Southern Spotlight

colleagues, has spilled onto Summerville like an open can of paint and brought some color back into all of our cheeks.

The Public Works Art Center will kick off the spring season with a fundraising gala on Friday, April 22nd. This is a wonderful opportunity to check out the space and enjoy getting dressed up while being surrounded by beautiful displays by local artists. It is also a chance to network with other Summervillians while contributing to a great cause. Community members will have the chance to learn about ways to volunteer, sponsor, or simply enjoy this space for creativity.

Riley encourages patrons to follow along on Facebook (Public Works Art Center) and Instagram (@publicworksartcenter) for more updates and opportunities on how to get involved. You can also visit on the web at www.publicworksartcenter.org to learn more. Here is your sign to take a break from the real world, surround yourself with pleasing things, and breathe in the arts of The Lowcountry this Spring! AM

March 4: Exhibition Opening 3 new exhibits! March 17: Third Thursday and Open Studios March 18: Poetry Night with Charleston Poet Laureate Marcus Amaker April 1-3: Artie the Artmobile at the Flowertown Festival April 9: Community Indigo Dye Day April 22: Creativity in Bloom” Fundraising Gala April 29: Exhibition Opening 3 new exhibits! •

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Tara Pate, the founder of Daysie Syrups, doesn’t sit around waiting for someone else to make her dreams happen, and that is most clear in her newest business pursuit. by Jessy Devereaux Mitcham

Taste Maker Daysie syrups are perfect for cocktails and coffee

Daysie Syrups was founded by dreams and fueled by coffee, with a founder who had two main goals in mind. One was to create a syrup that had an exceptional range of flavors, organic certification, and sustainable packaging. The other was to contribute to the support and growth of women-owned businesses by using her brand to showcase their products and help them reach their peak performance. These goals may sound fairly easy to obtain on paper, though that couldn’t be further from the truth. Tara knew it would take a tremendous amount of time and effort to start a business from scratch, and bringing her ideas to fruition proved to be more difficult than she anticipated, but she has never been a quitter. In fact, life threw a few curveballs her way before she had the idea for Daysie, and she wouldn’t be where she is today without them.

For Tara, there was a long period of time in her life where the traditional idea of “home” never really existed. Kevin, her husband, was an officer in the Navy, and the first eight years of their marriage were spent moving from place to place. The couple went to graduate school and then moved to San Francisco to pursue their shared dream of working for start-up companies, but after living there for four years, it still didn’t feel right. Kevin had been stationed in Charleston during his time in the military, and they both had the same destination in mind for their final trek across the country. “The Charleston area makes us feel settled in our hearts, and we feel really comfortable and at peace,” Tara says, and in January of 2020, the couple moved into their forever home in Summerville.

The Pates were ecstatic to be back in the Lowcountry. Everything was finally feeling “normal” again. But little did they know the pandemic was looming. Lockdowns began being put in to place, restaurants closed down, and Tara was furloughed from her position as a marketing director for a local restaurant group. Being out of work was a big change for her, as she had been working since she was only twelve years old, but Tara welcomed what she refers to as her “pandemic pause.” Without the pandemic, Kevin and Tara might not have taken the time to build their own at-home coffee bar. She carefully curated its contents to do her best to recreate her favorite drinks, yet never found a simple syrup that she liked. Everything on the market was loaded with too many preservatives and they left a bad taste in her mouth, literally. Tara’s final straw, and what gave her that extra push to begin Daysie, was a visit to Whole Foods Market. She was still attempting to find a coffee syrup when she was told by the kind worker that they didn’t have a single one, and she was directed towards the cocktail mixers.

Tara was fed up with the syrup industry. Using her extensive experience in marketing, she knew she could fill an obvious demand in the market. But first, she needed to talk it over with Kevin. Being unsure of how he would react to the idea of draining their savings accounts for her to chase her dreams, she was nervous about the conversation. Kevin’s response was exactly what she needed to hear. He said, “In life, we will have to make bets with our finances. Stocks, bonds, 410k, homes, etc. My best bet is on you.” With her husband’s support, Tara got to work.

Daysie was entirely self-funded by Pate’s hard work. Nights and weekends were dedicated to contract work, making as much money as she could to build her brand. When she was not working, she began experimenting in her kitchen, using whatever she could think of for her future syrup recipe. At this point, Pate knew she needed help taking the experiments from her kitchen and turning them into a plan for commercial use. She had planned from the beginning to hire women so they could support each other in their work, with her first two team members being a highly-qualified beverage formulator and a lawyer, both of which were fundamental to her success.

The success of Daysie was entirely dependent on taste, which meant countless hours were spent modifying their first few flavors to achieve the best-tasting brand on the market. It took six months to narrow down a handful of flavors that Tara felt confident in before she could move on. The next step was creating a private focus group to see which of their flavors, product labels, and brand names were the most likely to succeed. This may sound easy, but in reality, it was one of the most difficult parts of the process.

They began to search for a co-packer that could make Daysie on a larger scale than Tara was

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able to produce on her own, and found one that was capable of fulfilling all of the brand’s needs. The co-packer needed to be a certified organic facility, with the ability to do a hot fill and a quick cool to make it as efficient of a process as possible. Not everyone wants to work with a brand as new and as small as hers, but thanks to a podcast that she was listening to, Tara was able to find exactly who she needed.

Once they were able to make a plan for production, Tara had to go through the legal process for making products on a commercial level. It was here that Tara was met with extreme doubt in her abilities to make a certified organic simple syrup that was safe to consume while containing zero preservatives. On her very first attempt, she was told point-blank that it wasn’t possible. Luckily, Tara wasn’t working alone anymore and was given some great advice; Tara was encouraged to ask “Why?” when she was told something wasn’t possible, and that when the people involved in the scheduled process are met with something that hasn’t been done before, they will take the easy way out by saying “No.”

Tara learned to ask for solutions instead of accepting “No” as an answer, and with a lot of money spent tweaking the recipe even further, she was finally approved to move forward for Daysie to become a USDA-certified organic product. The correct information and certificates have to be provided for every single ingredient in a formulation, and because she had built these recipes herself, Tara was confident she would get the certification. There was a lot of time and money that went into the certification process, but it was one of the last steps in Daysie’s journey.

Tara describes the difference between the first experimental batches of Daysie as “100 times better than what I ever pulled off at home. Simple syrups imply by name that they would be simple to make. I can assure you that achieving a more nuanced taste profile is much harder, which is why we put ‘not so simple’ on our bottles.”

As Tara was looking into what it would take to turn her dream into a reality, she saw the inequalities that female entrepreneurs face when it comes to funding and resources compared to male business owners. The importance of supporting women entrepreneurs became just as important to Daysie’s