Merrilee Kick

She put up cows as collateral to start her company. Then sold it for $500M.

In 2006, Merrilee Kick was a high school teacher outside Dallas.

Living on a small salary. Raising two kids. And seriously considering divorce.

So when her school offered to pay for a master’s degree, she said yes.

She took night classes at Texas Woman’s University and taught entrepreneurship by day to her high school students.

One afternoon, grading papers by the pool, a cocktail in hand, she realized it was unsafe to drink out of glass near water.

So she thought: what if there was a strong, premixed cocktail in a plastic container?

Cute. Unbreakable. Strong enough to give you a buzz, but made with natural ingredients that didn’t leave you bloated.

That was her thesis project.

In 2009, she launched it as a business.

She called it BuzzBallz.

A snow globe she’d picked up on a trip to Scandinavia inspired the shape of the packaging.

A can of tennis balls sparked the idea for the pop-top.

She got help from engineering students at UNT to perfect the design.

She sourced plastic from suppliers in China, created the formulas, and designed the labels.

She got rejected by every bank in Dallas, except one.

They gave her $178,500.

Her only collateral? Her car and the cows from her grandmother’s Oklahoma ranch.

She used that money to buy her first line of production equipment and got to work.

She used a hand-crank sealer to build her first prototypes.

Her two sons, still in high school, helped brainstorm names and flavor combos around the dinner table.

Tequila ’Rita. Lotta Colada. Cran Blaster. Choc Tease.

BuzzBallz landed its first big deal in 2010 with Glazer’s, a Dallas-based distributor.

That first year, they sold 23,000 cases.

By year three, they crossed $2M in revenue.

Her husband became her CFO.

Her sons took on key executive roles.

Eventually, she gave each of them a 24.5% stake in the company.

She kept the rest.

BuzzBallz went from five pallets to over 1M cases a year by 2019.

They were in 50 states and 21 countries.

And she did it all without ever raising outside capital.

During COVID, she started producing hand sanitizer (18,000 gallons of it) and gave it away to frontline workers.

She also launched “The Nest,” a virtual school inside her facility for employees’ kids.

In April 2024, BuzzBallz was acquired by Sazerac in a deal estimated to be worth at least $500M.

But Merrilee didn’t retire.

She’s building a new company focused on solving plastic waste and energy problems using pyrolysis, a process that turns used plastic into fuel.

And she gave back.

In 2024, she donated $30M to Texas Woman’s University.

The business school will now be renamed in her honor: The Merrilee Alexander Kick College of Business.