Named after the historic year Mexican women were given the Right to Vote, the 1953 Tequila company keeps social justice at its core and empowers women at every level: from the Jaliscan Highlands agave farm that sources its ultra-premium Anejo Tequila, to the unionized Mexican distillery that makes it and beyond.
But, starting a premium liquor company was not necessarily in the career playbook for any of the 1953 Tequila company’s three founders.
Lindsey Davis Stover (’99, MPP ’02), a Baylor and Harvard Kennedy School graduate who once developed STEM programs for girls in Houston-area schools, served as U.S. Congressman Chet Edward’s chief of staff, where she worked for pay equity and better healthcare for veterans and was a senior advisor at the U.S. Dept of Veterans Affairs during the Obama Administration. In 2017, she ran for congress in Northern Virginia’s 10th district against Alison Kiehl Friedman, a former CEO of the International Corporate Accountability Roundtable and a social justice supply chain management expert.
“On the campaign trail, we were fierce competitors, but we also became good friends,” Davis Stover said. “We often joked, saying, ‘When this is over, let’s sit down and talk over a glass of tequila.’”
For years afterward, they met for breakfast every month. Before one meeting in 2021, Davis Stover happened to read a slew of articles about the men behind tequila brands and thought, “Why aren’t women doing this?”
That night, she stayed awake and wrote out a business plan.
“I knew Alison would be the one person who would tell me if I was crazy,” Davis Stover said.
When Davis Stover presented the plan to her friend, Friedman responded, “That’s my kind of crazy.”
Friedman brought in Shivam Malick Shah as a partner, another woman committed to solving social issues through business with a wide-ranging resume. Founder of Summit Advisors, a boutique advisory firm that specializes in strategy and innovation, Shah also founded and ran a pre-K to 12 school, served as a senior advisor in the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Innovation, and held multiple leadership roles on the start-up teams of two of the world’s largest philanthropies, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
“We all had the same vision,” Davis Stover said, noting that Friedman had already helped reform one of the world’s largest supply chains to protect workers. “Our goal was always to elevate women – to build a company with women leading at every single level — and to protect workers while creating an excellent premium product. We wanted to show it could be done.”
Not that it was easy.
“For two years, all we heard were no’s,” she said. “But we used the no’s to help us find our yeses.” It finally “all came together,” Stover notes, when they met Mexican distillery owner Adriana Lopez. “Adriana shared our vision of creating opportunities for women and treating workers fairly.”
Lopez’s distillery was unionized and offered employees fair wages and comprehensive healthcare. Traditionally, agave farms in Mexico are passed down from father to son. Lopez introduced the 1953 team to an agave farmer without sons who was planning to sell his farm. Why the introduction?
“The farmer had four daughters . . . this is probably my favorite part of our whole story,” Davis Stover adds. “These four women knew everything any four men could know about agave farming. They grew up on the farm and loved it. They knew how to grow it, the traditional production process, the business, everything, inside and out.” It never occurred to the father that his daughters could take over, Davis Stover said. “We told him if he passed his business to his daughters, we would guarantee the purchase of their agave.”
Chemical engineer Rocio Rodriguez, 1953’s master distiller, is another woman making inroads in the male-dominated field. Stover said Rodriguez is the genius behind the smooth taste of the premiere tequila and is so important to the brand that when she had a baby, the distillery built a nursery for her to use. The 1953 Anejo Tequila, made from 100 percent Blue Weber agave, contains no additives. Its distinctive flavor, with hints of caramel, vanilla, and maple (and, for some, chocolate and citrus notes), comes from being aged 15 months in American oak bourbon barrels that have been used to age bourbon whiskey.
“Rocio’s brilliance in the chemistry of distillery is unique. She has taught us how every ingredient, every part, every step matters for the good flavor we get, from the soil in the highlands where the agave is grown to how it is handled in the traditional harvesting, the roasting, the yeast, the water. She is so vital to the brand that we put her signature on every bottle,” Davis Stover said.
When it came to creating the bottle, the company’s commitment to female input and intuition led them to interview women at the end of the tequila supply chain: female bartenders.
“They told us that typically tequila bottles are short and fat,” Davis Stover said, “which makes them difficult to pour.”
1953’s tall, white bottle was designed to stand out on a bar with its pleated texture and smooth neck and to be easy to pour. As an added flourish, its copper stopper can be re-used.
The company launched its first offering online on October 17, 2023, the 70th anniversary of the day women got the right to vote in Mexico. Today, 1953’s Anejo Tequila is available in bars and restaurants in Arizona, Florida, New Jersey, and Texas, as well as in government stores in Virginia.
“We chose the name 1953 because we wanted to recognize and celebrate the power of women and what women accomplish when they come together and organize,” Davis Stover said. “That’s what we’re about from beginning to end. When we met with the four women who now grow the agave for 1953,” she continued, “we asked them why they would be willing to take this on. They told us there was a high school down the street from their farm and that they wanted every girl in that school to know that she could do whatever she wanted, even if she had never seen it done before.”
That desire resonates with the three partners behind 1953 to this day, Davis Stover said, as they hope sharing 1953’s story will inspire other women to disrupt old ways of doing things. “Our advice to women starting a business is to believe in the power of your ideas and never give up. Expect it to be hard. Expect to blaze your own trail.”
Stover said her grandfather taught her never to give up on herself. The youngest of ten, he grew up on a farm in Belle Meade. “He was brilliant and lived in the shadow of Baylor University but could never afford to go to college,” Davis Stover said, adding that all of his siblings dropped out of school to work on the farm. “My grandfather was the first to get a high school diploma because his high school principal would not let my grandfather drop out. If necessary, the principal would drive to Belle Meade to get my grandfather’s homework. That story has always stayed with me.
“To any woman with her own business – especially those working in male-dominated fields — I say the same: Never give up on yourself. Never give up on your ideas. You may get told ‘no’ a lot. Keep going until you get a ‘yes.’ And just know that you will get a yes.”
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Photography courtesy of 1953 Tequila
