand has also had to navigate a shifting regulatory and security landscape more recently. Mexico’s tequila regulator, the CRT, moved to restrict “additive-free” label claims industry-wide even as several major brands face lawsuits over agave content, and Fortaleza has had three trucks hijacked through freight broker fraud schemes over the past two years, recovering cargo tied to one incident through detective work that led to an arrest, while the other two shipments were never found.
Billy’s advice to other brand owners facing similar exposure is straightforward: confirm freight and insurance contracts in advance, and put a tracker on every shipment. Despite the disruptions, the company is currently building a new bottling line and an expanded distillery built to match its existing process exactly, aimed at closing the gap between demand and the limited volume its traditional methods can produce.
21 Seeds: Designing Around an Underserved Consumer First
Kat Hantas spent eight years making infused tequila in her own kitchen before she considered turning it into a business. A stay-at-home mother with no background in alcohol, she had switched from wine to tequila for health reasons but disliked the taste of blanco on its own, so she began infusing it with fruit to create something she wanted to drink regularly. Friends kept asking for bottles of their own, and Hantas began noticing a pattern: the same women who once ordered wine at dinner were now asking for tequila with club soda, a lighter, lower-calorie alternative that nobody in the category was actively marketing to them.
She launched 21 Seeds in 2019 with her sister Nicole, a former startup CFO, and friend Sarika, who had built and sold a consumer packaged goods company. None of the three had spirits industry experience, so they hired an alcohol attorney early to understand the regulatory basics of a category with a legal designation of origin, and eventually partnered with a female-owned, female-staffed distillery in Mexico, one of only three in the country at the time.
Before committing capital, the founders also built out a specific financial model: how much to raise, how long that money needed to last, and what case volume and distribution milestones it needed to fund along the way, a discipline Hantas has said made conversations with early investors far more credible than an arbitrary funding target would have. Park Street came on as their distribution partner around the same time the team began meeting with retail buyers directly.
Hantas has described the brand’s early strategy as four sequential decisions: define exactly who the consumer is, figure out where to find her, figure out where she can buy the product, and prove the concept in a small footprint before expanding. That last principle shaped a specific spending choice once the brand started to scale: rather than build a large field sales team split across on-premise and general market accounts, the founders put the bulk of their limited budget into a single senior hire experienced in chain retail, betting that the biggest return would come from unlocking the grocery and chain channel where their target consumer already shopped.
Their first purchase order came from BevMo, followed by a broader rollout into Whole Foods, Target, Walmart, and regional grocery chains, aided by a national distribution deal with Southern Glazer’s that eventually put the brand into 47 states.
The company’s consumers rebuy roughly every two months, well ahead of typical spirits purchase cycles, a pattern Hantas attributes to how the product performs in a simple, repeatable spritz. Diageo’s Distill Ventures approached the brand almost immediately after launch, but 21 Seeds waited until it had built out its national chain footprint and proven consumer loyalty before engaging seriously, eventually completing an acquisition once both sides were confident the brand’s core community would stay intact under new ownership.
Lobos 1707: A Celebrity Backed Brand Built Around an Unusual Production Detail
Diego Osorio, an actor with a 300-year family distilling history in Spain, started Lobos 1707 as a side project with no plan to sell it commercially. The idea began with a family history detail: Osorio discovered that a great-great-grandfather with his same name had traveled to Mexico generations earlier carrying Spanish sherry barrels, refilling them with agave spirit for the return trip, and noticing the barrels changed the liquid’s taste.
Osorio set out to recreate that effect deliberately, sourcing Pedro Ximénez sherry barrels from Spain and working with a tequila distiller in Jalisco alongside his own family’s Spanish master distiller to finish the spirit using a Solera aging system, the layered barrel method traditionally used for sherry and brandy and, by Osorio’s account, not previously applied to tequila this way.
One deliberate choice shaped the whole structure of the business before it had a name: rather than route the project through his family’s existing Spanish distilling company, Osorio chose to build Lobos as a fully independent brand. Keeping it separate meant giving up easy access to his family’s established production infrastructure, but it also meant retaining full creative and equity control over a project he still considered a side venture at the time, a tradeoff he has said he’d make again. The barrel sourcing itself later became a small secondary business line of its own, since Lobos’s used Pedro Ximénez barrels retain value and are now sold onward to bourbon and whiskey producers looking to finish their own products in them.
The brand’s trajectory changed when Osorio brought on Dia Simms as CEO, previously president of Combs Enterprises, where she helped build Cîroc and DeLeón Tequila. Their first meeting reportedly involved Osorio pouring an unlabeled sample for Simms in a hotel lobby to prove the liquid before discussing anything else. Around the same time, LeBron James became an investor after tasting the product himself, joined by a group that includes Maverick Carter, Rich Paul, Anthony Davis, Draymond Green, and Jimmy Iovine. The company has described James’s involvement as active rather than symbolic, including personal outreach to distributors and promotion through his own network, while Osorio and Simms continue to run brand and business operations day to day.
