So now that the table’s set, you can get a feel for what those very early days of Juice Press were like for me. It was exciting, chaotic, and terrifying all at once. I was 41 years old. My active partner was Alain Palinsky. He walked into the store one day while I was still in construction. I was lonely and felt like I needed someone, so I offered him ten percent of the company for ten thousand dollars. He didn’t have the money, so we put the ten thousand on his credit card to pay for building supplies. Who could’ve guessed that two years later a new partner, Michael Karsch, would come in and buy out Alain’s position for 1.3 million.
The truth is, Alain and I were fighting like brothers. Eventually, I had to fire him because he was disrupting the business. He threatened to sue me, but instead went to my father, David, to see if he wanted to buy his shares, and my father did. If you read the earlier part of the story, you might remember that when I first asked my father to go into business with me, he said absolutely not. But after spending six or seven months watching the store take off, he changed his mind. By that time, there wasn’t any room for him, so he came up with the idea that we build him his own franchise.
He found a spot on Third Avenue and 62nd Street. It was a big move. Our first store’s rent was three thousand a month, the second was fifty five hundred, and my dad’s store was seventeen thousand. He didn’t care about being trendy. He wanted a powerful store in a prime corner that targeted the right demographic, and he was right. Building that store took about five months and was a challenge because it was in an old co-op building that made every permit a hassle. I built it by hand with the contractors, taking a break from running the downtown stores to make sure it came out right.
When it opened, it hit the ground running. We had just gotten a huge feature in the New York Times, in T Magazine, which I still say was the spark that blew the brand up. Here’s how it happened. About eight months in, we had only one store on East First Street. It was a crowded day when a woman in a business suit came in asking for me. I was busy and told her to sit and wait. She said she was from the New York Times, so I gave her a ginger shot. She said, “Wow that’s strong,” and I went back to work, ignoring her for fifteen minutes. Then she called me over and said, quietly but sharp, “I am from the New York fucking Times.” That woke me up.
I sat down with her and said let’s go for a walk. We went next door to an apartment I owned and talked. She said she wanted to write about the juice cleanse craze. I told her most of those pieces were fluff and didn’t get into the real experience. I said, “Why don’t we do an overhaul of your life. You do thirty days on juice, I’ll guide you and pay for everything.” She agreed. If she hadn’t, I might never have gotten that article. She did the cleanse, lost sixteen pounds, dumped her boyfriend, stopped drinking, and said it changed her life. We agreed not to do any other press while she worked on it, which took three months.
During that time we opened our second store on East Tenth and Avenue A, a narrow spot we took out of desperation because our first store was too small to handle production. It was only okay business wise, maybe three thousand a day, but it kept us alive. Then the article came out. When subscribers got it that Saturday, our daily sales jumped from about twenty five hundred to eight thousand. On Sunday, when it hit print, we did twelve thousand. The sales never dropped below eight thousand after that.
The store was only 250 square feet, so production was a nightmare. We laid out juice cleanse orders on index cards at a coffee shop because we had no software, no system, no staff trained for it. People quit from burnout. Success hurts sometimes.
Around that same time, my father’s franchise was opening. The timing was perfect. The Times article had primed that neighborhood, and Juice Press was becoming a cult. In his first year, his store did 3.2 million in sales and grew to 4.2 million the next. He was making over twenty percent profit, sometimes twenty five. It was unreal for food retail.
When a brand gets hot, everyone wants in. Investors and opportunists started coming out of the woodwork. That was the beginning of the next chapter.
Right around the time all the press started hitting and my dad’s franchise store was opening, things got wild. I had five or six different investors chasing me like I was the prettiest girl at the prom. Everyone wanted a piece of Juice Press. I wasn’t new to that kind of attention. My background was in high end sales, art, and antiques, so I knew how to read people and manage those conversations.
