An Artisan Empire: Tracia Forrest

Photography by Ryan “Fivish” Cass

Tracia Forrest

Many people play sports up until college, and then, when the realization sets in that they aren’t good enough to play at the next level, they start watching sports instead, perhaps continuing to play in work and church leagues. Tracia Forrest did play sports after college — for USA Volleyball, which, at the time, had several divisions below the national team — but hadn’t played until then. Still, she credits volleyball as being formative in her approach to work.

“When you play sports at any level, you get beat, but you don’t go home and quit,” she says. “You practice to get better. And then you play again.”

To be precise, good athletes and teams go practice; others go home and do something else, like playing video games or drinking. Forrest played for various teams for 10 years in the USVBA after finishing her degree at UCO. She is now the owner of Artisan Fine Wine and Spirits, a distribution company she founded in February 2016.

The family is from Oregon. Forrest moved to Midwest City when she was 13, went to Midwest City High School, earned a degree, taught for three years at Wheeler Elementary. For a brief time, she was in Chicago, and then she and her surgeon husband moved to Tulsa, his hometown.

“I stayed home for seven years, raising our three girls,” Forrest says. “After the divorce, I just stayed in Tulsa.”

In one of those the-big-city-is-really-a-small-town moments, her then-husband operated on John Jarboe, whose family owned one of Oklahoma’s two largest alcohol distributors and dominated the market alongside Central Liquor in Oklahoma City. (Southern Glazer’s Wine and Spirits, the largest distributor in the country with a $21 billion annual revenue, bought Jarboe after the laws changed in 2018.) The connection to Jarboe gave Forrest an in with the company, and her plan to become a pharmaceutical rep changed to wine and liquor rep.

Her stint at Jarboe lasted five years, and she still counts the family among her friends. In fact, they helped her get Artisan off the ground — but before that, she had two short-lived jobs and one more gig as a sales rep. It was at another large distributor that she learned the lessons so many women learn in male-dominated career tracks.

“I had to go through four interviews to get the job,” she says. “I didn’t realize how much staying home for those seven years would affect their perception of me as a potential employee.”

At the time, and until recently, there were no women in executive roles, but Forrest slogged on even though she recalls realizing early that there would be no advancement or greater responsibilities.

“It was a dead end for me and other women because it was a bunch of fraternity guys taking care of each other,” she says. “But I tried to have a voice, and I stood up for myself. In the end, though, I really needed to move on.”

Forrest decided it was time to work for herself while she was working as an agent for a Napa winery. Prior to the new liquor laws, Oklahoma had a four-tiered system: producer, agent, distributor, retailer/restaurant. Producers made the booze, brokers or agents represented the products in Oklahoma, distributors purchased products to sell to retailers and restaurants. Forrest was in that second tier with a handful of local companies: Thirst Wine Merchants, Premium Brands, Provisions Fine Beverage Purveyors and others, including Select, which was part of Jarboe.

Artisan was the first local broker with an out-front female owner, and predictably, Forrest heard all the naysayers. “You have to block out those voices,” she says. “You have to have the confidence — they called it insanity — to be aggressive. I was raised by mostly men, so I understood what to do, and my career had taught me what not to do.”

And then the laws changed. What consumers understood was that they’d get wine in grocery stores. But the new laws also erased the distinction between distributor and broker, which meant Forrest would need trucks and a distribution network. The transition was easier for multi-billion-dollar companies like Southern and Republic National Distributing, but the costs were problematic for small, local businesses. Forrest was one of the voices being assertive about the new laws being an opportunity, not an obstacle.

“I was saying, ‘The sky is not falling. They do this in other states!’” Forrest says. “I was told it was ‘big, dumb blonde talk’ by a few, but again, there will always be naysayers.”

She got funding for the expansion, and now, to quote her: “My goal is to dominate. I’m very competitive, and people learn that I’m laid back ’til I’m not. We acquired as many brands as we could just to have something to sell, and then we started working on building an even better portfolio.”

As if Artisan wasn’t enough, she also started Oklahoma Beverage Logistics, a company that leases trucks to smaller businesses that want to distribute in the state. Artisan now has product in roughly 75% of Oklahoma markets from Guymon to Broken Bow, per Forrest. It’s adding two new reps to cover secondary and tertiary markets in southeastern Oklahoma. It’s growing fast, and Forrest isn’t done.

“We survived the chaos of new laws and the chaos of COVID, and we’re thriving,” she says. “Now we just need to fine-tune.” •