Park Street served as the brand’s importer from its earliest days, including during the label approval process before Lobos had settled on a commercial launch plan at all. The brand launched with four expressions: a Joven, Reposado, Mezcal, and Extra Añejo, priced from roughly $44 to $150, positioned to make the Solera finishing technique accessible rather than reserved for top-tier pricing alone. Identity and packaging lean heavily on the Lobos, or wolves, name taken from the Osorio family crest, built around a pack-based ethos the brand carried into a short film built around its founding story ahead of its initial launch markets in Mexico, New York, California, and Florida.
Tequila Komos: A Portfolio Strategy Built Around Occasion, Not Just Liquid
Richard Betts arrived at agave spirits by way of wine. After building and selling two wine labels, Betts & Scholl and Scarpetta, both funded initially on a self-described “toe in the water” model where early profit was reinvested rather than paid out so the business could grow without outside financing pressure, he co-founded Sombra Mezcal in 2005 and later Astral Tequila, both of which he eventually sold to Diageo. In 2017, he partnered with Joe Marchese to found Casa Komos Beverage Group, a holding company built on the observation that most great tequila was being made and marketed in a way that didn’t match how people actually drink it, more aligned with sipping whiskey than with the social occasions tequila is typically consumed in.
CKBG operates as a shared services structure, with each brand incorporated separately so it can make its own decisions on production and route to market while drawing on common back office functions like accounting, legal, and sales support. Betts has described the group’s filter for which projects get greenlit as sitting at “the intersection of enthusiasm and opportunity,” a deliberate screen meant to keep the portfolio from expanding into categories the founders aren’t personally invested in just because a market gap exists.
Tequila Komos, the group’s ultra-luxury tequila priced above $100, was still in its second year of business at the time Betts discussed it publicly, already described as the fastest-growing brand in its price tier. The broader portfolio has since expanded to include Superbird, a canned tequila cocktail line, and additional projects outside spirits entirely, including a plant-based aperitivo brand and a small-batch hot sauce.
The group’s early distribution choices illustrate how differently channel decisions can play out even within a single company. Superbird initially launched through beer distribution networks on the assumption that canned products belonged there, but the team found that beer distributors were structured around a small number of annual chain reset windows and were juggling hundreds of competing brand priorities, making it difficult for a new entrant to get attention. Komos and Superbird were both moved to traditional wine and spirits distribution instead, where Betts said enthusiasm for the products proved far stronger.
For Komos specifically, the group later partnered with Gallo, gaining access to a sales force of roughly 1,100 people while retaining control over brand direction, a structure Betts described as allowing CKBG to keep what matters most about the brand while leveraging distribution scale it could not build on its own. Betts has been candid that moving from wine to spirits production was a relatively smooth transition, but that sales and distribution inside the three-tier system was the far steeper learning curve, one he said he still learns something new about after nearly two decades in spirits.
What These Five Brands Have in Common
The entry strategies vary widely across these five brands, but a few themes hold across all of them.
None of them scaled distribution ahead of the liquid. Teremana ran through 113 distillations and built an exclusive distillery before its first case shipped. Fortaleza rejected industrialized production entirely to protect a process that took decades to prove out. 21 Seeds spent eight years refining a recipe at home before raising a dollar. Lobos 1707 spent months on Solera trials before settling on a final product. Komos was built around the idea that liquid and occasion need to match before a brand can find real traction. In every case, the production decision came first, and the go-to-market strategy was built around what that liquid could actually support.
None of these brands treated distribution as a single, solved problem either. Fortaleza built momentum through on-premise relationships years before chasing national scale. 21 Seeds bet its early budget on a single chain-focused hire rather than a broad sales team. Komos moved Superbird out of beer distribution once it became clear the channel didn’t fit, and doubled down on wine and spirits distribution instead. Teremana leaned on one strategic partner, Jägermeister, rather than building an internal sales force from scratch. The right structure depended on what stage each brand was at and what resources it actually had access to, not on what looked most prestigious on paper.
And nearly every brand ran into a regulatory or operational surprise that hadn’t been part of the original plan. Fortaleza has had to adjust to new CRT additive-free restrictions and has lost shipments to freight fraud. Teremana is actively managing agave supply cycles that run six to eight years from planting to harvest. 21 Seeds needed specialized legal counsel just to understand what it could legally claim on a label. Lobos 1707 was still working through label approval before it had settled on a commercial launch plan. Tequila’s growth has made it one of the more forgiving categories to enter, but it hasn’t made the regulatory and logistical layer of the U.S. market any simpler.