Tatiana Birgisson still gets excited about the prospect of free pizza.
Sitting in her small square office in Durham, the twenty-six-year-old Duke graduate has recently returned from a luncheon hosted by American Underground, the downtown start-up incubator. She listened to some speakers and ate free food from a spread overflowing with rosemary potatoes, macaroni and cheese, and bruschetta. Her eyes light up as she tells me about the unexpected extravagance.
“It was the best catering I’ve ever had,” she says. The half-Icelandic, half-Venezuelan founder of the young energy drink company MATI brushes her dark hair from her eyes and flashes an assured smile. “I would have been good with pizza.”
Across the little room, a collection of bottles sits on a floating shelf. It’s the de facto timeline of her company’s three and a half years, from initial product mockup to the most recent iteration. The new ones are the same bottles found in Whole Foods and, come May, in four hundred Kroger stores across the mid-Atlantic region. A new distribution agreement with Anheuser-Busch means that Birgisson will soon deploy cases of her energizing tea to convenience stores, food truck rodeos, Publix, and Earth Fare. With their colorful branding and images of effervescent fruit, the bullet-shaped cans look like standard-issue energy drink vessels. But what’s inside could alter the entire industry.
What started in Birgisson’s dorm room took the top prize at last year’s Google Demo Day, where entrepreneurs pitch their concepts to top investors. She is using a $100,000 personal investment from AOL cofounder Steve Case to open a thirty-thousand-square-foot production facility in Clayton this month, where she will produce her semisweet tropical-, cherry-, and citrus-flavored sparkling teas. MATI is already the best-selling energy drink in Whole Foods’ southeast markets. With the new manufacturing facility, Birgisson plans to produce thirty thousand cans per month.
The timing could barely be better, as beverages are evolving to reflect a society more in tune with where ingredients come from and what they do. First, there were the attempted soda taxes in cities such as New York, Philadelphia, and San Francisco (which now requires warning labels on ads for sugary drinks). Coca-Cola acquired Honest Tea in 2011, and it became a $130 million division of the empire. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cites a 39 percent drop in added calories from soda since 2000. Boxed OJ is trading places with fresh-pressed kale juice, Diet Coke with coconut La Croix.
It’s here that Birgisson finds her sweet spot.
“I think MATI is well-timed, as younger people want to be able to work hard but not compromise by consuming unhealthy chemicals found in other energy drinks,” says Adam Klein, chief strategist at American Underground. He’s watched the company grow from within the walls of his organization. “People are drawn to MATI because it’s a classic David-versus-Goliath story. She’s taking on the big beverage brands that push unhealthy drinks and beating them with a superior product.”
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Birgisson began making tea in her Duke dorm room in 2012. She suffered from depression as a mechanical engineering student and found the drink to be the kick she needed to get out of bed and into class. Birgisson drank tea in high school, but she couldn’t make the transition to coffee without the “bad habit of adding seven packets of sugar.”
She started brewing caffeinated black tea and wondered if other students might buy it. Market research told her, though, that drinkers were looking for something with more punch. She thought she had the answer in yerbe mate, a plant with as much caffeine as coffee and which her friends often drank in Venezuela.
“It took just a few spoonfuls to discover yerba mate was not the solution. It was much too bitter and would require a lot of sugar,” she says. “I researched plants similar to yerba mate but without that bitterness. That’s how I discovered guayusa, yerba mate’s ‘cousin.’”
While Birgisson was experimenting with recipes, a university-sponsored entrepreneurship group called InCube recruited her. InCube provides mentees with the support to launch start-ups. Before Birgisson joined, the eighteen members were all men. Until the program had a woman, it wouldn’t receive funding from Melissa Bernstein, a former Duke entrepreneur. The peers who encouraged Birgisson to enlist failed to tell her that starting a business was an InCube requirement. They feared it would scare her away.
“There’s a gap between the number of female-led start-ups that are launched and the number that are funded,” says Lauren Whitehurst, cofounder of SoarTriangle, an entrepreneurship program that supports female innovators. She’s worked with Birgisson for the last two years. “Thirty percent of start-ups are female-led, but they get around five percent of the venture capital in this country.”
Despite the odds, Birgisson accepted the challenge.
“It was actually really fortuitous, because having something that I could build helped me get out of the funk that I was in,” Birgisson explains. “It’s really hard to motivate yourself to do schoolwork or the grind of day-to-day life when you have depression. I decided to turn this energizing tea into my business. The only motivation I found in life was in this little opportunity.”
These days, Birgisson shows no lingering signs of that former shadow. The experience has changed her, turning her into a budding young professional. She smiles frequently and speaks with practiced clarity, not succumbing to vocal fillers or pauses. It’s obvious that she’s practiced her diction, whether in the mirror, in the car, or during long exercises with her fiancé, Jake Stauch.
“We went through her Google pitch, line by line, night after night,” he confirms.
Birgisson’s dark hair is shoulder-length, with a slight wave, and her small frame belies her physical strength. When she’s not working, she and Stauch climb rocks, both at local indoor gyms and outside, in the mountains. Birgisson has the sort of ropey musculature that allows for the bold moves needed to move up lengthy vertical stretches.
I marvel as she swings through complicated rock routes with grace. She is quick to give me advice and cheer me on, patiently talking me through the process of switching feet and maintaining balance on slick nubbins of purple plastic. She does the same for strangers.
