Isabella Hughes: Cofounder and Chief Revenue Officer of Better Sour

0:05Hi, everyone. I'm Hilary Kerr, the co-founder and chief content officer of Who, What, Where, and this is Second Life, a podcast spotlighting women who have truly inspiring careers. We're talking about their work journeys, what they've learned from the process of setting aside their doubts or fears, and what happens when they embark on their second life. Today on the show, I'm speaking with the co-founder and chief revenue officer of Better Sour, Isabella Hughes. Before she founded a sour candy company, Hughes was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii, and actually began her career in the arts, curating and coordinating exhibitions for a variety of organizations in the US and UAE.

0:49However, she'd always been interested in entrepreneurship, and in 2014, she started her first company, a Middle Eastern-inspired ice cream brand. Around the same time, she also came up with the idea for her second business, a Hawaii-grown herbal iced tea brand called Shaka Tea, which was acquired in 2022. After the acquisition, Isabella was once again ready to start something new, and in 2023, she co-founded Better Sour with her lifelong best friend. As daughters of Iranian immigrants who both grew up in Hawaii, the two used their shared mix of cultural backgrounds to inspire their flavors. Today, Better Sour is in over 4 ,000 stores, including Costco, Whole Foods, and Erwan.

1:34Isabella was such a joy to speak with, and I cannot wait for you to hear our conversation. Now, on Second Life, it's Isabella Hughes.

1:45Isabella Hughes:Okay, you ready? Excited, and thanks for having me on. My pleasure. So we like to start this podcast at the beginning. So I'm wondering, what did you study in school? And much more importantly, what did you want to be when you grew up? I was curious to be just about everything. I'm an insatiably curious person. Life is short but long, and I'm interested in so many things. What a privilege to live in a very interesting world. And I wanted to be a baker. I wanted to be an actress. I wanted to be an artist. I wanted to do it all. I wanted at one point to be president. So an array of different things.

2:26Isabella Hughes:But I ended up studying art history, just a deep lover of museums. And I was born and raised in Honolulu. And one of my favorite places in the world at the time was called the Academy of Arts. It's now called the Honolulu Museum of Art. But I just spent hours upon hours there. And when I grew up, we actually had also an additional museum, a contemporary museum, and again, spent hours and hours there and just love, love the arts. Talk to me a little bit about growing up in Honolulu. You have an Iranian mother and a father who was born and raised in Hawaii. Obviously, lots of exposure to the arts, but I'm curious about what your childhood was like.

3:07Isabella Hughes:It was really vibrant. It was really multicultural. My family is Sufi. My parents met at a Sufi gathering, mystical Islam. My father had converted and was a whirling dervish. I grew up on stories of Idrash Shah, beautiful Sufi mystic chanting, a lot of great Persian food. My mom was an incredible cook and bountiful host. I loved just the art of hospitality, which I think is so true to just greater Iranian Middle Eastern culture, but also in Hawaii, you know, local culture, Hawaiian culture, and just generosity, abundance, and welcoming people. These are really early, you know, visceral memories for me and the idea of gathering.

3:52Isabella Hughes:I think growing up in Hawaii, just it is a place where there is an amalgam of cultures. It's sort of the makeup of the islands and being introduced and exposed to people from so many different backgrounds was just a way of life in a really, really profoundly beautiful way. You know, on my father's end, you know, who's really, really aligned with the Hawaiian sovereignty activist movement and growing up really with an understanding of righteousness, of justice, of politics and activism were all profoundly impactful memories for me. And I think they shaped my values. And my dad, especially, was a lover of books, of knowledge, of art, of culture.

4:33Isabella Hughes:So I think going back to just spaces and places and ideas that shaped me. So those are all, I guess, big energy and big positive. And at the same time, I grew up in a family that was really chaotic and there was substance abuse. It was an abusive family, so it was a painful place. And it's complicated because I think for a lot of people that may have grown up, you know, with childhood abuse and trauma, you think it's all bad. You can actually be really loved and abused at the same time. It's not black or white. It can be gray and you can, you know, grow up and heal from that trauma. And I think that's a lifelong journey for a lot of people that may have come from those kinds of backgrounds.

