Meet Gretchen Skedsvold

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Gretchen Skedsvold a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Gretchen, thanks for sharing your insights with our community today. Part of your success, no doubt, is due to your work ethic and so we’d love if you could open up about where you got your work ethic from?
I was raised on a farm in North Dakota and both my parents were self-employed. My dad was a farmer and also a volunteer EMT and my mom was a stay-at-home mom when I was little, gardening and canning and sewing to help make ends meet and then worked at a tax preparation business part-time, bought the business, and eventually became a financial advisor. My parents are DIYers and are interested in lots of different things so that naturally rubbed off on me. As a kid growing up my parents would pay me to paint the house, hoe weeds in the shelter belt (the trees planted around farm houses as a wind break), clean the house, put up fencing in the pasture and pick rock out of the fields so I’m no stranger to manual labor. I also took 10 years of Suzuki method piano lessons from age 7-17 which taught me how to work toward a goal, break a big challenge into small steps, practice repetitions until the task comes naturally, and how to polish a piece (of work) to make it beautiful.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
I own a small wine, beer & spirits shop in Minneapolis. We sell mostly wines but also beers and spirits made by small independent winemakers, brewers and distillers. We like to think of ourselves as the indie record shop of liquor stores. We’re a mom and pop shop supporting mom and pop producers of alcoholic (and non-alcoholic) beverages. A lot of our wines fall in the “natural” category, a loosely defined category that typically includes wines that are made with grapes grown without the use of industrial pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers (sometimes certified organic or biodynamic but indie farmers don’t always go through the red tape of getting certified), wines that are spontaneously fermented (without the addition of commercially obtained yeasts) and wines that do not include chemical additives, enzymes, flavor enhancers, colorants, etc. We’re proud of our kind, helpful, knowledgable staff who are all dedicated to the same principles we are, our carefully selected inventory (we drink everything we sell–if we wouldn’t drink it ourselves it’s not on the shelves), the non-intimidating vibe of our shop and our dedication to people and principle, not just profit. We do weekly in-store wine tastings and have a very successful wine club.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
Curiosity, grit and faith. 1. Curiosity: I like to try new things and learn about new things—I think it’s that many-interested nature I mentioned before that I got from my parents. When faced with an idea or opportunity or challenge my curiosity usually wins out over the part of me that thinks about all the ways it might not work out or all the things that could go wrong. Ever since I can remember I’ve had this feeling that I’m not really fully in control of the direction my life takes so I might as well just try stuff and see what happens even if it doesn’t seem to fit into some grand plan of where I see my life going.
2. Grit: I’m stubborn and don’t like to give up. And if someone tells me I can’t accomplish something my reflex is “Oh yeah? Watch me.”
3. Faith: This isn’t a religious faith, more a faith and trust in the goodness of people and a trust that even when things get really bad they won’t stay that way forever. If you just keep going, things will eventually improve.

Okay, so before we go we always love to ask if you are looking for folks to partner or collaborate with?
I’m looking to collaborate with people interested in creative marketing, wine education, experiences like travel and special curated events as well as creative solutions to more localized wine production, reusable packaging and other ways to reduce the carbon footprint of wine retail.

Contact Info:

Image Credits
Linda Zimmermann

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