This week I sat down with my long-time friend Melanie Masarin, the French-born founder of Ghia, the non-alcoholic aperitif that quietly changed the way we think about drinking. Melanie is someone I've turned to for advice over the years, and getting to finally sit down and go deep with her on how she built one of the most aesthetically singular brands of our time was something I've wanted to do for a long time.

Melanie grew up around the ritual of the aperitivo, summers near the Mediterranean where a drink before dinner was never really about alcohol. It was about slowing down, gathering, being present. When she stopped drinking, she couldn't find anything worth holding in her hand. So she made it herself.

We talked about what it actually takes to build something from scratch, the 55 formulations before she landed on the one, the $900k she raised from her own network before anyone else believed in it, and how she turned sobriety into something genuinely aspirational rather than a compromise. Ghia was never a mocktail brand. It was always a worldview.

This is a conversation about taste, restraint, obsession, and what happens when you build something that didn't exist yet.

Produced by Dear Media

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.