When Rande Gerber set out to make a "house tequila" with his best friend, George Clooney, little did he know that Casamigos would become an award-winning spirit and one of the fastest-growing tequilas in America. Or that his wife, Cindy Crawford, would wake up in bed with the Oscar-winning actor
Among the many virtues of launching your own ultra-premium tequila are the hours you get to spend on ‘research’. After all, who better to test your agave alchemy than a focus group of your closest friends? Which is precisely how Casamigos was born.
Gerber and Clooney never had any intention of bringing their tequila to market when they first started their quest, but with the encouragement of their famous friends (and grateful taste testers), Casamigos was launched—with a third amigo, Discovery Land CEO Mike Meldman—in January 2013.
In two years, it has become one of the fastest-growing tequilas in the United States—already distributed in all 50 states, as well as in Canada, Mexico, the Bahamas and Hong Kong. In April, Sidney Frank Importing (the company that created Grey Goose) was named the exclusive importer of Casamigos in the United States and the Caribbean.
“I was not a superskinny girl,” she says. “But no one was at the time. You were allowed to have a fuller figure—I’m not a zero, I’m a six. There wasn’t even a zero back then!” While Crawford may have accepted her curves, she vividly remembers an instance when she struggled to fit into a pair of pants worn by Naomi Campbell. “I couldn’t get them up over my thighs,” she jokes. “But for the most part, my job was to fit the clothes, which I did, and make them look good, which I learned to do.”
And while Gerber has focussed on Casamigos (and his rum, Caliche), Crawford has expanded beyond modelling and devoted her entrepreneurial energies to her Meaningful Beauty skincare line, a signature home furnishing collection and a forthcoming book of essays and photographs celebrating her career.
(This story appears in the Mar-Apr 2015 issue of ForbesLife India. To visit our Archives, click here.)