Eric Winter – Founder – Palm Republic Rum

From Pre-Med to Paramedic to The Rookie: The Pivots That Built an Entrepreneur

Eric Winter’s path to Hollywood was never supposed to happen. He enrolled at UCLA as a psychobiology major, volunteered in ERs, and had every intention of becoming a doctor. Then a girlfriend told him she couldn’t understand why he wasn’t modeling or acting. After a few introductions and a couple photo shoots, his career path had completely shifted. He finished his degree, switching to psychology to avoid missing labs, and stepped into a world he had never planned for.

What followed was a series of pivots that would have broke most people. Modeling dried up after 9/11 when international travel ground to a halt. Acting proved brutally unforgiving, as “Hard work does not guarantee you anything in my business,” he said. “You have to work hard, you want to be skilled, but it doesn’t guarantee you absolutely anything.” 
Frustrated and looking for something he could control, Winter went back to his medicine roots and put himself through nearly every step of the LA Fire Department hiring process, becoming EMT certified and preparing to enter the paramedic academy. He was waiting for his psych eval notice to arrive in the mail when his old acting agent called with a Days of Our Lives audition, which he later booked. The Fire Department notice arrived a month later. A single month separated Eric Winter the paramedic from Eric Winter the actor.

The Rookie, Resilience, and the Power of Multiplexing

Eight seasons in, The Rookie is doing something almost unheard of in network television, it is growing. The show is pulling ratings in season eight that match season two and was recently named the most-watched network show with the youngest demographic of any network series currently airing. Winter credits social media and TikTok for bringing in an entirely new audience, but the staying power comes from something simpler.  A show that kept getting better when everything around it, COVID, the writers’ strike, political and social unrest; was trying to take them off course.  
What Winter built around The Rookie is equally impressive. While filming eight months a year in Los Angeles, he was simultaneously producing a TV movie for Lifetime, developing and pitching original shows to every major network and streamer, launching a podcast with his wife Roselyn Sanchez for three seasons on iHeart, and eventually co-founding Palm Republic Rum. He calls it multiplexing, running parallel tracks that most people would attempt one at a time. “In my business, you can’t control anything,” he said. “My future is in the hands of somebody else. So, I always set up things for myself that I can try to control.” That instinct to build alongside the uncertainty, rather than waiting for it to resolve, is what ultimately prepared him for entrepreneurship.

Palm Republic: Making the Rum the Celebrity

The origin of Palm Republic is a love story disguised as a business plan. Twenty years ago, Eric Winter flew to Puerto Rico for the first time to meet his now-wife Roselyn Sanchez’s father who poured him a glass of eight-year aged rum, neat. Winter, a vodka and bourbon drinker who had written off rum as sugary and cheap, was caught completely off guard. “I had this wake-up call,” he said. “This is actually a really great spirit when it’s a premium aged product.” From that moment, he started paying attention — touring distilleries in Puerto Rico, tasting rums across different countries and regions on vacations, learning how different rum could be made depending on where it came from. When Roselyn eventually encouraged him to follow his passion the idea had been marinating for nearly two decades.

What separated Palm Republic from the wave of celebrity spirit brands flooding the market was a deliberate decision Winter made from day one: the rum is the celebrity.  While others leaned on their name and their social following to carry a product, Winter insisted the liquid had to stand entirely on its own. “The consumer is too smart,” he said. “The consumer doesn’t care. It’s saturated. There are plenty of non-celebrity brands out there that are delicious. So why yours?” Palm Republic launched with a blend pulling from Jamaica, the US Virgin Islands, and Panama, regions chosen for how they complement each other, Jamaican funk balanced by USVI smoothness, deepened by eight-year Panamanian rum aged in sherry casks. No added sweeteners. No artificial colors. Just the rum.

Rum’s Moment: Why This Category, Why Now

Eric Winter didn’t pick rum because it was the easy call. He picked it because it was the honest one. Everyone around him was launching tequila brands. The category was saturated, and more importantly, it wasn’t authentic to him. Rum was. And the timing, it turns out, was right. “People think of the sophistication and the premium nature of tequila right now,” he said, “but 20 years ago, tequila was garbage. Nobody was sipping on tequila. It was a shot with a line of salt and you just tried to stomach it.” Better marketing, better production, and a category-wide commitment to quality changed everything. Rum, Winter argues, is at exactly that inflection point now.

Palm Republic is positioning itself to lead that shift, not follow it. The brand recently rebranded its packaging entirely, new bottles designed to stop someone cold on a shelf.  Bottles that could be mistaken for a premium tequila or a bourbon before the buyer even reads the label. The strategy is deliberate: change perception at first glance, then let the liquid close the deal. The brand is already winning awards, dominating in Florida, the largest rum market in the country, and expanding strategically into Texas and California. The goal is not to flood every market at once. It is to build the right presence in the right places with a product that earns its reputation one sip at a time.

Patience, Rejection, and Building the Right Team Around You

Eric Winter didn’t go to business school. What he had instead was two decades of auditioning, being told no, and learning to separate his worth from the outcome. That, he says, turned out to be the best possible preparation for building a company. “Patience has been the biggest thing I tell people,” he said. “In acting, nothing’s guaranteed. You have to wait and be ready when something is there for you. And patience in business is key. You have to be able to fumble and mess up and trust that you’re going to continue to grow if you do the right things.”

Fundraising was the sharpest learning curve. It was brutal and humbling and unlike anything his acting career had prepared him for, except for one thing: the thick skin. He pushed through, raised the capital, hired a full-time CEO whose twenty-plus years of spirits industry relationships immediately opened doors that would have taken years to unlock otherwise, and built a board that includes former CMOs of Moët Hennessy. The dream, stated plainly, is to scale Palm Republic to the point where a major spirits company acquires it and takes it worldwide. “You did a great job raising this child,” he said, describing the exit he’s working toward. “Now let’s take it into the next phase.” For a man who once waited by the mailbox not knowing whether his next move would be the fire academy or a soap opera set, the patience to play a long game comes naturally.