DYNAMIC DUO

Lake Forest residents Ryan and Angele Close met 500 miles away, at the University of Western Ontario. He was all about business and she was set on a career in clinical psychology.

After graduation, Ryan became a sales and marketing pro—the guy, he says, “who went in when things weren’t going well and had to quickly find ways to clean up the mess, kind of like Winston ‘The Wolf ’ Wolf in Pulp Fiction.” Angele brought her skills to college counseling centers, a family health team, and private practice.

Tiring of the corporate grind in Toronto, Ryan joined an incubator in his home town of Waterloo, looking to identify a side hustle that might lead to greater career satisfaction.

“I met a couple of engineers who were working to develop a cocktail maker but needed someone to find funding and figure out a way to bring the concept to market,” recalls Ryan. “So, with Angele’s blessing, I took the leap of faith, quit my corporate job, and started working without a salary. After five years of literally hand-building prototypes in basements and garages, I decided to move the business to the U.S. prior to launching and continued to build the brand with a new team.”

With investors and partners based in the Chicago area, Ryan and Angele opted to live on the North Shore.

“Many of the people I’d met in Chicago all seemed to agree that settling my family in the North Shore area would be best because of the high-quality schools and the safety of the neighborhoods,” says Ryan. “We lived in Winnetka when we first moved to Illinois in August 2019 and hunkered down through the pandemic months. Once we realized we were going to stay, we started house hunting at a time that was a seller’s market, with very little inventory. I started looking outside of Winnetka after negotiating with my kids and finally convincing them to change school districts for a bigger house and yard for our dogs.”

The family’s new home is a French Country style residence designed by Jerome Cerny Associates in “We bought it knowing we would fully renovate the backyard area and basement, which we’re in the throes of now,” says Ryan. “We’re making it our dream home as we love Lake Forest and plan on staying around.”

The couple’s three middle-school kids have become fans of the smoothies at Hometown Coffee and Angele has been conducting classes at the Gorton Center. Her latest, The Mindful Moms Group, debuts in the new year.

“The class,” she says “will provide a safe and sacred space for moms to learn about matrescence— which refers to the identity transformation all moms go through—and provide for real conversations and meaningful reflections to offer the kind of support that helps women thrive to their fullest.”

And that side hustle Ryan went looking for?

The Bartesian—a Nespresso-like device equipped with four glass reservoirs for rum, whisky, vodka, and tequila that produces the perfect cocktail from a capsule containing all the necessary ingredients—has taken off.

“Using Shopify, we’ve driven well over $100 million in sales in three years to our bartesian.com site,” explains Ryan. “We also have a strong commercial business, positioned in the suites and concession stands at most of the major league sports stadiums and arenas. And we have partnerships with major hotel chains— Radisson, Choice, and Hyatt. So, there are multiple areas where folks can get introduced to our product and find out for themselves why we have over 4,000 5-star reviews on Amazon and thousands more across multiple platforms.”

Cheers to that!