Photograph by Shane Van Boxtel/Image Studios
Entrepreneur Evan Freimuth is capitalizing on Wisconsin’s distinct cuisine culture — from nostalgic supper clubs to hometown breweries.
While a student at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, Freimuth founded Venture Wisconsin, a lifestyle company bent on “making Wisconsin the most interesting place to live in the Midwest” by helping hospitality businesses connect with customers.
Insight sat down with Freimuth to get the latest on the business’s current iteration: producing modern “coupon books” that offer diners and imbibers savings at restaurants, breweries, supper clubs and coffee shops across the state.
Insight: As a hardcore champion of Wisconsin culture, why did you decide to target the hospitality industry with your passport and card deck products?
Freimuth: It’s kind of a family tradition. My dad runs a small business, so he opened my mind to starting my own. I worked in family businesses and supper clubs in college. My mom was a cook; we always ate dinner together as a family. And I have this weird relationship with dive bars. My relationship with dive bars … is complicated, but they’re home and I love it. When you think of community, you think of the restaurant or the bar. The places people want to be. Hospitality was the most accessible place to start for me because I worked in the restaurant industry and knew some of these people.
The Old Fashioned Passport offers 126 supper clubs, distilleries and taverns across the state where people can cash in on a buy-one-get-one old fashioned deal. What’s in it for these participating businesses?
We try to approach it as a partnership and make it as good as possible for all parties. It’s free for them to participate. We’ve experimented with ways of giving them back more value, such as giving them free product to sell. For example, with the Brew Deck, which includes 66 different locations, half of all the decks we sell are sold through the participating breweries. That’s revenue in the breweries’ pockets. We make less on that half, but they’re getting to more people and they’re getting to a new audience that might not be on Facebook or our traditional channels of sales. We’re not only bringing in traffic, but some [establishments] are paying their rent for the month by selling the product.
You started Venture Wisconsin first as an app and then as a content platform, creating videos for unique Wisconsin businesses. Why did you pivot to physical products like the Wisconsin Brew Deck and Coffee Shop Passport?
When we transitioned out of the content game, which I hope to get back to someday, it just wasn’t a sustainable business model for my level of sales experience and relationships at the time. But I had built this brand, so now what? Once the [content creation] stopped, we launched the Old Fashioned Passport and it kept up our growth trajectory. Since then I’ve been doubling every year to year and a half, and the Old Fashioned Passport kept that trajectory up. Right now, we have four destination passport products. There’s the Wisconsin Brew Deck, Wisconsin Wine Tags, and then two passports: the Old Fashioned Passport and the Coffee Shop Passport. It’s kind of the trifecta of Wisconsin alcohol and then coffee.
Are you launching any new products this year? What’s in the works?
A couple collaborators recently approached me about partnering on two passport-style products. That’s the goal. I want to start a passport creation business because I don’t want Venture Wisconsin to have a dozen different passports you can buy. To me, it just starts to get old. But I do think that other organizations should launch passports, and we can help them with that. If a convention and visitors bureau wants a new way to engage their stakeholders, we can make this for them so they can drive brick and mortar traffic. They’ll be generating a new revenue stream, and we’ll help them create the intellectual property. Then I want to feed that back into creating an app ecosystem and see if we can fund the app development and grow through making passports for people across the country.
Why do you think Wisconsin has the potential to be the most interesting place to live in the Midwest?
Look, I don’t think we’re ever going to be the most interesting place to live in the U.S. I just don’t think that’s feasible. But I do think it is the most interesting place to live in the Midwest. We have all this weird influence and trailblazers like Harley-Davidson, Kimberly-Clark, Johnsonville and Kohler. These are real trailblazing stories. We have the most distinct culture. Wisconsin is fun. It’s the people, right? We have fun and work hard, and then party hard on the weekend. And maybe Thursday, too.
