Former public school teacher Merrilee Kick now ranks among America’s richest self-made women after selling her popular ready-to-drink cocktail business in May.
By Chloe Sorvino, Forbes Staff
Brightly colored, plastic spheres filled with pre-mixed drinks with names like “Cran Blaster” and “Forbidden Apple” are packed onto thousands of shelves across America, from supermarkets to gas stations. BuzzBallz, as these ready-to-drink cocktails are known, started as a side hustle and has transformed into one of the biggest brands in the $2 billion industry.
“I’ve been living in the American Dream,” says BuzzBallz founder and CEO Merrilee Kick. “We’ve built a legacy. We’ve become a contender in a space where women never went.”
In 14 years since she founded the brand, Kick has built BuzzBallz into an alcohol industry powerhouse. In addition to distribution across the United States, the brand is now sold in 29 countries with annual revenue that Forbes estimates is roughly $500 million.
The 61-year-old Kick, in turn, has become one of the alcohol industry’s biggest success stories, with one of best exits ever for a woman. The former public school teacher from Plano, Texas, never sold a stake in the company, but did give 24.5% to each of her two sons, Alex and Andrew, now president and vice president of BuzzBallz. The Louisiana-based spirits conglomerate Sazerac, owned by billionaire William Goldring, acquired BuzzBallz in May in an all-cash deal that Forbes estimates is at least $500 million. Neither Kick nor Sazerac would comment on the size of the deal, but, without providing documentation, Kick says that the actual figure is much higher. Forbes conservatively estimates that, after taxes, Kick pocketed at least $400 million. That’s enough to earn Kick a No. 84 spot on Forbes’ annual list of America’s Richest Self-Made Women.
The Sazerac sale is a rare feat in an industry with few female founders. “This is an industry that has so much capital in the institutional brands that have been around for such a long time that it’s extremely rare to bootstrap something like this,” says Alix Peabody, the founder and former CEO of canned wine brand Bev, which sold to E. & J. Gallo Winery in 2023, An exit of that scale and that size, especially from someone who has taken on no funding, is pretty much unheard of.”
Profitable from its second year, BuzzBallz sits in the money-making niche of convenience-seekers and young adults—or at least the young at heart. Sales are strong in the RTD market, as pre-batched cocktails are typically one of the most competitive parts of the spirits industry, with plenty of new entrants and long-standing rivalries among big brands. The category has been growing 30% year-over-year, according to Spins, which tracks retail sales nationwide. According to InsightAce Analytic, the sector is projected to hit $5 billion in sales by 2030.
“It’s a crowded space and she found a solution and had the grit to make it work,” says Sazerac president Jake Wenz, who led the deal. “[Kick] bet on herself with limited background and limited resources in an industry that’s very hard to break through. For every Tito’s and BuzzBallz, there’s thousands of people who have tried and have never tasted success.”
“I didn’t sell because I didn’t like what I was doing or I wanted to leave,” Kick says. “I sold for the exponential growth.”
Kick attributes much of her drive to growing up in a family that endured multiple bankruptcies. Her father struggled and eventually lost his logging business in Montana because, as Kick recalls, he lacked “financial acumen.” As a child, she remembers regularly “having to make something out of nothing” and learning to “never give up.”
Later on, in 2009, as a 46-year-old teacher of business in Plano, Kick was sitting by her pool grading papers when she had the idea for what became BuzzBallz: fun, high-proof cocktails served in easy-to-hold, colorful, plastic spherical containers. “I thought, I shouldn’t have this glass container out here,” she recalls. “I should have a plastic, pool-safe type of cocktail.” The project excited Kick, who had been working towards her MBA at Texas Woman’s University and wanted to gain more financial independence as she and her husband considered divorcing. She had no savings and nothing to fall back on.
BuzzBallz launched in 2010, after Kick found a manufacturer in China to produce her containers, which sold for $2.99 each. The self-described inventor recalls that from the earliest days she wanted her business to “sound like what it was so people remembered it.” That caught on, as did her slogan that underscored BuzzBallz’s fun-loving, bang-for-the-buck ethos: “Buy it by the ball.”
Kick was a natural at bootstrapping. She ran the equipment for BuzzBallz, loaded the trucks, and poured samples at stores. In addition to a $28,000 inheritance from her grandfather, Kick maxed out credit cards and took out advances against them.
