Photo by Michael Larsen ’89 and Tracy Talbert

How do you look a man in the eye and ask him for a million dollars on national television?

“You have to just go for it and not think about it,” Justin Fenchel ’06 says. “As soon as anyone in the room senses weakness, you’re doomed.”

It was June of 2014, and Fenchel was talking shop with Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks and one of the judges on the ABC reality show “Shark Tank.” Cuban had just bid $600,000 to buy a third of Fenchel’s company, and eight million TV viewers were waiting for an answer.

Running the numbers in his head, the Pomona economics major was hesitant to say yes. His team had agreed beforehand that they wouldn’t give up more than 20 percent of the business unless they received a particularly hefty bid.

The room was suddenly eerily quiet. The show’s dramatic background music wouldn’t be added for several more months, and the bright studio lights were making Fenchel feel like he was about to black out. (Looking at the transcript afterwards, he says, “I don’t remember half of the comments I appear to have made.”)

One thing he did recall saying, though, was his reply to Cuban: “Would you do a million?”

Cuban paused a beat.

“Sure.”

With those four letters, Fenchel’s life changed in a very big way.

BeatBox Beverages, his line of wine-based cocktails that come in blindingly bright 5-liter boxes, had just been valued at three million dollars, and was about to experience the unique joy that is “the Shark Tank effect.”

After not being stocked in a single store 18 months earlier, BeatBox soon expanded to nearly 900 locations in 13 states, all while grabbing celebrity endorsements and positioning itself to take on the biggest players in the wine world.

Reflecting on BeatBox’s rapid rise, Fenchel shakes his head and grins sheepishly.

“To think,” he says. “It all basically started with a game of ‘slap-the-bag.’”

Boxed-Wine Beginnings

Like Facebook and Napster before it, the origin story for BeatBox quite literally begins in a dorm room.

One of Fenchel’s fondest Pomona memories was living in the North Campus trailers and hosting “boxed-wine Tuesdays,” where his roommates would buy a case of Franzia wine and invite friends over to watch movies. His Pomona years coincided nicely with the rise of “slap-the-bag,” a drinking tradition that involves removing a bag of wine from its box, slapping the side of the bag, and taking a swig right from the nozzle.

Fenchel enjoyed the communal nature of “slap-the-bag,” and found Franzia convenient, affordable—and completely boring.

“The only reason I bought it was because there wasn’t a more appealing option,” he says. “It made me wonder if I could take the idea of a boxed wine, and recreate it so people my age would actually be excited to bring it to a party.”

After college he and his childhood friend Brad Schultz collaborated on a few iPhone apps, while still kicking around drink ideas.

In 2011 they dreamt up “Wine-ergy,” a caffeinated beverage coming in flavors like “Call-A-Cab” and “ZinFUNdel”; they promptly nixed the concept after the caffeine-infused Four Loko courted controversy on college campuses. A few months later they mulled over a vodka-based drink, before learning that regulations on spirits would limit their “party in a box” to a decidedly un-party-like 12 servings.

What finally kick-started BeatBox was, of all things, a glass of OJ. Specifically, Fenchel stumbled across a special wine made of oranges that drinks more like a spirit and pairs deliciously with fruit juice. By 2012 he had built a team of co-founders and developed flavors that were directly inspired by his days making Crystal Light and vodka mixers at Pomona.

On a bootstrap budget, Fenchel’s team crowd-sourced a logo and package design. To focus-group their product, they would plaster BeatBox stickers onto cardboard boxes, put test batches into empty wine-bags (“Thanks, Franzia!”), and walk around local events giving out free samples.

“We’d go to festivals and ask for brutally honest feedback on which flavors tasted best,” Fenchel recalls. “We knew we were onto something when people were literally throwing 20 dollar bills at us and asking where they could buy it.”

BeatBox’s first production run was just in time for the South by Southwest (SXSW) music festival in March of 2013. Slowly but steadily, the company grew—from 20 cases a month, to 50, to 100, with Fenchel and his three colleagues still packaging and pressing every box.

“By 2014 we had increased our distribution 800 percent, but realized that we were still spending all our time in the warehouse and none of it expanding,” he says. “We needed money.”

