Vanessa Royle

Vanessa Royle is the co-founder and CEO of Tilden Cocktails, a premium non-alcoholic cocktail company based in Santa Barbara, California.^[7] She co-founded the company in 2021 with Harvard Business School classmate Mariah Hilton Wood while both were enrolled in the MBA program.^[4] Tilden's flagship product, the Lacewing, won Best in Show in the non-alcoholic cocktail category at the 2023 L.A. Spirits Awards, five months after the brand's commercial launch.^[5]

Royle quit drinking alcohol in May 2020 and found the non-alcoholic beverage market lacking in options that matched the complexity and social ritual of a craft cocktail.^[7][2] She and Hilton Wood spent two years developing Tilden's first two ready-to-serve cocktails, testing hundreds of recipes and sourcing culinary-grade ingredients before launching in February 2023.^[1][5] The company sold out its pre-order before the first bottles shipped.^[1]

Before founding Tilden, Royle spent seven years in corporate communications, including four years at Cloudflare and three years at WE Communications.^[12] She holds a BA in media studies and political science from the University of California, Berkeley and an MBA from Harvard Business School.^[8] Tilden has been featured by Bloomberg, CNN, Oprah Daily, and W Magazine, and distributes to bars, restaurants, hotels, and retailers across more than half a dozen states.^[8][10]

Royle grew up in San Jose, California.^[2] As a child, she ran a door-to-door iris-selling business with her mother, pulling a wagon through the neighborhood with a binder of photographs of each variety.^[5] She attended Presentation High School, an all-girls Catholic school in San Jose, graduating in 2009.^[12]

She enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied media studies and political science, graduating in 2013.^[8] During her undergraduate years, she spent a semester abroad at Anglo-American University in Prague, studying communication and political science.^[12]

In August 2020, Royle enrolled at Harvard Business School.^[2] She had quit drinking three months earlier, in May 2020, during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic.^[7] At HBS, she was a fellow at the school and at The Capital Network, a Boston-based organization that connects entrepreneurs with investors.^[12] She completed her MBA in 2022.^[8]

WE Communications and Cloudflare (2013–2020)

After graduating from UC Berkeley, Royle joined WE Communications, a global public relations agency, as an account executive in 2013.^[12] She spent three years at the firm before moving to Cloudflare, the publicly traded internet infrastructure company, in 2016.^[12] At Cloudflare, she worked in corporate and policy communications for four years.^[12] She left in 2020 to pursue her MBA at Harvard Business School.^[8]

Tilden Cocktails (2021–present)

The idea for Tilden came to Royle one night after returning from a Harvard Business School social event where, as a non-drinker, her only option had been sparkling water.^[2] She later described the experience: sitting in a historic Boston bar at age 30, watching classmates order scotch and wine while she drank a La Croix pulled from the back of a fridge.^[2] That night, she put together a rough set of Google Slides and sent a Slack message to classmates pitching the concept of a sophisticated non-alcoholic cocktail.^[5] Mariah Hilton Wood, a lifelong non-drinker with supply-chain experience and a background in food and mixology, joined the Zoom call and the two connected immediately.^[5][4]

Royle and Hilton Wood formally began developing Tilden in 2021 during HBS's January boot camp for student business ideas.^[12] The company was originally called Jasper Cocktails.^[20] They spent the next 18 months testing hundreds of recipes, hosting dinner parties with scorecards, and sourcing culinary-grade ingredients — including a black-currant extract available from only one shop in New York.^[5][1] The prototypes were hand-crafted in Hilton Wood's kitchen.^[12] Royle served an early version of the product at her own wedding in lieu of a champagne toast.^[6]

Tilden launched its pre-order in December 2022 and sold out before the first bottles shipped in February 2023.^[1][4] The company debuted with two ready-to-serve cocktails: the Lacewing, made with cucumber, basil, lychee, and Szechuan pepper; and the Tandem, made with American oak, lapsang souchong, tart cherry, ginger, and cayenne.^[1][9] Both are sold in 750mL glass bottles at $35, contain no added sugar, no preservatives, and no adaptogens, and are heat-pasteurized.^[3][7]

Five months after launch, the Lacewing won Best in Show in the non-alcoholic cocktail category at the 2023 L.A. Spirits Awards, and the Tandem received a Platinum Medal at the same competition.^[5][14] In 2023, Tilden also won the regional round and the Crowd Favorite award at the Harvard Business School Alumni New Venture Competition.^[11][13]

Royle and Hilton Wood built Tilden's on-premise distribution by personally selling to bars, restaurants, hotels, and event venues.^[5] By 2025, the two co-founders had closed more than 300 on-premise accounts, including Santa Barbara restaurants such as Barbareño, Bettina, Bell's, Satellite, and El Encanto.^[5][7] The company ships online to 48 contiguous U.S. states and distributes across more than half a dozen states.^[1][10]

In late 2023, Tilden introduced smaller flask-sized bottles, originally used as sales samples in pitch meetings.^[3][16] Retailers requested the smaller format to let customers try the product before committing to the full bottle, and hotels sought them for minibar placement — a solo-sipping occasion the founders had not originally targeted.^[3] The founders chose to remain in glass rather than switch to cans, citing alignment with the brand's positioning around elevated cocktail occasions.^[16]

Tilden has raised approximately $518,000 in total funding across two SEC Form D filings, with the most recent raise of $210,000 closing in January 2024.^[18][20] Bethenny Frankel is among the company's investors.^[12] Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, Royle's former employer, also invested.^[12] Tilden operates with dual headquarters in Santa Barbara and Boston.^[8][17]

Tilden's Lacewing cocktail won Best in Show in the non-alcoholic cocktail category at the 2023 L.A. Spirits Awards, a competition historically centered on alcoholic spirits.^[5][14] The Tandem received a Platinum Medal at the same competition.^[14] In 2024, Tilden was included on Bloomberg's list of the 12 best non-alcoholic drinks for Dry January and was selected as a CNN Editors' Pick.^[10][12]

In 2023, Tilden won the Northeastern regional round of the Harvard Business School Alumni New Venture Competition, taking both the audience vote and the judges' vote, and was named the Crowd Favorite at the national finals.^[11][13] The brand's packaging, designed by Utendahl Creative, was profiled by The Dieline.^[9]

Royle lives in Santa Barbara, California, her husband's hometown, where she returned in November 2022 after completing her MBA.^[2][8] She has spoken publicly about her sobriety, which began in May 2020, and has written about the experience of not drinking at her own wedding, where she served an early Tilden prototype in place of a champagne toast.^[6][7] She had her first son approximately one year before a September 2025 interview, and has described motherhood as forcing her to prioritize more sharply in both her business and personal life.^[5]