Meet Our Founder
Andrew Ciss-Cuadros Huamán, CPA, CGA
Canadian born, Ottawa native and Toronto convert, by way of the Peruvian Andes and Senegal's Petite Côte!
Our founder, Andrew, comes from a uniquely diverse background - his mother of the indigenous Quechua people of Ayacucho, Peru, and late father of the Serer People of Mbour, Senegal.
Andrew has spent his career within the beverage alcohol industry since 2011, and has worn many hats in this time - from being on the frontlines stocking shelves, to finally becoming a seasoned Chartered Professional Accountant (CPA) contributing to the development of beverage alcohol policy and programs within Ontario!
Read his LinkedIn article about his career journey here!
The Idea
The idea of Wine Box Social was sparked one day in 2020 during the heights of the Covid-19 pandemic, when Andrew was looking for some design inspiration for an art project. As one does, he hit up several of his local hardware stores to see what they had to offer, only to be met with inventory outages, high prices, and/or inventory available that did not lend the artistic it-factor he was looking for.
Investing in Mental Health & Self-care
With the pandemic leading to many public closures, it became increasingly important for one to take the initiative to invest in, be it time and/or money, something that genuinely makes them happy in the interest of maintaining mental health. Andrew took his own advice and invested in his own version of self-care: purchasing all the tools he had been procrastinating in purchasing for years, in order to gain some satisfaction from making something from his own hands.
Economic Gap in the Market
While Andrew had his business hat on, he began to question why, such a valuable resource as solid natural wood, especially being a byproduct of the decadent wine industry, did not have any type of formal recycling process? WBS started off in a downtown Toronto condo located in the CityPlace neighbourhood, during the Covid-19 global pandemic. Andrew identified a local supply source of wooden wine crates that would be otherwise disposed of within the Ontario wine industry he works in, that could be mutually beneficial on many fronts.
Birth of a Social Enterprise
He believed in this idea so much that he was determined to bring this circular economy to fruition for the good of Ontario. He boot-strapped the business, from the business model, to woodworking, to incorporation, to accounting, to finally leveraging technology with WBS' customer-focused website design - and the rest is now history!
"Our Mission - making the Ontario wine industry more sustainable and diverse 1-box-at-a-time!"
- Andrew