Tina Karras — founder, CEO, and owner of Tina’s Vodka — didn’t start out to launch a small business in the sustainable spirits sector. She certainly didn’t set out to battle mega-corporations and big agriculture, but sometimes life takes unexpected turns.
After college, Karras picked up and moved from Charlotte, North Carolina to Los Angeles to pursue her dreams of becoming a singer/songwriter. Like so many who followed that dream before her, she found herself working in bars and restaurants to make ends meet.
How a singing career led to a sustainable Vodka startup
As Karras grew familiar with the industry, she became the buyer for several large establishments. “When I was responsible for purchasing liquor for the places I worked at, I realized most domestic brands are made with products full of GMOs and pesticides,” she recalls. “I wanted the market to have a domestic vodka that was purely organic, affordable, and delicious. I’ve seen domestic vodkas with a few of those qualities –but never with all three.”
This inspired Karras to create her own brand of organic, GMO-free vodka. After establishing her new venture, she began by sourcing organic corn from small farmers.
“People don’t realize that foods and beverages made from GMO products are doused with pesticides,” she remarks. “Growers wear hazmat suits when they spray those crops. Those toxic chemicals sink into the soil, run into the water, and go right into the foods and beverages we put into our bodies. When people stand behind organic crops, though, they help support farmers who are actually replenishing the Earth.”
The first David vs. Goliath moment for Tina’s Vodka
Starting a small business based on sustainable practices, partnering with suppliers, and finding a distributor were all enormous hurdles to overcome, but those obstacles paled in comparison to the legal battle looming ahead for Karras. Her brand, Tina’s Vodka, was headed for a trademark challenge from an international liquor giant. After doing some research on the USPTO site, we saw that Sazerac was the company that challenged her trademark.
“I was wondering when someone would look that up. Yes, the trademark dispute during the first Christmas and New Year’s of the pandemic, how could I forget? As if things weren’t tragic enough during that time, I was shocked when I received their cease and desist letters over my approved trademark,” Karras explains.
Sazerac trademarked a “Tina” logo in 1968, as well as the word “Tina” itself in 1992. But by the time Karras created Tina’s Planet Vodka, they were no longer using their mark.
“I’ve been a buyer for over 10 years, and I had never heard of ‘Tina Tequila’,” says Karras. “For that matter, none of my colleagues had heard of that brand either. I looked for it everywhere – online, in liquor stores, I even called distributors in other states trying to find it. I would have loved to have had a bottle for myself, too. In the crowded beverage market, customers encounter dozens of brands on a single shelf. I already had a name and imagery and was determined to stand by my own product — with my own name.”
The label on her product bottles displays Athena’s Owl perched atop an olive tree with leaves in the pattern of planet Earth — a design she chose to represent the company’s female ownership, Greek ancestry, and Planet Earth’s regenerative wisdom. The alpha and omega, as well as the grass on the label, remind consumers that starting with good seed and soil ultimately results in a better product. Karras thought long about every detail regarding her brand — the label and logo, the name itself, and the values she stood for.
The USPTO approved her mark in November 2020, but a month later Karras was sent letters demanding she abandon her mark, her TTB COLA, her company’s name, and even her website’s URL. Luckily, one of Karras’s colleagues in the liquor industry connected her to his IP litigator, Douglas Q. Hahn, and together, they challenged the claim.
After a drawn-out legal battle, Tina Karras — and her vodka brand — had won. In the end, Sazerac dropped their threat of opposition, and Tina registered her mark. Then, after all of that, Sazerac let the USPTO cancel their Tina trademark after they didn’t renew it in 2022.
Karras’s battle with big business taught her that a brand’s name needs to stand for something. “Your brand needs to resonate with something that’s true and authentic within yourself,” she says. “Going from a liquor buyer to a small business owner challenged me in ways I never expected. I found that instead of creating a business, I was creating a new version of myself. The business was just the vehicle for that transformation.”
How Tina’s Vodka lends a hand to small businesses and farms in the sustainable sector
Even after winning her unevenly matched struggle, Karras doesn’t shy away from supporting those in similar battles. She uses her brand daily to advocate for the small farmers who stand for eco-friendly agriculture.
According to the USDA, over 90% of farms in the United States earn less than $250,000 per year in gross cash income, placing them in the “small farm” category. Though urban migration, farm consolidation, and changing weather patterns pose serious threats to these small and family farms, Karras believes they are essential to the nation — as well as the planet.
“Small organic farmers keep rural communities afloat, but most importantly, they improve and preserve our world’s natural resources,” Karras concludes. “It may be more expensive at first to support regenerative farmers, but in the long run, it costs us less because it helps the environment. My dream is to use Tina’s Planet Vodka to partner with farmers as they convert to regenerative practices. After all, what’s the point of owning a successful brand if our air, water, and food are all contaminated? I want to contribute to life on a healthy planet through my vodka, my music, and everything else I do. I wrote a new song during this time ‘The Magical Ones’ and it was inspired by these challenges during the pandemic and how tapping into our own power and inner resolve will help overcome any obstacle or opposition”.
Tina’s album Classical Dreams is now streaming on all digital platforms.