She was turned down for loans at every major bank in the Dallas area until a local community bank agreed to a $178,500 small business administration loan. Kick also took out a $69,000 home-equity line of credit, which was her portion of the deposit on her family’s house. With that capital, Kick rented out a “filthy” 7,000-square-foot warehouse, purchased the equipment to run it, cleaned it up, and hired an employee off Craigslist for $13 an hour to manage production while she taught. “I scraped and scrambled,” Kick says. “I took every bit of every penny I could find and poured it into the business.”
BuzzBallz declared a loss in its first year. By the second, Kick had $1 million in revenue and $100,000 in profit. After the third, Kick—who describes herself as “terrified of debt”—paid off her loan, and quit teaching.
But Kick still needed more cash to grow the business. The big break for BuzzBallz came in 2012 when a distribution broker suggested that Kick attend a wholesaler’s trade show. With her oldest son, Alex, then in college and on spring break, Kick drove from Texas to Las Vegas to work a 10-by-10 booth that cost $2,000. It paid off: In one day, 15 states signed up for distribution.
Despite the positive reaction at the trade show, Kick was still grinding it out, and built BuzzBallz slowly in an industry where, because there are the large spirits conglomerates dominate most of the sales, distributors focus on the biggest brands.
“It’s so hard to break into new markets—and to go through it without rounds of fundraising,” says Jill Kuehler, founder and CEO of Oregon-based Freeland Spirits, explaining that expanding means shelling out a lot of money, months before having revenue. “That she was able to do that while keeping 100% is unheard of—and super inspiring.”
In the early days, Kick hand-sold BuzzBallz to retailers until consumers started to ask for it. By 2014, sales grew double-digits at grocers and convenience stores like Walmart, 7-Eleven, Circle K and Walgreens.
As the business kept taking off—by 2016, BuzzBallz had $20 million in annual revenue as the cocktails became top sellers at convenience stores such as 7-Eleven and QuikTrip, as well as sports arenas and on airlines like Spirit. Then came H-E-B and Albertson’s. By 2019, sales topped $100 million.
“My main goal was to be self-sufficient and to give my boys something where they could be self-sufficient and have a job out of college and make money,” Kick says. “It was never in the cards that I wanted to take private equity money.”
Owning BuzzBallz’s supply chain has been critical. As the brand grew, Kick understood that she had to control the pipeline of her signature plastic orbs, and she eventually moved production out of China. At BuzzBallz’s headquarters in Carrolton, , the plastics plant where Kick manufactures the patented spheres across 750,000 square feet now sits close to the office space which she believes is what Willy Wonka would have dreamed of, if he had an alcohol business.
Beyond plastics manufacturing, Kick’s parent company, Southern Champion, also produces the vodka, gin, rum and bourbon that BuzzBallz uses, while also exclusively selling the spirits it makes to other retailers, including 7-Eleven and H-E-B, which stock the spirits under their own labels.
Kick had rebuffed investors who wanted a piece of her business for years. But eventually, she wanted to cash out. “I wanted somebody that was going to come in and have big guns,” she says of potential acquirers. “Know how to penetrate the market and have legal backing and power that I didn’t have and have more bodies on the street to help us distribute our product.”
Three years ago, BuzzBallz tried to sell, and Sazerac—which owns more than 400 brands, everything from Pappy Van Winkle to Fireball whiskey—passed, as the price was deemed too high. By 2024, however, Sazerac, pounced on the acquisition so fast that Kick agreed to the deal within a few weeks.
Sazerac’s Wenz the company expects to improve distribution and BuzzBallz’s rate of sale, and continue to push BuzzBallz further abroad.
As BuzzBallz enters its next phase, Kick and her family (including her husband, Tim, with whom Kick reconciled and who has served as CFO since 2018) will continue at the helm. All four have signed employment contracts for the next four years.
With 1,000 employees and fresh backing from Sazerac, Kick believes the brand is built to last. BuzzBallz sold nearly 7 million cases last year and, before the Sazerac acquisition, had planned to increase that total by the end of 2024 to more than 9 million. Kick now plans for the business to double again in 2025, as BuzzBallz aims even higher.
“I didn’t sell because I didn’t like what I was doing or I wanted to leave. I sold for the exponential growth,” says Kick, “and because it’s selfish to hold it back. It really has legs.”