What Mélanie Masarin Is Buying Right Now: Pucci Skirts, Steak Knives, and Vintage Balenciaga

glamour.com:

hasn't yet heard of the , but when I mention it to the founder and CEO of —a herbaceous, non-alcoholic apéritif that “tastes like summer on the rocks”—she says she can immediately relate.

Masarin, who currently lives in California but grew up in Lyon and spent her summers in the South of France, launched Ghia in 2020, two weeks before the pandemic shut everything down.

The timing wasn't  ideal. Masarin says she‘d hoped to debut the drink in restaurants across the United States, but instead pivoted to launch online and on Instagram, where were bubbling, and Ghia, with its squiggly burgundy typeface, took off.Masarin says the brand was inspired by the Mediterranean aperitivo culture that she grew up with; the drink itself riffs off the bitter-sweet flavors of the Italian amaro with a combination of Japanese yuzu, lemon balm, orange, and bergamot. “I was always cooking with my grandma, and my mother and grandmother were always making drinks, but I never realized how big of an impact it had on my life until I moved to the United States.”The idea to create a non-alcoholic apéritif came to Masarin while she was freelancing in 2019; she previously worked at leading offline and experiential strategy for the beauty brand, and before that spent almost three years at (now DIG) as its creative director and head of marketing.

It was at Glossier, though, where she found herself so busy with work “that she stopped drinking without noticing.” At events, she remembers people commenting about that, calling her “boring” and fueling a kind of social pressure “to always have an alcoholic drink in hand to belong.” When someone suggested she create something herself instead of “complaining that there was never anything else to drink,” she.