Under The Hood: Alyse Borkan & Sam Naparstek From Rocco

Tell us a bit about your background, how you decided to jump into entrepreneurship and the story behind starting Rocco.

Alyse Borkan: Sam and I spent a combined 15+ years at startups and grew up the ranks until we felt ready to start our own. While Sam was leading product at Away, he visited a number of fridge factories. Surprisingly, there are many manufacturing similarities between fridges and suitcases – they’re both big hollow pieces of metal. While he was there, he realized there hadn’t been innovation in the wine fridge category in decades. 

He’s a wine drinker himself but had never actually been able to get a wine fridge because they were too bulky and ugly for his NYC rental apartments, and he couldn’t renovate his kitchen to include one. He hired an industrial designer in Italy to rethink the wine fridge from the ground up but instead reimagine it to be functional while fitting in as a piece of furniture.

That’s when I met Sam after three different people insisted we should chat because of our complementary skill sets. There was just one problem: I don’t drink alcohol. With this in mind, we decided to make it an all-in-one drinks fridge to perfectly store ALL types of beverages. The rest is history. 

What was the biggest challenge you faced with designing and producing the “V1” of Rocco?

Alyse: Once Sam and I joined forces and knew we wanted to create a more inclusive drinks fridge than just storing wine, we were faced with a few major challenges: Most wine fridges don’t get as cold as a kitchen fridge but most of the drinks other than wine that we wanted to make sure fit in the fridge needed to be ice cold: beer, soda, seltzer, water, canned cocktails, kombucha, cold brew, etc. 

We also needed to design a shelving system that both perfectly stored bigger bottles and smaller cans lying down so our Sight System could read the labels. Wine fridges usually have racks with slots spaced out to hold bigger bottles, but we needed to figure out a way to fit soda bottles, seltzer cans, skinny RTD cocktails, and more. 

What’s something about building a hardware/physical product business that you didn’t expect to be true when you first started?

Alyse: Both Sam and I have worked in physical products for most of our careers, so there weren’t too many things we found surprising with Rocco. The one thing that was shocking was just how quickly people would want the fridge! I remember telling Sam before we launched that it would take a while before people actually pulled the trigger. 

When you think about it, we were a new brand selling a product that is $1500 and it’s a real investment piece for someone’s home. They’ll have it for many, many years to come. We ended up selling out our initial inventory in just two weeks and have been on backorder ever since. We finally were able to exponentially increase our production (a bit harder to do with a product as complex as this) and we should be fully back in stock before the summer!