If Texas Woman's University Regents could have toasted the record-breaking gift it has gotten from an alumna, they might have "clinked" a round of brightly-colored plastic BuzzBallz.
Merrilee Kick, the CEO and founder of BuzzBallz, has given her alma mater $30 million, a gift that university leaders said will transform the young College of Business.
The gift was announced at the TWU Board of Regents meeting on Thursday afternoon. University officials said the gift will fund an endowed chair in the business college as well as fast-track the construction of a new College of Business building on campus.
Kick met with press at the Carrollton BuzzBallz plant, where the ready-to-drink cocktails are made and bottled in their patented round bottles. The production floor was bustling, and a conveyor belt was carrying scores of cheery red bottles toward a sorting mechanism. The machine put the bottles in single file, where they headed toward the next step in the packaging process. Upstairs, Kick waited near a fully-stocked bar, where a giant silver BuzzBallz spun in slow, smooth circles.
Kick said her reasons for sharing her wealth are pretty simple.
"My parents were teachers," she said. "They were educators. Their parents were teachers. To me, education is something I'm passionate about. Some people are passionate about dogs or cats, or the homeless, or whatever, you know? And if you have some money, you want to do something good with your money, right? And to me it makes sense."
Kick said she also thinks back to the days when she started BuzzBallz on a shoestring bank loan, running around the plant with her children filling bottles, wiping them off by hand, and packing pallets. She remembers being a busy working mother, trying to create something from what felt like scratch in "Big Alcohol," an industry dominated by men.
"You know, I do a lot of women-promotion types of things," Kick said. "Texas Woman's University gave me the opportunity to encapsulate a business plan that I could pitch to investors, and it helped me in a time where I didn't have any money. Education is the key to freedom. It gave me the freedom to do what I wanted to do, and financial stability."
She also said that TWU, which is in the midst of it's most ambitious capital campaign ever, called on her for help. "Dream Big" is the TWU campaign that set out to raise $125 million for the university's 125th anniversary. Prior to Kick's commitment, the campaign had raised $120,001,553. The gift completes and exceeds the campaign's goals.
Kick's gift doubles the $15 million donation the Doswell Foundation made to the university a year ago.
“This gift affords us an opportunity to shine a huge light on the innovation and business acumen women bring to the table in our globally competitive economy,” Texas Woman’s Chancellor Carine Feyten said.
“I am doubly pleased that this extraordinary gift comes from Merrilee, a shining example of our pioneering spirit and an alumna who has risen to the level of entrepreneurial titan.”
A globe trotter takes a risk
Kick was born in Greenville, but she also claims Montana as a second home.
"I'm a Texas girl," Kick said. "My parents are from Texas and they were finishing college when they had me. And then we moved to Montana. I went to school in Montana, college in Montana and then moved down to Dallas."
Kick started her career as a systems engineer for Ross Perot's EDS. She met her husband at the company, though he worked in finance. They had children, and when wanderlust struck, Kick said her husband moved them to South Africa for nearly four years. While Kick didn't work during that time, she did create a nonprofit organization to train women to work in film and television.
While living in Dallas, Kick had also worked in film and television, and said she was heavily involved in Women in Film Dallas. She helped raise $3 million for the South African nonprofit. Then her husband's job took the family to Stockholm, Sweden. Kick worked for Ericsson, a global information and communications tech company. She also started work in voice acting, and did "thousands of voiceovers for, like, Absolut vodka, Sprite, the U.S government, the Army, you know, all those kinds of things that needed an English language voiceover."
Kick said she also wrote screenplays during the family's five years in Sweden.
Kick and her family came back to Dallas, and Kick went to work for TSNRadio, where she had both full-time and part-time roles between 2002 and 2010. But media pays poorly while keeping a demanding pace, Kick said, and she needed a better paycheck to raise her two small children then. In 2004, she also started teaching at Plano West Senior High. And as is the tradition for public schools in Texas, Plano got as much expertise from Kick as possible.
"I taught five different subjects for them," she said. "I taught business law, international business marketing, sports and entertainment marketing. I taught business computer systems, too, you know, because I used to do that, too."
Plano ISD offered its teachers a professional development deal: get a master's degree and the district would help cover the cost if teachers studied at a local college. Kick knew she didn't want to study education administration, though. Instead, she decided to get an MBA. After all, she was teaching business-centered electives.
"I convinced them to bend the rules so that I could get an MBA instead of a degree in administration. And so I was the first one to push that through," Kick said.
She shopped around Dallas for a school. There was Southern Methodist University, with it's celebrated MBA program. But TWU would admit her without requiring Kick to take the GMAT, a graduate school exam that focuses on management. Kick liked that idea.
"The GMAT would require me to be really good at calculus, and I hadn't taken calculus in years," she said.
She enrolled at TWU and became a Pioneer.
A master's thesis that would go down smooth ... if investors would bite
Kick was still teaching at Plano West while working on her masters.
She said her million-dollar idea occurred to her when she was on the job, sort of.