Birgisson first learned to love the outdoors during summers spent with her grandparents. Her parents visited New York just before she was born so that she would be an American citizen. After four weeks, they returned to her father’s native Iceland, where he was working on a medical degree. Her parents moved every few years in pursuit of higher education; between them, they have five postgraduate degrees. But time off from school was split between families in Venezuela and Iceland.
Birgisson remembers growing up on two vastly different islands as “a child’s dream,” filled with horseback riding, fishing, and swimming. In Venezuela, she also got her first taste of entrepreneurship.
“My mom’s brother started a tourism business, so he rented banana boats and had trampolines in the ocean,” she recalls. “He’d take tourists on cruises, and I got to drive Jet Skis as a seven-year-old. ‘This is a job? This is amazing. Can I be an adult now? Can I be in charge?’”
Before heading off to college, Birgisson spent two summers working in Iceland. She clocked eighty hours a week and managed to put $9,000 in an Icelandic bank account with a 14 percent interest rate. In 2008, she shipped off to Duke, which she chose for its biomedical engineering program and her interest in making prosthetic limbs. From her dorm room, Birgisson watched the global economy tank. The banks in Iceland were nationalized, the majority of her savings lost. At the same time, her mother, who had finally earned her MBA and landed a job with Microsoft, was laid off in a massive cut.
“Those things were supposed to be stable and secure,” she says. “It made me realize that big institutions aren’t always trustworthy. That really laid the groundwork of thinking about entrepreneurship and relying on myself.”
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While still at InCube, Birgisson continued tweaking her recipe for MATI as an afterschool exercise. She’d fill shot glasses with different tea and juice blends, which she and Jake would then analyze for flavor and potency. One night, Birgisson made eight variations. One of them kept the pair up until three in the morning.
“We were like, ‘This is it. Something here works,’” she remembers.
Birgisson settled on a formulation containing apples, lemons, cane sugar, peppermint, and tea. She’d brew MATI—a play on her nickname, Tati—in a large pot before selling the carbonated kegs to Durham-based companies Shoeboxed and Appia, as well as the Duke Innovation and Entrepreneurship office. When it came time to bottle the tea, Birgisson printed out labels on a sticker sheet and rolled them onto cans using a spray bottle. She squeegeed out the bubbles by hand.
“Watching her take an idea conceived in a college dorm to a full-blown business has been one of the highlights of my association with start-ups,” says Casey Steinbacher, who served as president of the Greater Durham Chamber of Commerce until last year. “Entrepreneurship is never an easy path, but it has some especially unique challenges when you are a young female in the manufacturing arena. Her fearlessness is legendary—camping out in offices of major brands, confident she could pitch her product if given the chance.”
Once MATI began selling hundreds of cans per month in those area spots, Birgisson searched for ways to expand her market. Despite leaving dozens of voice mails, sending emails, and even shipping samples to Whole Foods’ beverage buyer, the lines remained cold. In June 2014, Birgisson drove to Atlanta, walked into the Whole Foods regional office at eight o’clock and requested a meeting. A receptionist said the manager was booked for three weeks but that she could wait. At four thirty, she was escorted in.
Armed with sales sheets and a list of talking points, Birgisson wheeled in a cooler full of chilled MATI. Within five minutes, she had the green light to sell in the region, as well as an introduction to the distributor she still uses at Whole Foods.
“In some ways, Tatiana is very similar to many of the business owners we have dealt with over the years: smart, focused, goal-oriented, skilled in her field,” says Jim Lee, the property owner who negotiated the lease for MATI’s new manufacturing plant. “And then it changes—young lady fresh from college, building a million-dollar operation with no silver spoon in her mouth.”
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On the evening of February 26, Birgisson cut the orange ribbon hanging across the doorway of her manufacturing plant in Clayton with a pair of oversize scissors. She began to nudge about a hundred friends, family members, and customers in suits and sequins into the massive new space. Forklift paths marked with bright yellow tape accented the floor, and pallets of shiny MATI cans stretched toward the ceiling, filling an entire room.
She told me to check out the site’s laboratory, where her staff of seven will be able to quickly create and test new formulations. MATI is the first company of its kind to have such a lab; the only others belong to the billion-dollar giants, like Red Bull and Monster. Birgisson insists she’s less focused on aggressively carving out a market share and battling those behemoths than in creating a line of energy drinks that perform better, taste better, and are better for you. Still, she plans to produce a million cans of MATI by next year.
“Most young adults Tatiana’s age are struggling with their first job, buying a car, renting an apartment,” says Lee. “Tatiana surely has some of the same desires, but she and her crew are willing to do what it takes. They are way too young to retire, so failure is not an option.”
Birgisson stands by the doorway and shakes hands or exchanges hugs with everyone she meets. The last time I saw her, we were sweaty and scrambling over brightly colored bouldering holds, our hands covered in chalk. Tonight I tell her that she looks like a small-business owner with her black A-line skirt and glittering eyelashes. She cradles a bouquet of roses and quietly replies that she feels like a fraud.
The line for food stretches the length of the wall across from the DJ, blasting Taylor Swift. The table overflows with crostini adorned with tangy goat cheese and rosy beets. There’s gooey mozzarella and pine nut pesto next to stacks of cold cuts and wedges of Brie. For dessert, there’s a cake made in the company’s vivid colors, plus blackberries and fist-sized hunks of mango. Visitors nurse pints of craft beer or toast with mimosas made from Champagne and cherry-flavored MATI. They speak in Spanish and English, wearing big grins.
I must admit it was some of the best catering I’ve ever had.
This article appeared in print with the headline “Sustainable Energy”
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