HOW SHE BROKE THROUGH
FEATURING MELANIE MASARIN
By Grace Cook
6 Minute Read
Melanie Masarin, photographed by Amanda Charchian
It took courage to go sober. It took even more courage to turn sobriety into a $50 million global brand called Ghia.
The latest interview in our business series, How She Broke Through, is with Melanie Masarin. She grew up in Lyon, France, and now resides in New York. In 2020, she founded Ghia, a non-alcoholic aperitif brand which derives its name from Italian car designer Giacinto Ghia. Pronounceable in many languages, Ghia is designed to sound fun and positive. She is 34.
Melanie Masarin is in the midst of the busiest month for her company on record. When we speak on Zoom, it’s early January and Masarin is still in Paris for the holidays; the day prior, she had been on her laptop until 3 a.m. with her team in New York, as they mobilized on eight enormous orders for Ghia. “There is a lot of demand,” says Masarin, who came up with the idea for a non-alcoholic aperitif in 2018, which was then a non-existent market. “Dry January as a movement just keeps growing.” So do Ghia’s sales.
Masarin, a former head of retail and offline experiences at Glossier, didn’t intend to “go sober”. And she certainly didn’t intend for sobriety to shape her career. (She started out as an analyst in investment banking at Goldman Sachs, and now describes herself as sober “with a lower case s.”) Few could have predicted that her wish for an alcohol-free drink would collide so cosmically with the rising global awareness that health equates to wealth. Since 2020, fitness has become a cultural phenomenon impacting our travel, leisure and spending habits. This shift paved the way for sobriety and sober curiosity to explode. The timing is so coincidental, it seems almost pre-destined.
Of course, it wasn’t. To pioneer a new drinks category required Masarin’s unbelievable tenacity and determination. Ghia—a tart, “unapologetically bitter” aperitif in a design-led bottle that evokes post-modern Italian art and design—has experienced astronomical success. Sold for $38 a bottle, in 2024, the company was valued at $50 million. Ghia’s original concoction is made using white grape juice, yuzu juice, and extracts including gentian root. Masarin gave sobriety the elegance it had always lacked; typically, alcohol-free options in a restaurant or a bar went no further than Coca-Cola. More than that, she turned alcohol-free into something that was aspirational. Ghia became an in-the-know signal, telegraphing someone's taste level and commitment to their well-being. “Around 90 percent of Ghia’s customers identify as drinkers,” says Masarin, who is an outlier of women founders in the male-dominated alcohol and beverage industry. “Ghia offers them moderation.”
“Ghia became the transitory drink that shields you from peer pressure if you’re in the exploration phase of sober-curiosity.”
But how does a young woman without any knowledge of a sector create a best-selling brand? For a start, catering to herself as a primary customer—the ultimate conviction. In 2017, she was in her mid-twenties in a high-stakes and demanding role at Glossier. “There were a lot of young women building something that everyone was watching; it was special,” she says. “I was managing 150 people and on two or three flights a week, overseeing the LA and New York stores.” She wound up on Forbes’ 30 under 30 list for retail and e-commerce. “I needed to be fresh all the time. It just didn’t make sense for me to drink.” The role was “exhilarating” but highly stressful. By the time she left in at the end of 2018, she was burnt out.
Without a full-time role to distract her, Masarin started hosting dinner parties, and simultaneously realized how much better she felt for staying sober. But something was missing. “I felt left out of my own experiences because I wasn’t having a drink,” she says. “That’s when it really clicked that there was a gap.” Inspired by Mediterranean bitter aperitifs and drinks like Campari and Martini Blanc, Masarin set out to create a drink that was “an experience” of its own accord. “I didn't want to create a spirit where you have to do the work to turn it into a drink.”
Inspired, she raised $900,000 from within her network to kickstart the brand. Then, she set out to find partners in production in America who were willing to experiment with a bottled drink in this format. It was more challenging than she envisaged. Not just because all of the factory partners were men, but because alcohol is what both preserves and sterilizes a drink. There were fruit juice makers and there were alcohol makers, and both had very different approaches to sanitization and packaging. She discovered there wasn’t a factory who could combine the elements to put an alcohol-free drink into a glass bottle with a stopper lid.
She learned she’d need to persuade them to do something they’d never done before. But she needed to get tactical. “There was no way that a girl with a French accent was going to get through to these guys,” she says. Rather than waste energy fighting the system, she hired strategically, bringing in Henry Ellis as chief operating officer and partner to run the internal operations. It became “very clear, very early on” that it would be advantageous, she says. The lesson? Delegating is often critical, and preserving your headspace is key.
