At some point in the 1400s, Stephanie Houston’s great-great grand somethings were trading sugar cane for rum on the Canary Islands. Then sugar cane and Houston’s ancestors made their way to the Caribbean. In 1732, 16 farming families from the Spanish Canary Islands arrived at San Antonio de Béxar and created the foundation for modern-day San Antonio. About 240 years later, Houston was born in San Antonio.
“I have 600 years of rum DNA in my body,” she says.
Houston, an Oak Cliff native who swears Gonzalez on Jefferson has the best flour tortillas, is the co-owner of Island Getaway Rum and the first Latina to own a distillery in Texas.
This is also a good time to mention she was a history major at the University of Texas.
Before she lived in Austin for the first time, she grew up living with her single mom and sister in an apartment located between Wynnewood and Kiest Park. Houston remembers going to Kidd Springs as a child.
“I love to go back there and kind of walk around that little lake and just reminisce about those days when I wasn’t thinking about payroll and property taxes,” she says.
She went to St. Elizabeth Elementary School — where she still goes to light a candle every time she’s back home — and graduated from Skyline High School before heading off to UT.
When she came back to Dallas, she started working in student services for ITT Tech. She left to work at an ad agency. Then one of her clients recruited her to work for his medical staffing company.
“My first day of work, I really wasn’t even sure what I was going to be doing,” she says. “I didn’t understand what he was even saying to me about what the job was.”
Houston was 27 years old when she and four colleagues left that company to found Platinum Select Healthcare Staffing in 2001. According to a 2004 Dallas Business Journal article, the company grew fast — $10 million in revenue in 2002, $15.1 million in 2003 and more than $24 million in 2004. In less than seven years, the company was worth $52 million with over 700 employees across the nation. The five sold the company in 2008 to MN Allied Services — right before the economy tumbled.
What do you do when you walk away with a bundle of cash from selling a medical staffing company?
Well, you take a repair shop and convert it into music-venue -and-bar LaGrange in Deep Ellum.
“It was a passion project for me. I loved doing every single second of it,” Houston says.
The project was losing money. It didn’t matter that it was winning “Best of” awards or that even The New York Times noticed its popularity. In a 2010 article, LaGrange was highlighted as one of the places bringing “the groove back” to Deep Ellum with its indie rock lineup.
“But I hated losing all the money that I had,” Houston says. “I think one day somebody said, ‘You know, Stephanie, you can’t just keep throwing money at stuff.’ I was thinking, ‘Ah, I hadn’t really thought of that.’”
She decided to move on in 2013. LaGrange transformed into Three Links. Houston decided to move back to Austin.
“I’ll be honest, when I came back to Austin, I was really in a complete crisis,” she says. “I just didn’t know what I was gonna do. I was running out of money. I was just lost.”
An old friend from Dallas she knew from working in Deep Ellum was starting a winery in the Hill Country. After they connected on Facebook, she went to the winery for a day to work.
He mentioned a rum project he had been working on with someone else.
“I said, ‘Hey, if y’all are serious about doing this, and you need an investor, you need a business person, tell me about it,” Houston says. “Please include me.”
But he and his business partner had it covered. They were good.
He called a few months later. She immediately asked if it was “Rum time?” No, he needed a dog sitter.
Then he called again. She immediately asked if it was “Rum time?” No, he needed someone to watch the winery while he was on a ski trip.
He called a few months later. It was rum time.
Houston cut an investment check $30,000. With a total of $61,000 (according to a 2018 Forbes article, you need about $200,000 to start a distillery), the three partners started filing the paperwork, finding a property and working on their recipes in 2016. It took 18 months to be licensed federally and at the state level.
They were down to their last dollars by the time they opened the distillery and tasting room in Hye, Texas, located east of Fredericksburg, near the Garrison Brothers distillery.
“It’s not a cheap business,” she says.
The company started as Hye Rum, using Louisiana molasses to produce the white rum that serves as the foundation for their spirits. It’s also available in its own bottle.
“It is just this big, bold, fiery rum, as rum is supposed to be,” she says. “You can taste the rum, but it also just balances all of the other flavors in the cocktails.”
Island Getaway was the first cocktail on their tasting menu and it inspired their eponymous line of flavored rums.
By 2019, Houston and partner/distiller James Davidson bought out the project’s originator. They brought in a small group of friends, a few from Oak Cliff, to invest. Then Houston and Davidson bought them out.
Then like everyone else, the pandemic brought them to a standstill. Their product was sitting on shelves and they weren’t seeing any foot traffic in their tasting room. And like every bar and booze-producing company, they were going to get hit with the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission’s mixed beverage gross and sales taxes on March 20, 2020. Houston launched a Change.org petition to suspend the tax during the pandemic, according to an Eater Austin article. The petition garnered more than 99,000 signatures.
They pivoted to making sanitizer — their rum is 69% alcohol by volume — after the federal government gave distilleries clearance. Houston says they made 52 tons of hand sanitizer to donate.
Then in 2021, they moved the distillery to Dripping Springs, closer to Austin, since they were burning through gas and wearing themselves out in the more-than-hour-long commute. It wasn’t efficient to have two rum brands, so they merged the Hye Rum into Island Getaway Rum.
“For me, rum reminds me of getting away,” Houston says. “So we wanted to inspire people with the kind of feeling that you get when you hit an island and you see that sunset and you’re sitting on that beach with your frozen drink.”
It’s eight years in. This might be the first year Island Getaway Rum is in the black. It’s a family affair at this point. Houston’s sister and son work at the distillery. Island Getaway Rum is available at Spec’s. They have plans for exporting internationally with the first stop in Tokyo.
“I think it’s some of that survivor mentality. It allows me to look at ways outside of the box on how to do a lot with a little,” she says. “I would love for us to have the right investment dollars to be able to really just take our gloves off and go. But that hasn’t been our experience. We’ve had to be as scrappy as possible.”
