Letterpress Distilling was founded in 2012 by Skip Tognetti and is currently operated by him and his business partner and friend of more than 30 years, Liz Lyman. Their skills and interests complement each other nearly perfectly, which makes for an ideal partnership.
Skip Tognetti
Skip grew up in the Bay Area of California, but spent much of his young childhood and many of his summers with his grandparents and extended family in Rome, where his mother Angela was born and raised.
It was those days at his grandfather Amorino’s (“Nonno Morino”) small liquor shop just off the Piazza Cavour, that Skip first saw the way that Italians experience wine and liqueurs as part of their daily lives and as an integral component of their shared community.
When Skip founded Letterpress, he thought Italian liqueurs would be his little side project that he could support with whiskey and gin production. After releasing his limoncello to rave reviews, however, it quickly became clear where the the business needed to go and where his heart was: making his version of the wonderful liqueurs he grew up with.
Liz Lyman
Skip and Liz met in college way back in 1992 and have been great friends ever since.
A few years after opening Letterpress, Liz, already a small investor in the distillery, decided to leave her corporate job and come to work full-time at Letterpress as production manager and CFO. Liz brings operations management experience from early days at Amazon (when they still just sold books!), 15 years at Starbucks corporate, and finally a stint at Expedia.
At Letterpress, Liz manages the day-to-day production and product forecasting as well as wrangling all of the financial and reporting responsibilities.