Carolina Arantes/Courtesy
Going online and building a strong direct-to-customer sales channel in the first instance wasn’t in the business plan, but staying nimble and open-minded enabled Masarin to pivot. In its first year, Ghia made $2.5 million in sales, which were almost exclusively online. Quite a feat for a product based entirely upon taste. It helped that the brand’s imagery was catnip for Instagram. Ghia’s brightly colored, evocative shots conjured vacations in Italy and France, which, during a time when everyone was indoors, offered the notion of escape. People were also desperate for new experiences, and Ghia was definitely a new concept.
With a small team and a limited budget, Masarin used social media to her advantage. She employed guerrilla marketing tactics, directly DM-ing more than 450 chefs and store owners to ask if she could send them a bottle of Ghia. It worked. Soon, the brand became an if-you-know tipple that signalled someone was tapped into the zeitgeist. It was festooned on the tables of private parties and on the Instagram feeds of Americans with good taste. My first sighting of Ghia in the wild came in 2023, when I found it in the minibar at Palm Heights, the luxurious, design-led wellbeing hotel in the Grand Cayman, led by Gabriella Khalil. Now, its appeal is so mainstream, one of its biggest accounts is Whole Foods.
Today, Masarin is a 360-degree entrepreneur. In March, she’s releasing her first cookbook. Based on the European idea of healthy eating, in a way, it’s an accompaniment to Ghia—dinner ideas with good ingredients, based on wholesome experiences, and designed for sharing. She’s also experimenting with building out the lifestyle element of Ghia. Recently, she launched soccer-style jerseys, ceramic trays, and hair clips. Her taste level has become her signature. I can envisage her hosting a pop-up bar, or perhaps even a restaurant, to amplify the Ghia experience. In December, she held a pop-up corner store in Manhattan, where she created a holiday tree made from stacked Ghia cans.
Masarin thinks women entrepreneurs’ best asset is their unbelievable resilience, their creative vision and ability to get stuff done. But she doesn’t want to identify herself as a woman entrepreneur, in spite of her experience at Glossier during the peak #girlboss era. Masarin is simply an entrepreneur; her gender, she says, is not Ghia’s unique selling point. She did learn many things from the #girlboss, though. “Emily [Weiss] would always say, ‘We have to blow her mind.’ Customer service was so important to her. For me, it’s about surprising and delighting people. I want to retain every single customer.” To this end, additional products and content, such as Ghia’s online recipes, evolve the narrative.
Her potential demographic is only growing. “We get asked a lot about Ghia for post-run club events,” she says. “When I started Ghia, it was often the case that the only drink available was alcohol, and if you weren’t partaking, you were considered boring, so that’s real progress. Overall, every touch point in the world of wellness leads you to cutting down booze.” Her pioneering product not only enables people to justify their choices but is arguably changing social behavior for good.
Five years in and $ 50+ million later, what has she learned? “An extraordinary life comes with extraordinary sacrifices,” she says. “I work at least 12 hours a day. I still look at every customer service email that comes in. No one wants to tell you this, but it’s not easy being an entrepreneur.” She smiles. “I wouldn’t trade it for the world.”
The Tangible Takeaways: Masarin’s Professional 411
Personal intentions can become professionally advantageous: Masarin stopped drinking by accident, but realized it helped her stay on top of her game.
Your passions can become your profession: Masarin served herself as her primary customer.
Masarin discovered a white space. Never limit your potential by moving through spaces that already exist. Think about what spaces you could create for yourself.
Absorb as much knowledge as you can from your superiors: Masarin employs a similar ethos to Ghia that she learned from Emily Weiss.
Every role has the potential to impact your future career: skills and experience are assets no matter the industry or role.
She took key lessons from her time at Glossier and applied it to her business, despite being a different category. (Think: social media and marketing strategies; direct-to-customer experiences; customer-centric decision making; the role of branding and packaging; the importance of joy.)
She found obstacles being a woman in the spirits industry, but hired an ally to overcome immediate challenges rather than fight the system. Remember: not all battles are worth your energy.
The reality of entrepreneurship is it's a 24/7 vocation, and it’s important to be prepared for, and okay with that.
The Coffee Break Q&A
1. What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned since starting Ghia?
How you spend your days is how you spend your life. Building Ghia has taught me that work is life. It’s not something you rush through to get to the other side.
2. What’s your best piece of entrepreneurial advice?
There will be a lot of hurdles, and learning how to manage stress really matters. If something won’t affect the business long-term, or if it’s completely out of your control, try not to let it take over your nervous system. This is much easier said than done!
3. What personal goals do you have this year?
I want to reconnect with movement, especially dance. I did twelve years of ballet growing up, and I miss that feeling of being fully in my body.
4.How does movement help you do your job?
For me, movement is a way to shake energy out—good and bad. I never feel more grounded than when I dance, and everything feels lighter afterward. Beyond dance, I also just feel better when I move. I have really trained myself to welcome a workout as something good and nourishing for my body, not something I have to do to stay in shape. It's a treat!
