Name Selena Cuffe | ||
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Education Stanford University, Harvard Business School | ||
Selena Senora Cuffe, née Saunders (born 5 November 1975 in Culver City, California) is an African-American businesswoman. She is best known for co-founding Heritage Link Brands, LLC, the largest global importer of black produced wine, with her husband, Khary Cuffe.
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Early life and education
The only joint child of Dr. Joseph Saunders and Veronica Saunders, Cuffe was raised in the Ladera Heights – Windsor Hills community of Los Angeles County, California, United States by her mother. Cuffe’s father, Joseph, died one month before her second birthday.
Cuffe's paternal great-grandfather, J. Saunders, was born into slavery. A descendant of the Ashanti tribe of Ghana, he was freed by the Emancipation Proclamation at the age of eight. He had 16 children, the youngest of whom was Cuffe’s grandfather, Titus Saunders Sr., a de-segregationist of the Georgia public school system who founded the state’s first integrated school transportation system. Both of Cuffe’s paternal grandparents graduated from college in the 1920s.
Cuffe graduated with a BA in International Relations from Stanford University. During college, she became a member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. Cuffe also holds a Master of Business Administration, with honors, from the Harvard Business School and is certified, with merit, by the Wine and Spirits Educational Trust. Selena is Vice President Emeritus of the Harvard Business School Alumni Board, and she currently serves on Stanford University's Bing Overseas Studies Program Advisory Council.
Early career
Early in her career, Cuffe worked for United Airlines. During her tenure at the airline, her responsibilities included territorial sales, the promotion of new routes, and business development initiatives related to united.com and the launch of online travel websites, Hotwire and Orbitz.
She received her marketing training from the Procter & Gamble Company in Cincinnati, Ohio, where she served as Assistant Brand Manager for the Pringles brand,. Her primary responsibility was managing marketing plans for the Brazil and Mexico markets.
In her final position before founding Heritage Link Brands, LLC, Selena was a Director for the Council on International Educational Exchange (CIEE), overseeing the promotion of student and work exchanges for 50,000+ people worldwide. She left CIEE in January 2007 to work for Heritage Link Brands, LLC full-time.
Heritage Link Brands
While on an unrelated business trip to South Africa in September 2005, Cuffe decided to visit the first annual Soweto Wine Festival in Johannesburg, organised by the Cape Wine Academy. There, she met vintners from the Seven Sisters winery, one of the only black-owned wineries in South Africa. The Seven Sisters were having difficulty exporting to the United States and finding a distributor in their local market. At the same festival Cuffe found that out of South Africa’s $3-billion wine industry, less than two percent was owned by blacks. Seeing the inequality – blacks made up over 80 percent of the country’s population – and wanting to help the indigenous vintners she had encountered, Cuffe began to craft the idea Heritage Link Brands, LLC.
Heritage Link Brands was founded in October 2005. Cuffe remained with the Council on International Educational Exchange while she financed the new company with her savings and credit cards. In 2006 she brought M'hudi, the first black owned family vineyard in South Africa, post-apartheid into the company’s wine portfolio. In January 2007, Cuffe left her job to run Heritage Link Brands, LLC. In the following month, February, the wines were first launched in a test market with Whole Foods Market.
That spring, Heritage Link Brands Wine Club and Shop were established, and TIME magazine featured Cuffe and her company in September 2007, exactly two years after Cuffe visited the Soweto Wine Festival. Heritage Link Brands wine can now be found in over 40 states. The company also imports wines from the Fair Trade certified community of Koopmanskloof (producing under the label One World). One World holds the distinction of being the first Fair Trade certified wine to be served onboard any US airline.
Heritage Link Brands has since expanded its horizontal and vertical presence within the wine industry. In 2015, Cuffe began importing wine from France to produce the house red and white wine for the musical Waitress, Broadway's first ever, all-female creative production team in history. Tickets for the world premiere production sold out. Heritage Link Brands also produces the house wine for Broadway plays, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and War Paint.
In 2016, Cuffe negotiated exclusive rights to import award-winning Brazilian wine producer Casa Valduga, home to the largest sparkling wine cellar in South America and famously listed as one of 1,000 Places to Visit Before You Die.
In South Africa, in partnership with Burdell Properties, Selena Cuffe negotiated interest acquisition of Silkbush Mountain Vineyards, a 138-hectare (341 acre) property in Breedekloof, 90km east of Cape Town, South Africa, in the famous Western Cape Winelands. Its cultivars, planted on sloped hillsides, up to 700m above sea level, include: Cabernet Sauvignon (26.97 ha), Pinotage (12.85 ha), Shiraz (12.81 ha), Merlot (7.26 ha), Cabernet Franc (4.89ha), Malbec (3.55ha), Petit Verdot (3.95ha), Viognier (3.09 ha), Petit Syrah (2.59 ha), Pinot Noir (2.2ha), Grenache Noir (1.76 ha), Semillon (1.5ha), Sauvignon Blanc (1.5ha) and Mourvedre (1.35ha).
Personal life
A mother of three young children, Selena is married to fellow co-founder of Heritage Link Brands, Khary Cuffe a graduate of Harvard University's Graduate School of Business and John F. Kennedy School of Government. Khary’s parents emigrated from Jamaica to the United States in the 1960s. His maternal uncle is Derrick F. Kellier, Jamaica's Minister of Agriculture.