Getting in the Tank

Justin Fenchel ’06 and his Beatbox partners on ABC’s SharkTank

Customers had been constantly telling Fenchel that his company seemed ripe for “Shark Tank.” When producers announced an open casting call at SXSW 2014, he stood in line for two hours to give his 30-second pitch. Three months later, BeatBox was one of 108 teams to be selected for the show, out of 70,000 annual submissions. (“You’d have a better chance getting into Harvard, or even Pomona,” Fenchel says.)

The team feverishly prepared in the ensuing weeks, painstakingly researching the show’s five judges and enlisting business faculty from the University of Texas to serve as “mock sharks.” They learned about the sharks’ every move—what they invested in, what they looked for in companies, and even what they ate for breakfast each morning.

“We acted like it was the biggest job interview of our life,” Fenchel says. “Which it was.”

The work paid off: in the months after BeatBox’s episode aired in October 2014, sales doubled and the team expanded from 150 stores to nearly 900. In 2015 they hit a million dollars in sales and rung up endorsements from the likes of electronic musician Skrillex and rapper Waka Flocka Flame, who enthusiastically describes the Blue Razzberry flavor as his “Turnt Up Juice.”

“Shark Tank” also impacted BeatBox in more intangible ways. “It certainly helps when your email to Walmart’s Texas distribution team includes a CC to the most powerful businessman in the state,” says Fenchel, who connects with Cuban at least once a week via email or text. “People who wouldn’t return our calls before were taking meetings with us now.”

As Fenchel zips around the country hobnobbing with potential distributors and investors, one of the most common questions he gets is a simple one: why boxed wine?

As any casual oenophile knows, boxed wine has what Fenchel generously describes as a “perception problem.” The practice of putting wine in boxes first emerged in Australia in the mid-60s, and the cheapness of the approach made it attractive to low-end jug-wine sellers in America.

While companies targeting upscale customers may view the box as a barrier, BeatBox treats it as a key differentiator and marketing tool for millennials who are more interested in having fun than seeming sophisticated.

The box also helps the bottom line, since boxed wine is cheaper to produce, longer-lasting, more convenient and more environmentally-friendly than traditional methods. BeatBox’s sales last year translated to a savings of 530,000 wine bottles that weren’t being produced or trashed.

Justin Fenchel ’06 and his
partners meet with investor
Mark Cuban.

Moving forward, Fenchel’s five-year plan is simple: “More stores, lower costs.” He’s hoping to get big-chain authorizations from the likes of Publix and Kroger, and hopes to soon stock single-serving sizes so that they can sell it at bars and convenience stores.

He also has built a network of more than 250 “brand ambassadors” who organize promotional events and happy hours around the country. It’s all part of his loftier goal to grow BeatBox into a global company on par with Red Bull, with sponsored concerts and sports competitions.

“If anyone can turn BeatBox into a lifestyle brand, it’s the guy who’s embodying that lifestyle,” says Schultz. “The fun-loving, outgoing, celebratory spirit of BeatBox—that’s more or less a direct reflection of Justin and who he is as a person.”

Most of the people gathered around the card tables at the Senior Center in Longmont, Colo., this morning seem to be my age or older—in their 60s or 70s. They sit three or four to a table and peek at their cards, as I do at mine.

Unlike most card games, GoWish gives each player a full deck—cards bearing no diamonds or spades, no aces or deuces. Just words. Words like: “To be mentally aware.” And “Not to be connected to machines.” And “To be at peace with God.”

The object here isn’t winning—it’s understanding. By organizing our cards into numbered priorities, we’re all seeking to come to grips with the nitty-gritty of our own mortality—that is, to decide how we would prefer to die.

As I shuffle through my cards and grapple with my own priorities (Do I want to be free from pain more than I want the chance to see my close friends one last time? Should I rank having my financial affairs in order above having a doctor I trust?), my host, Peggy Arnold ’65 wanders from table to table, asking probing questions and offering nuggets of information about the world of modern death. Just starting the process of talking about the subject, she says, is therapeutic—taking us back to a day when death was a visible part of life.

“Death in our culture has become a medical event, not a personal experience,” she says. “It used to be that children would run in and out of the parlor when the body was lying there. Or people grew up on farms, where life and death were always present.” Modern death, she says, is often hidden away behind hospital curtains, and most people have no clue what awaits them there.

