Business Women Awards 2022
Achievement Honoree Manya Rubinstein, Industrious Spirit Co.
NEW YORK CITY NATIVE Manya Rubinstein is CEO of Industrious Spirit Co. in Providence, leading a like-minded team and creating sustainably sourced vodka, gins and bourbons. It all happens in a city where Rubinstein has found her groove and set roots.
Originally, Rubinstein suspected publishing was her calling. After graduating from Brown University in 2001 with a bachelor’s degree in comparative literature, she landed a job at the magazine Vanity Fair in New York City, her hometown.
But something back in Rhode Island kept tugging at her.
In Providence, she found kinship in the tight-knit, creative community she discovered – artisans of all kinds working and sharing ideas around metals, glass and foods. Once she graduated and left the state, though, “I was missing this amazing energy that I just started getting to know here,” Rubinstein said.
She missed that energy to such an extent that she began coming back to Rhode Island on weekends.
“It was its smallness,” she said of the Ocean State. “If you wanted to talk to someone about doing something, you can because we all know each other. It doesn’t take too many steps to accomplish your goals. I like this sense of possibility and this collaborative nature.”
Rubinstein became active in Providence’s Steel Yard industrial artists’ and makers’ community, which offers courses and residencies for artists in mediums such as ceramics and metals. She served on its board from 2014-2019.
Through this creative Providence community, Rubinstein met Dan Neff, a ceramicist and welder with a passion for fermentation who had also worked in food service. He wanted to open a distillery.
Rubinstein had been restarting some consulting work when Neff shared his vision with her. “Dan and I started working together and I became intrigued,” she said. Now partners, the two found their chief financial officer Doug Randall, a Columbia Business School classmate of Rubinstein’s, and they started hatching plans for Industrious Spirit.
Rubinstein especially loved the idea of a distillery as a gathering place. The process of creating sustainable spirits and honoring the creative people who previously inhabited the former Providence Steel and Iron Co. complex where Industrious Spirit is located – it had been artists’ studios – took the artisanal theme full circle.
Rubinstein, Neff and Randall took their time opening the business, discussing philosophy, raising capital and managing construction. The space was completely renovated.
