Jamila Conley opened WeRise Wines with a vision: highlight wines from diverse and underrepresented winemakers. The idea was inspired by a dinner party featuring Black women winemakers, which came at a pivotal time for Conley.
Previously working in tech, she was considering a career change motivated by a desire to create greater impact after the events of 2020, including the killing of George Floyd. As she explored different ways she could drive more meaningful impact, both in the role she had at the time and other roles she wanted to consider, nothing was grabbing her. The dinner party opened her eyes to the underrepresentation of Black winemakers in the industry, sparking her idea for WeRise Wines.
“Because my head was already in this thought of how I could drive impact, what came together was my love for wine and passion for impact around diversity and inclusion,” she explained. “I started thinking, is there something I could do here?”
Conley started having conversations and working on how to turn her idea into a business. Our Accounting and Business Consulting Program helped her shape the plan. This program offers Seattle-based businesses and nonprofits free, personalized one-on-one counseling in multiple areas like accounting, marketing, tax compliance, and more.
For Conley, the ABC Program helped her figure out where to start and navigate the process as she worked to open WeRise Wines. She used a business development consultant who helped her with the process of opening a business. An accounting consultant helped set up her books, which was very helpful since she didn’t know about restaurant accounting. From there, she was able to build out the WeRise Wines brand and utilized a marketing consultant to develop her media kit and expand her marketing strategy.
“The ABC Program really helped me avoid pitfalls that I wouldn’t have known about,” Conley said. “It was just a godsend.”
She opened WeRise Wines in Belltown in December 2024. The wine bar carries wine made by people of color, women, queer, and other underrepresented winemakers. Bottles for sale feature tags identifying the winemaker. Conley says her focus on lifting these communities is about increasing diversity in the wine industry and driving generational wealth.
“It helps move these winemakers from a mom-and-pop where their winery lives and dies with them and turns it into something that can extend out as they extend their customer base,” she said. “It’s really about how we can help plant those seeds to actually help the roots of the tree grow.”
Conley designed the space to be a welcoming one, a place where people can be themselves. She wanted them to feel they could swing by and enjoy a glass of wine without a reservation. She says creating that approachable space feeds into her vision of building connections.
“I want people to feel like they really got taken care of, that they were able to learn something they didn’t know, and they felt like it was safe to come in and say, ‘I don’t know anything about wine,’” Conley explained.
In her second year as a business owner, Conley says she’s enjoyed being able to watch her vision and strategy come to life. She feels it every time a customer comes in and gets excited about the wines her bar offers.
“When people come in and get excited because they see a wine and say, ‘Oh you have a queer wine’ or ‘I didn’t know you had Indian wines,’ and seeing people have the same reaction I had when I went to that dinner is something really deeply special to me,” she said.
As part of our work to reduce the racial wealth gap, the ABC Program offers entrepreneurs with professional support while eliminating the financial burden, setting their business up for success. We offer business owners up to 10 free consulting hours in each area they need help. Services range from marketing to accounting assistance. To date, the program helped more than 1,000 businesses with more than 12,000 hours of consulting services.