From Texas to Tokyo: Female Hispanic-owned Island Getaway Rum ready to conquer the world

Stephanie Houston can trace her ancestry through sugarcane.

She can look at the ingredient, that she uses to make rum in Dripping Springs, and remember her indigenous Guanches forefathers from the Canary Islands, which served as a sugarcane gold mine in the 1400s. The islands are located off the upper western coast of Africa near Morocco, but they are a Spanish community.

It was a connection Houston hadn't expected to find when she entered the rum industry. But now, with her brand Island Getaway Rum growing and expanding, she feels her career is "an unspoken legacy ... in (her) DNA."

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The road to rum

Before Island Getaway Rum, Houston was a University of Texas Austin graduate with an African history degree. She grew up in Dallas and returned there after school, and she worked a few different jobs before moving back to Austin. There, she reconnected with a friend who had a winery in the Texas Hill Country.

Houston helped her friend set up his winery, and he mentioned his desire to enter the world of rum.

"It was one of those moments where the hair on your arms stand up and you're just like, 'This is it,'" Houston said. "'This is what I'm supposed to be doing next.'"

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Over the next few months, Houston pestered her friend by asking if it was finally "rum time," and it's a phrase she said she continues to use. When that time finally came, Houston worked as a co-owner of HYE Rum in 2016 at a distillery in Hye. Operations then moved to Dripping Springs in 2021, and HYE Rum would become Island Getaway Rum.

"We chose the name that resonated most with me just as far as the vibe of the brand and then also the one that we think resonates the most with people who drink rum," Houston said. "Everyone that even thinks about going on an island vacation is probably going to end up with a frozen rum drink at some point."

Representation in the world of rum

Houston, who is a part of the Texas Distilled Spirits Association, said Island Getaway Rum is one of only two female Hispanic-owned rum distilleries in Texas. That's out of the association's number of registered distilleries, which Houston said numbers around 210 with only about 160 being active.

"Only a handful of those are women-owned distilleries, and if you drill that down even more, only a handful of them are minority women-owned distilleries, and then when you drill that down even more, you go, 'We've got two Hispanic-owned distilleries," Houston said.

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Island Getaway was also the first of the two female Hispanic-owned rum distilleries, making it the first to exist in the entire state. Such a title has come with struggle and a realization as to how few women work in the distilled spirits industry. For example, Houston said BIPOC distilleries make up not even 1% of the entire beverage market.

"I've been patronized a lot as a female entrepreneur just in general, but I didn't really realize how underrepresented but also how undercapitalized minority businesses are," Houston said. "What we've been trying to do is really bring more awareness to that, as well, but also try to lift up the other minority distilleries that are in the state."

Rum across regions

Island Getaway Rum is available in Specs, Total Wine and Party Stop stores in Austin, San Antonio, Dallas, Lubbock, Amarillo and more. But worldwide brand expansion is underway.

Recently, Houston took a trip to Vietnam to help establish Island Getaway sales there. She also said that Tokyo is serving as the brand's first export destination. Next, the rum is headed to Spain.

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But Houston isn't forgetting about Texas as the brand grows. In fact, she feels it's her Texas-born company's duty to spread across the state.

"We should be the No. 1 rum that people in Texas buy because they're supporting Texas employees and Texas everything," Houston said. "It's a lot of legwork. It's a lot of boots on the ground. But I really hope that we can start gaining some momentum even just as people start to see and hear and know the brand name."

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Female Hispanic-owned Island Getaway Rum ready to conquer Texas, world