(Seguin) — A pair of entrepreneurs from Seguin need your help as they race against the clock in their efforts to craft and launch the latest blend and bottle of organic Tequila named VICE.
2011 Seguin High School graduates Zacharee “Zach” Ramirez and Jay Torrez are hoping to reach their Kickstarter campaign goal of $7,500 by 10 p.m. this Wednesday.
As of late Monday, the pair along with a third business partner Jordan Simmons, were about $1,000 shy of meeting their mark.
The money raised will go to help support the trio’s initial investment to produce VICE Tequila.
Ramirez says the idea for VICE started just over a year ago. He says what began as only as an interest for the taste buds has now become a business venture — a business venture that also looks to tie in the bottle of spirits with the culture and celebrations of the city of San Antonio and surrounding area.
“I guess it originally started by all of us just kind of liking Tequila really in the beginning and then we started kind of expanding our taste a little bit just realizing that there is a lot of different varieties and different brands out there of Tequila and so once we started realizing that, there wasn’t a Tequila that was branded as a San Antonio product and as a hometown kind of product and so that’s when we realized the opportunity to do something like that and so, once we realized the opportunity, what we really did was looked at different Tequilas based out of Texas and this kind of reversed, engineered the whole process of how they did it and kind of put our own little tweak on it and that’s how we came up with our product,” said Ramirez.
Zack Ramirez, Jordan Simmons and Jay Torrez, left to right, want to put a bottle of their organic VICE Tequila into the hands of everyone this coming spring. This Wednesday is the deadline for their Kickstarter campaign. The young entrepreneurs are still hundreds of dollars shy of reaching their goal, all in hopes of moving forward with production. Courtesy photo.
Ramirez says coming up with a new blend of Tequila, however, wasn’t that simple. He says the group of budding entrepreneurs spent time touring the Tequila region of Jalisco, Mexico looking for that perfect product. Ramirez says VICE tequila is 100 percent organic created “from the native weber agave.” It will also be hand crafted in a distillery located in the small town of Amatitan. In fact, the agave plant, itself, is harvested, “by jimadores at prime ripeness and then roasted in a traditional clay oven. There are zero additives, artificial or natural, used in the production of VICE.”
“The main learning point that we kind of figured is that tequila just can’t be made anywhere. It has to be made in the tequila region of Jalisco, Mexico. The country of Mexico actually owns the rights to tequila because the agave has to be grown there in that region. It is very similar to what the country of France has for champagne. The same concept applies for tequila so that’s where it kind of all started out for us was a genuine appreciation for tequila itself,” said Ramirez.
As for the name, Ramirez says coming up with the right one was very important.
“So, the name VICE — originally we had wanted to call it VERSA which would be the Spanish word for versatility in a way because one, we wanted to showcase how versatile the spirit of tequila is. You can use it with a lot of different cocktails, a lot of different ways but then we started brainstorming a little bit more and realized that VERSA didn’t stand out as much. You have different companies that already use that name. So we started playing with the Vice Versa and then ‘Vice’ sounded like it had a great ring to it and we really liked that name and it’s a little bit non-traditional because a lot of tequila names are Spanish names and so we went the other way with that and just went with the more English name of VICE and it just sounds a lot better I think,” said Ramirez.
Up to this point, VICE has been self-funded. Ramirez says all they need now is this final small “financial push from the community” to help make their dream a reality.
“The Kickstarter platform, the actual company Kickstarter started that platform to help entrepreneurs and different start up individuals create projects that in the end would be meant to be shared with a lot of people and so, when we wanted to do Kickstarter, we actually found that we had to submit an application to Kickstarter kind of discussing what the project is and how we can share it with other people and so once we got approved, that’s how we chose Kickstarter because we want to share our product with all the different communities, Seguin community, San Antonio community and all of the surrounding areas and eventually, we are going to grow outward to kind of get everyone that San Antonio experience and that San Antonio area. Kickstarter’s whole vision is again to create product that can be shared with other people and they also have an all or nothing concept. So, if we don’t hit our goal, then we get none of the proceeds and that’s kind of designed to protect the company and the backer in that we are not creating false expectations like this is our goal. If we hit this, we are going to make VICE happen. It’s going to be on the shelves,” said Ramirez.
As for Wednesday’s deadline, Ramirez hopes everyone becomes a part of bringing this bottle to the shelf. He says the $7,500 goal is the amount required to import their first order of 720 bottles.
This includes things such as “production costs for the actual tequila juice, bottle production, cork top production, label printing and manufacturing, importing fees, storage fees and marketing costs.”
Those wishing to back the project may do so by clicking http://kck.st/2oNnFKe. Individuals, who simply believe in the project, can pledge without a reward or they can pledge based on various gift levels. Those gift levels include a VICE shot glass, a VICE Fiesta t-shirt or both.
If the trio reaches the Kickstarter goal, then the plan will be to officially introduce the bottle of tequila during San Antonio’s 2020 Fiesta celebration. Again, the deadline to pledge online is 10 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 30.