5:17Isabella Hughes:and you pick the really good parts and you acknowledge the really bad. So just living in like the radical transparency of what it was. Thank you for sharing that. Talk to me a little bit about leaving Honolulu and going on your higher education journey. You have a degree in art history from Boston University and then stayed on the East Coast for your master's. I understand the love of art was obviously foundational, but did you have a culture shock in that giant move? And like, what was the choice to go as far as you can go essentially away from Honolulu? Yeah, I think for me, it was like, I definitely given what was going on at home, wanted to go really, really, really far away and have that break and build my own life.

6:07Isabella Hughes:And it was amazing because I was able to get financial aid and a scholarship package to BU. And I'd gone to a really prestigious prep school, Punahou. Oh. Obama had gone there. It has a beautiful campus. My dad has a good friend from college who went there and we were visiting. And I mean, it's incredible. My husband is like, it feels like we're at a resort. But it was such an amazing experience. It was an incredible education. I feel sometimes that I learned more in high school than I did in college. And I ended up going to college with like a year's worth of credits. I know. I know. It was pretty fabulous.

6:45Isabella Hughes:But yeah, so I got into B with this amazing package and it was very far away. So it was this wonderful break and a culture shock because I'd never seen snow. I did quickly learn I hated the cold. But it was everything, I think, a young person that just wanted something very different, very calm, and to build their own life away from some of that chaos I'd grown up with really sought. And Boston is an incredible city. It is so rich in history and culture. And I think it's the right-paced city. And it's a large university, BU, right in the city. And I was able to, you know, follow my passion and interest.

7:29Isabella Hughes:I was working at the ICA, the Institute of Contemporary Art, right when it was moving from the old location in Boylston to the new Diller Scorfidio Renfro building that's right in the Boston Harbor. And this is when there was nothing there. And I was a tour guide there. And just to be part of such magnificent architecture going up at such a time, and at the same time with my financial aid package, FAFSA, there was some work study program. And of all the places that you could do a work study, I got to work at the MFA, the Museum of Fine Arts. It was in the basement. It felt a little dark and a little dinky.

8:08Isabella Hughes:But I had this funny job where I got to go and look at everywhere they had used images of artwork from the museum's permanent collection to make sure it was copyrighted. It was actually really a cool way to be a young person in the city, studying what I loved and there with the MFA and then the ICA at this amazing new building going up. So then talk to me about your first job hunt once you were done with education. What did that post-grad job hunt look like? Well, it was a terrible time. It was 2008-ish. Oh, no. I graduated early. I had met at the time he was my boyfriend. not my husband yet but we just kind of knew knew it was the one so I graduated a little earlier than him we were the same year because I'd gone with all those credits and we were doing long distance and I applied just about everywhere I'd done an awesome internship at the Verilis Center for Art and Politics in New York where I curated my first little show from their permanent collection And I was just such a goody little two-shoes with all the right CV, the right grades, the right resume.

9:23Isabella Hughes:And no one was hiring at the end of 2008, 2009. No museums were hiring. Nonprofit arts and culture worker. Good luck. So I applied to a master's program in museum studies at Johns Hopkins. And I met while I was in the program a really awesome friend. And we decided to curate a show together. And I guess it was by nature of being someone who graduated in that era, but also if the world is not going to work out for me, I'm going to make it work out. I'm just going to figure it out. And it was an era of just like jobs not really being there that sort of set me off in many ways in an independent path.

10:08Isabella Hughes:I like to say I've never really been professionally employed for more than six months. I've had just a lot of like fractional jobs. I worked at the Art League Gallery in Alexandria, Virginia, associate director. It was part time for a couple days a week while I was doing my master's for a year there. But at that same time, I curated a show with Barbara Petra Escobar. She was in the master's program, too. She also worked at the Art League. It was part-time work. And it was called I Ran Home in America. And it was a show about Iranian-American artists. I was like, Barbara, I want to do a show because I'm so tired of being always called Iranian.

