Message In A Bottle: How Clase Azul Celebrates Mexican Culture With Handcrafted Tequila And Decanters

Authenticity has been the byword of Clase Azul Tequila since 2000, when founder Arturo Lomeli started producing world-class tequila and mezcal, not to mention the handcrafted ceramic decanters in which his spirits are packaged and sold. 

While headquartered in San Francisco, its bottles are made in the mountainous Mexican town of Santa Maria Canchesda, population 1,750. Of the 180 employees who work at this Clase Azul location, 80% are women who grew up in poverty and with little, if any, formal schooling. Lomeli, along with business partner Juan Sanchez, provide them with two meals a day, transportation, daycare and school tuition. The work they’ve provided has revitalized the local economy. The Santa Maria community is representative of what Lomeli and Sanchez believe is their business’ ultimate purpose: “to celebrate the magic of Mexican culture and artistry, while transforming lives through positive engagement.”

In recent years, they’ve begun extending the reach of the brand, opening up Clase Azul boutiques, expanding their product line to include pottery and working with the Milan-based Istituto Europeo Di Design to create lamps, mirrors, and other products from its ceramic decanters, all to “share the historical, cultural and luxurious aspects of Mexico with the world.” It seems to be paying off: Clase Azul generated $55 million in revenue last year, all without taking a cent of outside funding.

Lomeli, who grew up in Guadalajara in the Mexican state of Jalisco, got into the liquor-making business in 1997 when he was 24. After college, he had opened a bar, only to find that he didn’t care for the scene. “I hated working with drunk guys,” he says. So he teamed up with a friend named Hugo Luna Vazquez to make and sell a pomegranate punch they branded La Pinta. The next year they came out with a tequila called El Teporocho. Both products were total flops.

In an effort to discover what he and Vazquez had been doing wrong, Lomeli went back to school in 1999. While studying marketing, he figured it out: They needed to start over with new packaging and diversify their markets and customers. Vazquez didn’t think the business was worth the effort, so Lomeli bought him out of the company and continued on his own.

The next year, Lomeli studied the arts of ceramic- and tequila-making, and in doing so, the vision for the company began to crystalize. He wanted to make high-quality tequila and put it in bottles so beautiful that they would only be upcycled. But what would he call it?

In the late 1990s, a Mexican telenovela called Azul Tequila was all the rage. Lomeli had eyes for the female star, Barbara Mori. What better name for his tequila, he thought, than “azul,” the Spanish word for blue? He traveled to Mexico City to trademark the name, only to find that it had already been taken. The word “clase” popped into his head, and like that Clase Azul was born. In 2000, the first bottle of Tequila Clase Azul Reposado, which takes up to 12 months to age in wooden casks, came on the market.

Over the course of the next two decades, the company grew in fits and starts, with several defining moments along the way. In 2001 Lomeli was introduced to Tomás Zaldívar, who was working with artisans in Santa Maria to make high-temperature ceramics, the kind needed to properly package tequila. Lomeli was inspired by Zaldívar, the work he was doing, and how it benefited those he employed, and they decided to work together.

In 2002 Lomeli contacted Juan Sanchez, a children friend and brother of his first wife, who was working as a banker in San Francisco and asked him to review a contract in English—which he could not read—that he had received from an importer he had been using in San Diego. Sanchez read it and told him not to sign: it would give the importer all rights to Lomeli’s business in the United States. Instead, they set up their own import company, Tequilas Premium Inc., which they used to import and distribute Clase Azul products to the United States for two years until 2005, when Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits, the world’s largest alcohol importer and distributor, picked up the brand. Within six months, sales had tripled, and Sanchez joined the company to manage its finances.

Another critical turning point came during the 2008 financial crisis, when Clase Azul was approached by a group of wealthy celebrities interested in making an investment in return for a stake in the company. Eager to grow, the partners accepted the offer and doubled production. But the deal fell through, leaving them with too much inventory and too little cash. Lomeli and Sanchez searched for a new source of outside funding before accepting that they would have to solve the problem on their own. They developed a plan to eliminate all cash expenditures that weren’t absolutely necessary, while delaying others and accelerating the collection of receivables . Lomeli, who had been living in San Diego, moved back home to Guadalajara, where he could monitor every peso that left the company.

After the crisis had passed, the partners found themselves with a greater appreciation for the importance of efficiently managing cash flow and maintaining comfortable profit margins. They also decided it was unwise to bring in outside capital to finance faster growth. Paced growth, using their own cash flow, made more sense for them.

But, as its reputation grew, Clase Azul continued to attract the attention of investors and buyers. In 2019, Lomeli and Sanchez received a $1 billion offer for the company. They turned it down. For them, no amount of money was worth giving up the chance to build a business on their own terms, all while supporting their community and sharing their native land with the world.

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