At my table, one person picks as her top priority “To be free from anxiety.” Another chooses “To have an advocate who knows my values and priorities.” I settle on “To have my family with me.”

In each case, it soon becomes clear that there are personal    experiences behind the choice. The person who wants to be free from anxiety explains that her mother spent weeks before her death in a terrible state of fear. The person who hopes for an advocate worries about having no one she can trust. It only occurs to me afterward that my own choice might have something to do with the fact that both my parents died suddenly, without a chance to say goodbye.

“What’s really interesting about that game,” Arnold says, “is what happens when people have a discussion about why they chose what they chose. Really, it’s a values clarification game.”

Taking Back Dying

For Arnold, the program coordinator for Longmont United Hospital’s AgeWell program, this game, and the reflections and conversations it prompts, are also part of a larger movement—a grass-roots crusade that has been spreading across the country for the past few years. The goal: to reclaim death from the medical establishment and empower people to make choices about how they wish to spend their final days.

“To me, what’s exciting is that people are starting to take back their own death and dying process,” she says. “Look at everything that goes on around birth—all the joy and the care, the respect and the dignity that goes on. But on the other end of the conveyor belt, this hasn’t been happening.”

Today, medical technology can prolong life almost indefinitely, but as Arnold points out, in too many cases that has simply prolonged suffering and turned the end of life into a horror show. “Most people—there are always exceptions, but most people—are not going to want to go out of this life hooked to beeping machines, with tubes everywhere,” she says.

Like the Advanced Directives class she teaches at the Senior Center, this game of GoWish is intended to help participants think clearly about their options while there’s still time. Arnold likes to quote Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ellen Goodman, the founder of The Conversation Project, who said: “It’s always too soon, until it’s too late.”

Since 2010, The Conversation Project has been focusing on encouraging people to have a conversation with their loved ones about their end-of-life wishes. That, however, is only one of the visible prongs of this burgeoning movement. Another is the Death Cafés, which sprang up in the United Kingdom, also in 2010, and have now spread across the United States, offering people a forum for freewheeling discussions of death and dying over cookies or a slice of cake. Then there’s the Green Burial movement, which seeks to reclaim the long-lost right of natural burial, without embalming or caskets or concrete vaults to inhibit the natural recycling process. And at the heart of it all, there’s an increasing number of activist physicians like Dr. Angelo Volandes, author of The Conversation, and Dr. Atul Gawande, author of Being Mortal, who are seeking to change the ethos of end-of-life care by pulling back the curtain on hospital death and challenging both their fellow doctors and the public to look at the subject differently.

Peggy Arnold ’65 adds her wish to the “Before I Die” Wall at the Art Museum of the University of Colorado, Boulder.

In the area around Longmont and Boulder, Arnold is at the center of a small but determined community of end-of-life reformers whom she dubs, with affection and “M*A*S*H”-style humor, “the Deathies.” There’s Kim Mooney, an experienced end-of-life counselor and certified thanatologist (death scholar) who recently started her own company, called Practically Dying. There’s Bart Windrum, who, following the disastrous hospital experiences of his two dying parents, was moved to write Notes from the Waiting Room, a guide book for families of the terminally ill. There’s retired emergency room physician Jean Abbott, who is urging her fellow doctors to get over their squeamishness about removing patients from life-prolonging equipment when the outcome is no longer in doubt.

What the Deathies all have in common is that they’re passionate about returning control over the end of life to the dying and their families.

One Death

For her part, Arnold says death has always seemed an integral part of her life. Her mother’s father died two months before she was born, and she suspects that her mother’s grief may have affected her in the womb. One of her first playgrounds in her hometown of Oberlin, Ohio, was a cemetery where she played among the tombstones of runaway slaves. Then there was her grandfather’s suicide by walking in front of a train here in Claremont. “I could go on and on with all these experiences of death,” she says. “So it’s really no surprise that it’s been a theme for me. Maybe not THE theme, but it’s definitely been part of the story.”

Having worked as a hospice volunteer before taking her current job 15 years ago, she says the part of her work that relates to “the death trade” just evolved naturally. “You could call it ‘unbidden,’” she says. “It just appeared, and I was the one who was asked to do it.”

