Why friendship can be a valuable business asset
People often ask Michelle Kauczka and me how we met, which seems an obvious question. But that question asks so much more. How did two women with wildly different personalities, communication styles and ways of moving through the world decide to open a wine bar together?
The truth is we spent years orbiting one another before we became friends and eventually business partners. In many ways, our story mirrors the very thing that inspired the bar’s name.
Sonder is the realization that every person around us is living a life as vivid and complex as our own. For us, we simplify this to mean “journey,” the winding paths we travel that shape who we become.
Michelle and I arrived at this moment from very different directions, but our journey was similar. Like many women in this industry, we believed hard work was the answer to everything. We hustled. We tried to outwork everyone around us, convinced that if we cared more and worked longer hours, we’d eventually earn the respect we deserved. Most women can relate to that mentality.
Michelle built her career in wine distribution, education and sales. I never planned on a life in hospitality. Once here, I came up on the restaurant side in ownership, food, operations and finance — the thousand daily decisions that keep a business alive.
Ironically, we’d actually met at a Christmas party years before we became friends. It was likely our first public outing post-partum, trying to drink as much wine and talk to as many adults as we could. Five years later, we crossed paths again at a birthday party. Our daughters, those same babies from that Christmas party all those years before, had become best friends. I guess in many ways, motherhood brought us together. Or maybe, like so many friendships in adulthood, the timing was finally right.
Finding meaningful friendships in your forties is a foreign, almost radical idea. Finding one while raising children, building a career and navigating entrepreneurship feels nearly impossible. But we became fast friends — the kind of friends who could spend hours talking about anything. Pretty quickly, those conversations became Sonder.
Sonder came together organically. I understood the restaurant market and had been quietly carrying around the idea of opening a wine bar for years. Michelle possessed something I didn’t: an incredible depth of wine knowledge and a genuine passion for sharing it.
For decades, the wine industry has felt exclusive. The language and culture can feel inaccessible and the environment is overwhelming. In short, wine can be intimidating. Michelle and I wanted to challenge that. We wanted a place where someone doing a blind tasting while studying for a sommelier exam could sit next to someone ordering their first glass of orange wine and both would feel equally welcome. We wanted to build a space where questions are encouraged, learning is optional and trying something new can feel fun. One of our first conversations about Sonder was that we wanted it to be a library for wine.
The irony is that Michelle and I could not be more different. We communicate differently. We solve problems differently. We show appreciation differently.
And yet those differences are what make our partnership work. Where one of us sees details, the other sees the bigger picture. One of us pushes, the other pauses. Where one is stressed by urgency, the other sees calm. One of us leads with logic, the other leads with instinct. We’ve learned that successful partnerships aren’t built on sameness. They’re built on trust.
Opening a business isn’t romantic. Friendship, an underrated business asset, carried us through. It creates honesty and accountability. It allows difficult conversations to happen without damaging the relationship underneath. Perhaps, most importantly, it reminds you why you started in the first place.
What brought Michelle and me together as friends was mutual respect, but what kept us together was making time for one other. It was long conversations that turned strangers into friends, mothers meeting in between soccer pick-ups and family dinners, friends celebrating milestones and showing up at a moment’s notice. We were two women who couldn’t be more different becoming lifelong friends and business partners. That’s exactly the community we want to build at Sonder.
Maybe that’s what being a female entrepreneur, a mother and a woman in her forties teaches you — how to trust yourself enough to embrace the detours and to recognize that sometimes the most meaningful journeys are the ones you never planned to take at all.
Jillian Schenzel and Michelle Kauczka are co-owners of Sonder, 90 Cannon St., Charleston.
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