10:44Isabella Hughes:And it's Iranian. And so let's do a funny, spoofy show called I Ran Home about Iranian-American artists. And we found this artist. She's really well-known now, Hedia Shafi. And she was living in Baltimore. But anyway, she was in the show. Eric Parnes, Pune Marase. it was at the Fridge Gallery. And that was the first show show that I curated. And it was in all the press. It was in the Washington Post. And it gave me a lot of confidence. Barbara and I pulled it off. And there was a lot of experimental things. Like Pune would brand meat with an Islamic fractal pattern. We did a lot of events. Philippa Hughes from the Pink Line Project.

11:23Isabella Hughes:She's this incredible arts cultural producer. We did a fortune-telling fall. It's an art throughout West Central Asia, where you turn upside down Turkish coffee, read fortunes. Yeah. We did some event with her. We did a lot of public programming, food, art. It was amazing, but it was a glorious experience and it gave me a lot of confidence about just pulling things together. We had to fundraise. Just, it was amazing. Oh, I love this. So you ended up working at some point for the tourism development and investment company? Yes. So then my husband graduated. He got for a hot man at a job in DC. And then he got let go because it was 2009, 10-ish.

12:03Isabella Hughes:I was finishing my master's and we were like, you know what? This is not getting better. It was a really rough moment. So many of our friends who graduated college the same time we had were also not finding jobs. And so I had always said I wanted a really interesting life. And I think being the daughter of an immigrant. The idea of just moving was not a particularly scary concept. And I had wanted to then go get an additional master's in West African photography studies at the University of Accra, very, very specific. And my husband was like, well, how about we move to Dubai where I think we could get these kinds of jobs?

12:46Isabella Hughes:I was like, okay, that would work too. Let's go for it. but it ended up not working out, which we learned quickly. So I had been offered the day we moved a much better job at TDIC at the time, the Tourism Development Investment Corporation. And I told them the day we moved, I was like, I'm a woman of my word. I've already accepted this other job. I can't take it. I remember this. And it was a much better job, double the pay. So I call them up once we get there. I'm like, actually, this other job didn't work out. And Come on in. So I get the job there. And my husband and I go back to Hawaii and we get married and I get acclimated in my job.

13:31Isabella Hughes:And I work there for six months and I actually am concurrently curating back in the United States, a show. It's the first show in contemporary native Hawaiian art at the Smithsonian. Oh my God. Yeah. It was called This is Hawaii. And I had pitched it. It was actually a show I'd come up with when I was finishing my master's degree. And I couldn't believe that the Smithsonian had every year an annual Hawaii festival that our late senators Akaka and Inouye had been really instrumental in putting together and supporting the Smithsonian NMAI, the National Museum of the American Indian, but there was no actual dedicated exhibition or anything.

14:13Isabella Hughes:So yeah, I'd pitch the show, raise the money. I was 24. I was so young. And Carl Powell, Solomon Enos, Puni Kukahiko, and Maika E. Tubbs. And it was a crossover exhibit with Transformer, a micro gallery, I think 14th Street, and then The Smithsonian. So you got this really edgy, young contemporary audience that might not necessarily be an NMAI Smithsonian, but that exhibit was in both spaces. And it was the first time there was a dedicated exhibit to Kanaka Maoli, Native Hawaiian art at the Smithsonian. So I was doing that and I met TDIC making six figures in 2010, baby me, and I'm miserable. My job was really administrative and boring and extremely well-paid and not interesting.

15:02Isabella Hughes:And I was like making tape sculptures like Tara Donovan at my desk and like sad. Anyway, it gets wind that I'm curating the show back in America. And then I pitched to write our Asia Pacific, a review of the Sharjah biennial or something. And somehow they didn't like the idea that I was doing some things under my own name independently. It wasn't really a thing back then. I feel like it's much more acceptable now, but that was seen as like, you're asking for too much. No. And the thing about me I've learned is I need to be in charge. And I think it comes back to like, I was a very little child that always had to be the grownup.

15:38Isabella Hughes:For me to feel safe, I have to have freedom. It's a controlling thing, but I realize it's come from a trauma response in a really healthy way. And so the minute someone's like, you can't write some article, you're going to get paid like$300 for a review. You can't curate a nonprofit show like back in America. It's like the spidey sense. And I feel like suffocated. The walls close again. No, no, no, no, no. So I was crying. My husband had gotten a really good job. We were young and married. We were like 24, 23. Yeah. Because he's younger than me. We're babies. And he's like, well, you know what?

