Introduction
Our lives began on different continents but converged in Italy on a single summer evening, and we’ve been together ever since. Today, we are husband and wife, business partners, and best friends. Professionally, we are olive farmers, extra-virgin olive oil producers, importers, marketers, salespeople, and now authors. We are obsessed with extra-virgin olive oil and have carved out a space for ourselves in this ancient industry. The world of olive oil can feel exclusive, pretentious, and, at times, intimidating. However, at the end of the day, it’s just a bunch of farmers, olive oil lovers, and food enthusiasts looking to share their work with the world!
Before we started our business, EXAU (see page 11), we were just consumers who felt there was a lot of mystique around olive oil. When we entered the industry, things didn’t get much clearer. Therefore, we know firsthand how opaque the olive oil industry can feel for consumers. Our big shift arrived in 2016. We felt underwhelmed with the lackluster selection of olive oil at our local grocery store in Oakland, California. The extra-virgin olive oil selection was sparse, and we only saw Tuscan and Sicilian oils—Calabrian oils were nowhere to be found. It seemed like all the grocery buyers were purchasing from the same importers and distributors.
Missing the extra-virgin olive oil from home, Giuseppe called his mom in Calabria to see if she could ship him vats (yes, literally) of their family’s extravirgin olive oil. She enthusiastically agreed. We told some of our friends, and they immediately asked if she could send them oil as well. But then Giuseppe had an idea. He called his mom back and told her not to ship any oil—instead, he suggested, we would start our own olive oil company. Initially, Giuseppe wanted to build a start-up with outside funding and advisors—the whole nine yards. We were going to catapult our way onto the US market, showing up on thousands of grocery store shelves. He created a business plan and was getting ready to start pitching to investors. But then he looked at his family’s olive groves and had a change of heart. Raising outside capital would mean scaling quickly, essentially stripping us of one of our core values: producing oil using just our family trees. We didn’t have enough trees to keep pace with start-up life, which meant we had to start really small—and sometimes, that’s for the best.
Skyler was not immediately convinced about this whole olive oil business. She had a steady career in the design industry and was on her way to becoming a fully licensed architect in the state of California. In fact, the thought of pulling in outside investors compounded with entering a new industry and the many unknowns ahead terrified her. But she wasn’t finding joy in her career path anymore, and deep down she knew it was time to try something new. And to be honest, starting an olive oil company sounded kind of fun, not to mention romantic. So why not give it a go?
Over the next year, we plotted, schemed, and researched ways to start an olive oil business across two continents on a shoestring budget. In September 2017 we traveled to Giuseppe’s hometown of Le Castella, Calabria, and founded the company we would eventually call EXAU Olive Oil. In the beginning, it didn’t have a name, but we knew exactly how we wanted the brand to feel and which space it would occupy in the olive oil industry. Our product had to be delicious, our production practices needed to be transparent, and the business would need to honor Giuseppe’s family traditions. We wanted consumers to feel as though they were picking up and tasting a little piece of Calabria, a unique sensation so special, they couldn’t get anywhere else. We also felt it was incredibly important for us to explain the process of producing extra-virgin olive oil in an approachable way, providing consumers with educational resources in addition to the oil itself—we believe you can’t have one without the other. As we dug further, it became clear that the only way to create this experience was for us to go through the entire production process ourselves—from harvesting the olives to milling them to importing the oil. This allowed us to share our firsthand experience with our customers, and their reactions were incredible.
While we knew what we were creating, our product still didn’t have a name. Thankfully, later that fall, after all the oil was sealed in tanks, Giuseppe bolted up off the couch and exclaimed, “
Ex albis ulivis!” This phrase, Latin for “from white olives,” means the olives were harvested young or early while still unripe, which produces a superior oil. Skyler promptly declared that it was entirely too long to be a business name—so we shortened it to EXAU. After a few clicks on the computer, we had all the domains purchased, and boom—we had a brand.
In our first two years of running EXAU, we often felt like we were standing in front of a curtain, the heavy red velvet kind you see in theaters. Behind that curtain were all the beautiful secrets of the olive oil industry, but, unfortunately, we “outsiders” weren’t allowed backstage. We didn’t know any professional olive oil producers, we didn’t fully understand the olive oil industry associations, and the existing olive oil shops and importers weren’t exactly willing to help. In short, we didn’t have the privilege of tapping into preexisting relationships to find any guidance or access. We eventually found out that the world of olive oil is tiny, and everyone knows everyone. If you’re not on the inside, it’s easy to feel excluded. At the time, this felt off-putting and made us angry. But we’re incredibly stubborn. We doubled down, certain that we were supposed to be in the olive oil business. We eventually learned which rope to pull to lift that figurative curtain, but we had to do the pulling ourselves.
Thankfully, behind that curtain was a group of kind and very talented people. They’re passionate about their work and have a strong desire to protect the integrity of their industry. They’re also incredibly busy. Unfortunately, this often translates to an appearance of pretentiousness and disinterest. But, as we discovered, that’s not the case at all. Producers, brand owners, and olive oil professionals care deeply about their consumers; the industry is just a little behind the times. It’s a very old-school industry that struggles to connect with a younger generation, and with the endless stream of social media platforms and competition for the most eye-catching headlines, it can feel hard for olive oil professionals to find their place in the modern world. To be fair, they’re used to dealing with trees that are hundreds of years old, so they’re accustomed to a slower pace.
This amounts to an industry that can feel opaque to its customers. We even believe that many younger producers are themselves struggling with that curtain we worked so hard to lift. But that’s why we wrote this book. We want to provide you with context, information, and a starting point. This is your rope—now, pull.
Copyright © 2023 by Skyler Mapes and Giuseppe Morisani. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
