She skipped an MBA to build a canned-wine company with her husband

Leitner-Waldman, now 39, had worked at Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, and the Global Partnership for Education at the World Bank. She loved wine and wanted to solve a simple problem: how to enjoy a glass without opening a whole bottle. In 2013, while still at the World Bank, she also began examining the environmental cost of wine packaging and distribution. She said that for bottles priced below $25, shipping and packaging often cost more than the wine itself.

The couple considered bag-in-box packaging but worried that its materials could not be recycled everywhere. Aluminum cans, by contrast, fit existing recycling systems and the growing demand for single servings. Leitner-Waldman developed Archer Roose on the side, then left her job in the summer of 2015, after securing an initial supply chain and distributor. The company launched first with boxed wine; cans followed, and sales began in 2017. The founders put in savings intended for her MBA and raised $350,000 from friends and family in 2016.

Her husband, David Waldman, proposed sourcing wine internationally and shipping it to the United States in flexitanks for packaging and distribution. They focused on Chile, tasting wines under $25 and tracing the bottles they liked back to their producers. Luca Hodgkinson agreed to work with the fledgling company after many winemakers declined to partner with a brand using alternative packaging.

Product quality became a point of disagreement with investors, Leitner-Waldman said. She believed customers would not make canned wine a repeat purchase unless it tasted good. The company investigated how wines interact with can liners, collaborating with Cornell food science professor Gavin Sacks and supporting dedicated research. In 2022, Constellation Brands took a minority stake, offering what Leitner-Waldman called validation for a business that did not fit familiar industry categories.

Leitner-Waldman is CEO and her husband is board chairman; they decided only one would work full time at the company so employees would not report to both spouses. Archer Roose has 15 to 20 employees, works with five winemakers worldwide and operates fully remotely. Elizabeth Banks joined in 2021 as chief creative officer and co-owner. The company plans to add lower-alcohol-by-volume options in 2027 and share its intellectual property to help grow the alternative-wine-format category.