Berlin Kelly remembers reaching her breaking point. The founder of Proud Pour was hurrying from New York to Boston with 638 oyster shells in two bags slung over her shoulders. While running down the steps in Penn Station with only minutes to catch her train, the bags ripped open and shells flew everywhere.
On the verge of tears, Kelly recalls thinking: “It’s too hard. I can’t do this.”
Within the next 10 days, Brian Thurber—who has a legal and environmental studies background, as well as a penchant for coding—went from Kelly’s advisor to her full-time business partner and co-CEO.
“It was just kind of amazing how the universe was like, ‘You need help?’” says Kelly, who holds business management and accounting degrees from the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business.
Based out of WeWork Williamsburg, Proud Pour is a company that pairs alcoholic beverages with important environmental causes, allowing consumers to say “cheers to change.” Founded in 2014, the company’s first product is a North Coast sauvignon blanc dubbed “The Oyster.” Every time you buy a bottle—which comes with a decorative oyster shell that contains a handwritten note by Kelly—100 oysters are restored to local waters. To date, Proud Pour has partnered with the Billion Oyster Project and other nonprofits to restore 2.8 million oysters, over 1 million of those being in New York Harbor.
Soon there will be a red wine that will help support bee colonies. Then what?
“A beer for beavers, and maybe a vodka for bats, and a whiskey for wolves—all these keystone species that really need attention,” says Kelly.
Kelly wants Proud Pour to be the first company to span wine, beer, and spirits, while also making all these beverages without chemical additives. Or, as she puts it: “Why don’t we make it a pure, really amazing, delicious, good-for-you beverage, and just use the ingredients that these keystone species interact with and really engage with these species?”
In 2012, Kelly got involved with the New York City Homebrewers Guild and learned how to make beer, wine, cider, and kombucha.
“I had been working in real estate development for a multinational company,” says Kelly. “I just wanted to do something that would make a difference in a positive way on the world. That’s always been my goal, and I realized very quickly that that wasn’t happening.”
Kelly had her sights set on the alcohol industry, but didn’t want to “create just another product,” she explains. “We have plenty of products out there.”
Instead, she wanted to drink to “something more interesting, rather than this-is-just-a-drink. Like why isn’t there a Toms shoes of the alcohol industry?” she asks while wearing black Toms.
After Googling “oyster problems” and “environmental problems,” she discovered the startling information she needed to form a business.
“We’ve lost like 85 percent of our world’s oyster reefs,” Kelly says. “And New York used to have trillions of oysters. It was the hub, the headquarters, of oysters in the world, and it’s all gone. When it was here, it was key and essential to everyone’s lives—from jobs, to water, to local fish, to protection from flooding, to just having a life by the sea that we don’t have.”
With Proud Pour, the 30-year-old entrepreneur has truly discovered her means of making a difference. Not only has she found a fun and interesting way for consumers to help the environment, but she’s taking it one step further.
“Part of my thing with Toms shoes is it’s wonderful, but I also will never see these children—it’s only two pictures,” Kelly explains. “With what we’re doing, we have all these local projects where you can see your work. You can volunteer.”
Photos: Lauren Kallen