For Samara Davis, It’s Just the Beginning

When writer Gray Chapman caught up with Imbibe 75 alum Samara Davis for our July/August 2024 issue, Davis hinted at wanting to pass the torch and move beyond her impactful membership organization Black Bourbon Society (BBS). “There’s a whole community of African American spirits professionals that are coming into this space. And I want to be able to just plug and play where I need to,” she said. Then in September, she announced she was ending BBS at the close of 2024. So what does that mean for BBS members and for her diversity initiatives within the industry? We checked in with her to find out. This interview has been edited and condensed.

How and when did you realize you wanted to move beyond Black Bourbon Society?

I’ve known it for a while. And I think somewhere between last year and now this year, I started to ultimately resist that nudge to transition because I felt very guilty about wanting to do that. I felt very responsible for saving this community through Covid. For instance, I was just at the shops with my husband on Saturday, and another gentleman and his wife were in there. He walks up to me, shakes my hand, and says, “Hi, I’m such and such. I know exactly who you are. Thank you. You saved my life during Covid.” Never knew his name, I never interacted with him. He’s not a member of BBS. But, I understand the impact that we’ve made has been huge and it was very life-saving for folks during a very tough, tough time.

I felt this need to carry this responsibility for folks. But as we started to transition out of Covid, all the members who were attached to our brand were like, “I can go back to my regular life and now I don’t want to drink bourbon anymore because I do this, or now I’m busy at work.” My community was shifting and I was still feeling like I had to hold it all together, not realizing that, no, it’s actually okay for everybody to go on.

What’s the next step?

What I’m discovering over these past couple weeks is that it’s time to put what I know from doing this and creating this community, and what we’ve been doing for the past eight and a half years, and really apply it internally. I still love my brand relationships. But instead of brands coming to me saying, “Hey, we just had this release and want to send you a bottle, and we want you to promote it to your audience.” No, I’m not doing that. Now it’s the time for me to come in and work with you internally to tell you how to connect. It needs to be part of a corporate culture and a corporate structure.

Companies can hire me as a consultant. I’ve consulted on projects behind the scenes, I’ve consulted on up-and-coming brands and emerging brands to help them with their branding and their marketing. So, yes, I’m still consulting within the industry. But it will not be as this public-facing influencer. Because, honestly, it’s just not as good a use of my talents. I have way more to contribute.

A brand reached out to me a couple weeks ago and said, “We heard that Black people really like butterscotch whiskey, so can we send you a bottle and you tell all of your members to go buy our bottle?” No, I cannot! But what I can do is work with you. I can analyze your bottle, analyze the liquid, tell you if it’s good or not. I can help you to improve and refine what your product is. Because, again, I don’t want to be the face. I don’t want to be the spokesperson of that. I don’t want to be the endorser. 

Will someone else take over the Black Bourbon Society?

No, no one’s gonna take it over. I’ll still keep my IP, I’ll still keep my trademarking. I do think that there is an opportunity to circle back to redefining Black Bourbon Society and a more exclusive community-based group but much smaller and much more concentrated on the exclusive spirits experiences that I would like to create for that community. 

Maybe I take 10 people with me to spend 10 days in Scotland, and we just learn about scotch. Or maybe we go to Barbados and we learn about rum. Or we go to Napa with 15 people and do a grapes and grains experience with Napa Valley wine country and the Napa Valley bourbon distilleries that are popping up all over the place out there. But it will be more catered and more exclusive but also very much inclusive of Black community and building a special connection for those folks.

But, for me, BBS became about quantity because we needed the quantity to prove to the brands that we exist. Now I would really like to focus on quality. So it’s not a free community, it’s not just free education, it’s not just “brands meet Black people, Black people meet brands.” It is much more strategic, intentional, and more intimate. I guess that’s a better word than “inclusive,” but it’s a more intimate experience with Black Bourbon Society moving forward. 

We have a paid membership and we have a free membership. Right now, our paid membership is about 1,500 people. Whereas our free membership is about 30,000. So it’s more of like, “Okay, we can cut out the 28.5 and just really focus and share those intimate experiences with the 15 that are truly dedicated and really want to learn and really want to commit to what BBS is doing. It’s time for us to get more focused and more specific with what we want to do with BBS instead of just being this come-one, come-all community.

So you’re not leaving the industry—you’re continuing to expand within the industry.

In order for me to be able to branch out, I need to reduce. I’m being pulled in too many ways with such a large community and brands coming left and right just wanting me to do things, and everybody wants me to do something, and nobody wants to pay for it. I want to reduce all of that down to something that feels like it’s a mutual exchange. Everyone is able to get something out of it and everybody appreciates the experience they’re getting from it.

By reducing that all the way down on BBS and getting very clear on what the community is and how I work with the brands, that opens up a lot of opportunity for me to then be able to, again, write the book that I really want to write, to focus on my agency. We’ll continue to produce direct consumer marketing events and activations for brands, but now I have the opportunity to work with other brands outside the industry.

I do want to take my time to make sure that as we transition out of this, that plan develops into something solid. And when we’re ready, we’re ready. The ideas of Black Bourbon Society can be translated into anything. Like I tell my brands that I work with all the time, “Your why is strong enough; the how doesn’t really matter, the what doesn’t really matter.” So we could be Black Bourbon Society and we could launch a classroom partnership with William Sonoma and it will make sense, you know? Or we could do a series of spirits travel and become a spirits travel agency and it will make sense because the why is still strong enough. But the what, and how we execute the what, is what’s changing.

What does this mean for BBS members come January 1?

They’ll know by then but probably not a day before. Definitely not today. This is something that I’m still being still with. And, again, I just finished my media kit. So this is something that I’m sending out to my current sponsors. All my colleagues in the industry that I’ve worked with for eight and a half years, they’re all freaking out. They’re like, “Bye! We didn’t get a chance to work with you.” They think I just retired. I didn’t retire, but we are transitioning into something. Let me show you what we are working with and how you can still work with me because you’re still my friends. I still love you. I still want to come to Kentucky. This is not over. This is just change.

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