16:08Isabella Hughes:This is the UAE. You can make anything happen. And a few other people wanted me to curate. I met a sheikh in Bahrain. He wanted me to help open a museum. I'm timelining you, okay? It's 2011, right before Arab Spring era. He's like, you should just curate your big show in the Smithsonian and go do this big project in Bahrain. You should quit your job. You should be happy. You're going to be independent. Do it. So I quit my job. And anyhow, the Arab Spring happened. My projects in Bahrain obviously didn't happen. A lot was going on in the region. It was a really tough time, but I was really grateful that I did.

16:43Isabella Hughes:And other things ended up happening. I ended up going independent. I did a lot of other really interesting things, producing a March meeting for Sheikh Ahur with Sharjah Art Foundation, which is the Sharjah Biennial March meeting. I worked with Ambassador Michael Corbin doing a lot of interesting other projects. So it all worked out. I mean, that is wild and fascinating. So can we skip ahead to 2014? Let's do that. I want to know about how you came up with the idea to co-found an ice cream company. So I was pregnant with my second child. My husband and I knew our time in the UAE, it was waning.

17:21Isabella Hughes:We wanted to probably go back. And I really, really missed home. The thing about Hawaii, it's just like the best place to grow up. It's given me so much sense of place, sense of identity to feel and to know aloha and that sense of community, that sense of relationship, of reciprocity, of caretaking, of we culture, not I culture. It's profound, the values. There are no words to express the level of values that are within me that I will carry till the day I die, wherever I am in the world. And I really wanted my children to experience that. So, also, my husband comes from a line of entrepreneurs, and we kind of was just, you know, we were going to work together in some shape or form.

18:07You had such an entrepreneurial spirit, as evidenced by everything that you had done at that point as well.

18:12Isabella Hughes:Yeah, my grandfather was an entrepreneur. And so, I think that just was our vibration, too. And we're very, like, nerdy, creative people together. And we're like, okay, well, unfortunately, you know, Hawaii does not have a lot of jobs. And while my deep passion and love is nonprofit art, culture, and community building, you don't make any money. I'd come from a family that had had money and gone bankrupt. And I just did not like that feeling. And I knew once I had kids, I was like, oh, I don't want to know what it's like to be tight ever again. I want to be abundant. And a way to access that is through entrepreneurship.

18:47Isabella Hughes:That's one of the few ways you can jump in the United States today. So we were like, let's start a business. And we had been eating this really great ice cream all over the Middle East. It's called Buzan Arabic, Dondorma in Turkish, basically anywhere the Ottoman Empire was. And it's chewy. It's got like an orchid called salop that is critically endangered. So you can't leave Turkey with it. So we had to figure out how to use food science. We ended up using konjac, a tuber from Japan to figure out the viscosity. Wow. My friend Barbara, who I'd curated that show with. We co-founded it with her and her husband who had been in restaurant management back in New York.

19:25Isabella Hughes:We're living in the UAE. I'm pregnant with my second child. It was nuts, right? I'm starting the biennial. I'm working opposite hours up all night because it's Hawaii time. It is just nuts. We go to America in the first week. We're in the New York Times organically. Our life was just beautiful, like clusterfuck-y energy all around, all the time, everything going on all at once. When I think back of everything, I'm like, how did it happen? We learned a lot. The business got into a ton of accounts and we raised some capital, but ultimately we didn't know a lot about co-manufacturing and how to build it to scale.

20:03Isabella Hughes:So I did that down, but it was like an MBA and learning how to do business. And you learn the most when you're failing, not when you're winning. So it was like a win fail. That's so interesting. So clearly you had the entrepreneur bug because you started building a second consumer goods business. Kind of at the same time. Oh my God. Of course. Of course. Because you're always doing multiple things at the same time. Yeah. We started almost at the same time because when I was pregnant, you're not supposed to drink caffeine. I was drinking a ton of this herbal tea I'd grown up with, mamaki. I had grown up drinking it in Hawaii and it's a nettle that doesn't have any stingers because Hawaii doesn't have any land predators.