First she was designated as the hospital representative to a short-lived organization called the Front Range End of Life, which focused on creating resources for the terminally ill. Then the hospital decided to do a video about planning for the end of life, and guess who got the job? Then they needed someone to teach a class on advanced directives… “It’s like the underground of aspen groves,” she says. “Their root systems go on for acres and keep shooting up new stems. The time for this had come, and I happened to be in the middle of the grove.”

Then, five years ago, her focus on death and dying took a turn for the personal. An old friend, Mogens Baungaard Thomsen—a Danish exchange student in her high school who had become a vascular surgeon in Sweden—revealed that he was living with a death sentence—kidney cancer that had metastasized to his lungs.

“We just started Skyping a lot and had the most fascinating conversations,” Arnold says. “At some point, I said, ‘Mo, I’d love to record what you’re saying. I think it is so wise.’ He was a physician. He was a widower. Now he was facing his own end.”

So they made a video together about his experience of dying. “He talked about all the adventures he’d had in his life, like being with headhunters in New Guinea, and how everything he did was just a new adventure,” she says. “Sometimes it was scary, but he knew that was part of who he was. He loved all those adventures. And so, he was looking at death as the next adventure.”

Peggy Arnold ’65 at her desk with a photo of Mogens Thomsen and his granddaughter.

At the time, Thomsen didn’t expect to live long enough to see his new grandchild, but he outlived his own prognosis. “There’s a picture of them together,” Arnold says, pointing to a photo pinned above her desk of Thomsen holding his granddaughter. “And he actually lived almost two years longer.”

During that time, they made two more videos together. The first, prompted by Thomsen’s terrible experiences with the Swedish healthcare system, is aimed at his fellow doctors, giving them heart-felt advice on how to relate to people who are dying.

The second, made shortly before his death, is less philosophical, more practical and more emotionally raw—what he wants for his last meal (a cheeseburger or maybe fish and chips); what music he would like to hear on his deathbed (a piece by Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy that he listened to with his wife while she was dying); what he wants on his epitaph (“I don’t want one”).

The exchanges between Thomsen and Arnold sound at times like an interview, at times like old friends chatting, at times like therapy. “Although I’ve seen so many people die, I still don’t know what goes on at the end,” Thomsen reflects at one point. “As long as I’m aware of what’s going on, I would probably want to cling to my relatives and have them with me, but that’s a very egoistic way of thinking. I don’t think it’s a pleasure for them to see me die.”

“You could ask,” Arnold gently suggests. “It may not be a pleasure, but it may be important.”

“You’re right,” Thomsen says. “I hadn’t even thought of asking. Thank you.”

Four months later, when Thomsen finally reached what he called his “expiration date,” both of his sons were at his side.

“As it turned out, he had a medical emergency, went to the hospital, and though he would never have wanted to die there, that’s exactly what happened,” Arnold recalls. “And it was probably the best thing, as it turned out, because a really good friend who was a doctor was able to be there to make sure everything was going to happen the way Mo would want it. And it meant that his two sons could actually be there.”

It’s About Life

In the end, Arnold says, her experience with Thomsen taught her something important—not about death, but about life.

“What we learned from him is that, first of all, we do need to be looking at death face to face. No one should tell anybody else how to do this, but I think there’s a lot to gain from looking at it—not just at the end, but in relation to the end. What is life about? What is today about? Tomorrow isn’t here yet, so what do I want my life to be about today? That, to me, is the goal of doing this work.”

In the end, as much as we may avoid the subject, we all have our own expiration dates—we just don’t know what they are yet. Arnold sometimes wonders how she would respond to a terminal diagnosis herself. Would her work still have meaning? Would she find joy in little things, as her friend Mo did at the end?

In the meantime, she continues to teach her classes and organize events and counsel seniors who come to her for advice. And she continues to let her involvement with death inform her thinking about life.

“Advanced directives are just documents,” she says. “The medical people need them. But what’s interesting to me is the thought that has to go into them. So that means people have to look at what their values are, what their beliefs are, what their goals in life are, what quality of life means to them, all of these things. If they’re really thinking about it and taking it seriously, they’ve got to look death in the face and figure out what their relationship is to it. And that means, ‘What’s your relationship to life?’”