Founder Spotlight: Jennifer Ross (Swoon)
Meet Jennifer Ross:
Swoon is a collection of deliciously refreshing, zero-sugar beverages crafted for you to live your sweetest life, naturally. Swoon brings you high-quality lemonades and iced teas with a fresh twist—each monk fruit-sweetened sip creates a deliciously natural experience, so you can live a happier, healthier life with practically zero effort.
Startup Stage:
Seed
Location:
New York City, New York, USA
When did you launch the business?
2019
What led you to where you are today?
I was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes when I was six and I always knew that I wanted to help other diabetics. As I’ve gotten older I’ve realized how detrimental excess sugar consumption is for everyone, not just for type 1 diabetics, and the health complications it can cause. Swoon offers people a fun and delicious way to help reduce their sugar consumption, which can have such a positive impact on everyone’s health.
What do you wish you knew before embarking on your entrepreneurial journey?
You’ll never know what challenges are thrown your way. One of the best entrepreneurial traits to learn is to be nimble as inevitable unexpected curveballs will happen.
What is the most difficult decision you've had to make regarding your business so far?
There are difficult decisions all the time but right when Covid hit, we were supposed to launch a new product that was specifically for food service. We had spent about 2 years working on and kept delaying the launch. We ultimately had to decide if we should scrap it and walk away from all of the time, energy and money that went into it and pivot into something else completely - which is what we ended up doing. We decided to move away from our original product launch in May 2020 and ended up launching our lemonades and iced teas in August 2020 - which ended up being a big success!
What can you help the VEGPRENEUR community with?
The beverage space is an incredible competitive one - and one in which we’re proud to have become a national brand. We’ve learned a lot about retail expansion, especially with a focus on specialty dietary needs, akin to vegetarians and always happy to share what we’ve learned!
How can the VEGPRENEUR community help you?
We’re always excited to meet like minded founders.
Fun fact about you:
I met my co-founder, Cristina Ros Blankfein, in grad school as we were seated next to each other due to our last names (mine is Ross.)
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