When he arrived in Cambridge as a very first-year student, Farrell did not count on to finish up in the spirits business. “I was a 16-year-old when I got to MIT, and I don’t know if there are a lot of 16-year-olds who really know, necessarily, what it is they want to do in life,” he says, laughing. Farrell majored in chemical engineering but says his exposure to finance, economics, and enterprise at the Institute helped him kind the dream of beginning his personal enterprise.
To study the ropes, he started his profession in management consulting. He did a stint in private equity, earned a master’s in technologies policy at the University of Cambridge and an MBA at Harvard, and launched his very first startup in sports and media, which he says saw initial good results but didn’t scale the way he’d hoped. Then Farrell joined Starbucks, increasing to come to be vice president of worldwide retail and beverage innovation.
Serving as an executive for the world’s biggest coffeehouse chain renewed his personal sense of goal, and he decided to launch a brand that would honor his Caribbean roots. “When I think about Caribbean culture, we have this uncanny ability to activate celebration. It really is a way of life for us,” says Farrell. “Rum plays a role in so many of those celebrations. It really is part of the fabric, part of the essence of what we consider to be celebration in the Caribbean.”
Farrell named his startup Ten to One to spend homage to the West Indies Federation, which united ten Caribbean nations from 1958 to 1962. Although rum can be located in most sugar-generating regions of the world—it is made by fermenting and then distilling sugarcane juice or molasses—its origin is attributed to the Caribbean.
The enterprise at the moment sells two higher-good quality rums sourced from some of the most distinct and superior producers all through the area, now readily available in 15 US states. The dark version is a blend of rums from Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, Jamaica, and the Dominican Republic the white is a mix of rum from the Dominican Republic and Jamaica. Ten to One also sells restricted-edition releases, such as a 17-year-old single-cask reserve.
Although the brand is a relative newcomer, Ten to One has received almost 70 awards as of 2022, generating it the most decorated rum in the US. In October 2021, singer-songwriter Ciara joined the enterprise as investor and co-owner. While such initial successes have been gratifying, Farrell says he is most excited to alter the way folks assume about rum—not just for his enterprise, but for the business.
“When I think about what success looks like, whether that’s three, five, 10 years down the path, my hope is that we are the brand that has become synonymous with shifting the perception of the rum category,” he says, substantially like how Starbucks reinvented the coffeeshop. “I’m really hoping that Ten to One can be that in the world of rum.”