"I had a cocktail with me," Kick said. "I was grading papers by the pool."
She also had a trinket from Sweden by the pool: an Orrefors crystal ball candle holder.
"I'm grading papers by the pool and trying to think of what I wanted to do my master's degree on," Kick said. "I wanted to do something in the spirits industry because what survives in good times and bad, you know? Booze. For sure. So I came up with the idea to create something that looked like that [Orrefors] container. And I thought that would be kind of interesting to make a party ball, you know?"
The name "party balls" was already taken by the sphere-shaped party kegs, and Kick said she contacted the legal team at MillerCoors, who had the product, to ask if she could license the name.
MillerCoors responded: "Not only no, but hell no," Kick said.
She workshopped product names with her high school students.
"The students came up with 'schwasted balls' and 'kickballs,' you know, all kinds of funny names," Kick said. "And and then we settled on BuzzBallz because I thought, you know, these balls will get you buzzed. It was something that looked like what it was, but I can't say the word 'buzz' because I can't allude to getting drunk or anything like that because that's against (Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau) rules."
She finally settled on a name: BuzzBallz.
"The 'z' on the end is at an angle, because it makes you tipsy. Get it? Tipped 'z?'" Kick still grins at the pun.
Unfortunately, Kick said, she couldn't get a business loan. She was rejected by every bank in the region. Kick said her impression was that her being a woman, and with no experience in the spirits industry and even less money to seed a business made her too risky for lenders. She also didn't have a distributor for her product.
Nine months later, Opportunity Bank, located in Richardson, asked her if she was still looking for a loan. They sent officers to the space she had rented, where there were no machines yet, but the spots where they'd sit taped off on the floor. But she had pluck and a distributor, Southern Glazer's Wine & Spirits, willing to make an initial purchase.
She got a tiny loan. Less than $200,000 — and putting her house up as collateral — and she was in business: the Carrollton-based BuzzBallz became the only woman-owned distillery/winery/brewery combo in the United States when it launched in 2009. The first pallets of product were shipped in August of 2010.
BuzzBallz eventually grew into a thriving business, largely on the stellar success of its sphere-shaped, shatter-resistant containers, which became a signature of the company’s pre-mixed cocktail product line. It was the first ready-to-drink cocktail that was sold in individual servings at stores. In Denton Walmarts, you can pick up Peach Chiller and Pineapple Colada flavors, among other. Buyers can also pick up four-packs.
Kick sold the company in May to Louisiana-based Sazerac, the world’s largest privately held spirits company, and remains BuzzBallz CEO. Industry sources said that when Kick sold her festive product to the company based in New Orleans, it was worth a billion dollars.
Kick's product will nurture future business women
Rama Yelkur, the dean of the TWU College of Business, said Kick's gift is a game changer.
"This gift is transformational for a business school," Yelkur said. "We educate primarily women, and that really gives us a very unique opportunity to prepare women business leaders for their profession. This is finance, to be ready for Wall Street and other industries, to create and generate women-owned businesses and to support student entrepreneurs. This gift allows us to grow into a leading business school primarily for women, and offer all kinds of cutting edge and innovative programs. It just changes the trajectory for the business school and the ability to offer all these programs."
The TWU College of Business was established in 2017. Yelkur said the college achieved the "gold standard" in accreditation in the 2022-23 academic year, when the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business granted the program credentials.
Yelkur said Kick's gift is an enormous vote of confidence for the college, which offers courses and has a presence on the Denton, Dallas and Houston campuses. Kick's gift will build a college facility on the Denton campus, and Yelkur said the endowed chair will help TWU attracted high-level talent to its business faculty. The gift will also position the university to continue offering programs to women in communities adjacent to its campuses, offering leadership training and skills.
Yelkur said she's been talking with Kick for a while now, and they found that Kick especially liked the idea of TWU's commitment to developing "grit" in its students. TWU doesn't have a hard and fast definition of grit, but Yelkur said resilience and adaptation are important in the 21st Century marketplace.
"When we talked, I asked, 'Can we establish an Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship within the College of Business that would have an entrepreneurial residence that would help? Do not entrepreneurs incubate products that would help students take their idea from conception to reality?' Merrilee was challenged in a male-dominated industry. She navigated that with grace and determination. But that can't happen to every person. We need to provide that support system to generate more women in businesses."
Kick said she's staying on as the CEO of BuzBallz for four years, which Sazerac estimates as the length of time it will take to make the conversion. Kick said she is looking forward to writing some screenplays and exploring her next venture. And she can be a presence in the TWU classroom, too, to offer mentorship and her expertise to students. She likes the idea of helping women realize their dreams. She has long found a way to plug women into new skills and confidence.
"I wouldn't call myself a women's libber, because I don't hate men, you know. I'm not that kind of person," Kick said. "Men have helped me tremendously throughout my career. It's just that women need the support."
The Board of Regents is expected to announce that TWU will name the College of Business in her honor on Friday.