Snow Tequila: Rebuilding the Raise Around a Real Model

Situation

Snow Tequila is a female-founded, additive-free cristalino reposado with real early traction: 80+ wholesale accounts across 8 states, placement with the largest U.S. spirits distributor, and a shelf of medals. It also rides a genuine wave — premium tequila is the fastest-growing spirits category, compounding at roughly 14% a year, and U.S. tequila overtook American whiskey as the #1 revenue spirit in 2022. The product and the market were not the problem.

The raise was. The brand’s financials were unfit for fundraising: a prior-year revenue dip, a COGS line misclassified to zero, and headline projections (40,000 cases and $9M by 2030) that were disconnected from any bottom-up unit economics. An investor doesn’t fund medals — they fund a model. The engagement’s job was to make the documentation as credible as the liquid.

The engagement

CMA rebuilt the raise from the unit up — a comprehensive, assumption-linked financial model, a repositioned investor narrative, and a structured $1M SAFE with a defined use of funds.

Two scenarios, modeled honestly

The single biggest credibility move was to stop presenting one optimistic line. The rebuilt model carries two scenarios side by side — a conservative bottom-up case (reaching $1.68M by 2030) and the brand’s aggressive growth case ($9.0M) — so an investor sees the range, the assumptions behind each, and the distance between them. That honesty is what makes a spirits forecast fundable rather than dismissible.

Unit economics that carry the story

Under the forecast sits a real engine — bottle and case economics by channel. A standard bottle sells at $210/case; after $75 of supplier cost and $15 of landing, that’s $120 of gross profit per case — a 57% margin on the base product (the premium “Mountain Bottle” runs far higher). Margins hold across the channel mix because the brand is priced for it.

Because the model is channel-aware, it shows where the margin lives — from event and DTC sales at the top to the thinner (but volume-building and brand-defining) European and resort channels.

A position no competitor had claimed

Numbers make a brand fundable; positioning makes it memorable. “Premium tequila” is a crowded shelf, so the narrative was rebuilt around a lane no one owned: “The Spirit of Après” — first-mover ownership of the luxury alpine / après-ski occasion, reinforced by the additive-free wellness story and the female-founded, WBENC-certified brand. It gave the raise a reason to exist beyond another good bottle — with the 2026 Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics as a natural European catalyst.

Why the structure mattered

The discipline was to rebuild from the unit up and show the range. A single hero projection on a shaky cost base is exactly what makes an investor walk; a channel-aware model, a conservative and aggressive case, and a position the brand can actually own are what make a sub-scale spirits company legible to capital. The work wasn’t inventing a better story — it was making the story provable.

Impact

Snow Tequila left with an investor-ready package: a dual-scenario model grounded in real bottle-and-case economics, channel-level margins from 57% to 79%, an après-ski first-mover narrative, and a structured $1M SAFE at a 25% discount to the next round, with a defined use of funds. A standout product finally had documentation to match. (Figures are modeled projections and management targets, not realized results.)