20:45Isabella Hughes:And so I was like bringing a ton of it into the UAE. And we had Honest Tea, Harrison, my husband and I, when we like were in college, but it was like, you know, most of them were caffeinated and we were drinking this mamaki and we're like, we should have a caffeine-free herbal tea. Everybody loves Hawaii and this could put money in the local economy because Hawaii doesn't have a lot of money. And I grew up at the tail end of when pineapple and sugar all went away. So there's a lot of high value export crops. And I was really interested in like a social impact business at that point. I was like, how could we do a business that could actually do good?

21:21Isabella Hughes:Right. We saved up a hundred grand to put into the business and a hundred thousand dollars to live off of. At that time, we knew what a co-manufacturer was, so we didn't have to make it. And we moved back to Honolulu. We had bought a house when we were living in the UAE, our first house. And we were so proud. And we're like, in a year from now, it'll be great. We'll be rolling. It's all going to work out. And the biennial is going to be successful. And everything's going to be great. Little did we know, a year later, we were in enormous debt. My husband was Lyft and Uber driving. I was doing part-time PR.

21:54Isabella Hughes:Biennial was originally supposed to open in 2016. We pushed it to 2017 because we didn't get there. But anyway, it all ended up working out in the end. That's my story. Just keep going like Nemo. Just keep going. I mean, there's a lot more, but it worked. It was acquired in a relatively short period of time in 2022. It was seven years. And I think the hardest thing that people don't realize is that Mamaki was not a commodity. So the work that I'm most proud about is that we gave away over 40 ,000 seedlings. There was so much pride with Mamaki because it's endemic. So pre-contact, pre-even Polynesians getting to have this plant just evolved.

22:31Isabella Hughes:It's so good for the environment and it's the host plant for native pollinators. And so to figure out how to commercially grow it, we gave out 40 ,000 seedlings, build out the entire processing system. And I guess what made me so happy about that business was that it felt so much like art. It felt so much like all the stuff I love about community and the approach from food and art is I've always been interested in how do you break down barriers and bring people together? there's such a convergence. If you really think about it, it all makes sense between like food and art and like the idea of connection.

23:07So getting that company up and running and successful and going through acquisition.

23:13Isabella Hughes:And the biennial becoming a triennial, being the board chair, doing that through the pandemic. That was insane. We brought Yayu Kusama to Hawaii for the first time. Oh my gosh. Yeah. Mata Aho Collective. And you have two small children while you're doing all of this. Yes, it was a lot. At what point were you starting to realize like what aspects of being an entrepreneur you were good at or felt like was a natural fit? And then were there aspects where you're like, you know what? I can do it. I will do it. I am doing it. But the second we can have more resource, that part's not for me. Yeah, I think it's such a good question, Hillary.

23:47Isabella Hughes:I think the most important thing is early on, you have to kind of do everything. Yeah, it sucks. You're a generalist. and then the minute you can and there is no shame and especially as women where we feel that we need to have every answer we need to say my favorite thing is now to say I don't know I'm not very good at that and the older I got the more accomplished I got the more I say I don't know and I'm actually not very good at that and that's so funny because when I look at my younger self I wanted to have it all on my plate but you know I've had really good co-founders along the way and I'm the first to admit I've never been a solo founder.

24:25Isabella Hughes:I've always been a co-founder. And I think that is just a deep knowledge of knowing I'm a big picture thinker. I'm very strategic. I'm really great at building partnerships, alliances, highly creative, a really compelling convincer. You got to convince people. You got to convince people to become a public partner or give you exhibition space for free. You got to convince people to donate money or invest capital. So those are where I shine. I do not shine in paperwork. I have had to do horrible little tedious things like insurance paperwork, whether it's for multi-million dollar artworks or multi-million dollar businesses, but these are not where you want to put me.

25:00Isabella Hughes:And I really deeply respect all the operational parts that go into art exhibition making and, you know, seven, eight figure businesses, but the operation side kind of kills my soul. I get it. By the way, we're the same. So I also want to talk about before the acquisition, you started investing in other CPG brands, including Partake Foods, which is a friend of the pod and others. Talk to me about becoming an investor. And I'm most curious about what would make you invest in something like what was the secret sauce of a company that would light up your eyes and say, yes, this is where we need to go.