One of the first groups I met was led by a guy named Marvin Azrak, a wealthy Syrian Jew who had sold his toy company. He and his friends loved the business and they knew my father, so they wanted in. The only problem was they didn’t want to pay anything close to what it was worth. They offered peanuts for half the business and half the control. I teased them about it and we never made a deal.
My father, meanwhile, was off chasing some pseudo millionaire who was talking about taking Juice Press global. I had to remind him he was just a franchise holder and didn’t have that kind of authority. I told him to keep the guy warm just in case, but not to get lost in fantasy.
Then there was Kenny Dichter. Kenny was a real entrepreneur, cofounder of Marquis Jet and a bunch of other things. He was obsessed with Juice Press and I liked him, mostly because he ran a private aviation company and that sounded sexy. I was naive but I was a hustler.
The first time we met, I went to his temporary office on Broadway. There were a bunch of corporate guys in suits sitting around a boardroom table, and Kenny was the only one in a tracksuit. I knew right away he was the boss. He made me wait half an hour while he finished his meeting. I got bored, stood up, and said, “Gentlemen, I have to go.” Kenny jumped up and chased me down the hall. I told him, “If you wanted to meet, then meet. My time is valuable too.” He smiled, brought me into his office, asked my shoe size, and handed me a brand new pair of rainbow New Balance sneakers from a wall full of boxes. That was his style.
A month later he called and said he was coming by the store with Mark Teixeira from the Yankees. They showed up with a few suits, and because the first store was so small, we had to stand outside for photos. Nothing came of that meeting, but a few days later Kenny called again and said, “What are you doing right now? Get to Teterboro Airport, we’re going to Florida.”
So I dropped everything. I was in a T shirt and jeans, but the next thing I knew I was flying 37,000 feet in the air on a Gulfstream G4 with Kenny Dichter, doing 700 miles an hour. We were just talking nonsense. I said, “Kenny, let’s stop wasting time. Let’s write a deal on a napkin.” We did. We both signed it. I said, “Give me a deposit,” and he emptied his pockets. Cash and coins. I pocketed it as a down payment. Then I told him he’d owe me a 25,000 dollar nonrefundable deposit next week if he wanted to move forward. He laughed and agreed.
The following Monday, I went to his office, held out my hand, and said, “Where’s my check?” He wrote me a personal check for 25,000 dollars. He joked, “If we don’t do a deal, can I get 25,000 dollars worth of juice?” I said yes. That was my specialty, closing and getting paid.
Kenny and Mark Teixeira eventually put money into the company, which got us out of debt and helped build store number four. My dad’s store, number three, was already open and killing it. Store four was on Mott Street. Rent was around ten thousand a month for about 350 square feet in a roach infested building. It was rough, but that’s another story.
Kenny’s next move was to help raise six million dollars for expansion. He started sending me around to meet investors. I had to wear a suit and tie twice a week and pitch people in boardrooms. One meeting was with his childhood friend, Michael Karsch, a hedge fund guy with two full floors on 59th Street. The place was silent, serious, and intimidating. No music, no artwork, just tension. Michael was tall, gray haired, clean cut, and dead serious. I kind of liked that.
He asked me questions about the business. I don’t remember what they were. We shook hands and left. A few days later, he invited me to speak at a founders meeting at his firm. Coach K from Duke University opened the talk, and then it was my turn. I sat there talking about Juice Press like I knew what I was doing. Michael raised his hand and asked how I felt about plastic bottles. I thought fast and said, “I love plastic. It’s easy and it’s cheap.” Wrong answer, but I didn’t know it yet.
Michael loved the business anyway. When Alain was trying to sell his stake to my father, I asked Michael to buy it instead, and he did. That made him a major shareholder before we even raised the six million.
The next big meeting Kenny sent me to was at Ken Langone’s office on Park Avenue. I didn’t do my homework and had no idea who he was, the cofounder of Home Depot, a billionaire, and a philanthropist. I showed up in a suit and tie, sat in a big boardroom, and waited with two other people getting ready to pitch their companies. I had no clue I was sitting in front of one of the most powerful investors in America.