About Talkhouse Encore

Talkhouse Encore is a premium vodka and tequila seltzer brand born out of one of the Hamptons' best-loved institutions. Co-founder Ruby Honerkamp's family has owned the Stephen Talkhouse, an unpretentious dive bar and live-music venue, for nearly 50 years. It holds about 200 people, and over the years its stage has hosted world-class talent: SiriusXM runs a summer concert series there, where acts like Metallica, Coldplay, and Ed Sheeran have all played the room. John Mayer has been announced to play the venue in August 2026.

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When the world shut down in 2020, co-founders Ruby and Rob wanted to find a way to bring the Talkhouse into the homes of its regulars. Talkhouse Encore was born. The ready-to-drink seltzers now span seven flavors inspired by dive-bar cocktails: three tequila seltzers (blood orange, pineapple, grapefruit) and four vodka seltzers (classic cranberry, classic lime, the Hampton Mule, and an iced tea lemonade). Each is between 100 and 110 calories, with real fruit juice, real spirits, no added sugar, and no artificial sweeteners. Talkhouse Encore is on a mission to make drinking better for you and to be transparent about what is in the can in a category that rarely is.

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Courtney Roth is the VP of Marketing, and she is a team of one. She has more than a decade of experience in CPG and beverages specifically, with tenure at PepsiCo Beverages, Alani Nu, and Prime Hydration. She runs every marketing function at Talkhouse Encore, and creator marketing sits near the top of her priorities.

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"We want to make sure we're targeting people who are consumers of our product, not just the creator with the biggest following. We're working with a lot of micro creators and foodie accounts. We've learned that the number one way people learn about a new beverage is through a trusted source, which makes influencer marketing critical for the brand's growth."

The Challenge

When Courtney took over, Talkhouse Encore was barely doing influencer marketing at all. A brief engagement with a PR firm was sending out fewer than 10 packages a month, nowhere near the scale the brand needed to grow awareness. It became clear quickly that creators had to become a core growth lever, and that the program had to ramp fast.

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The problem was bandwidth. As a team of one, Courtney had to source creators, track every mention, and report on results herself, on top of running the rest of marketing. Sourcing each creator by hand was slow. Tracking was worse: the most authentic Talkhouse content was showing up in Instagram Stories, which disappeared after 24 hours.

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"Before Archive, if I didn't check our social media over the weekend, who knows how many posts I would miss, especially stories that disappear after 24 hours."

The Solution

Courtney already knew the tool she wanted. She had used Archive briefly at another company and remembered it as the all-in-one platform that could handle sourcing, tracking, and reporting in one place. As a team of one building a program from the ground up, she brought it to the table at Talkhouse Encore.

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Today she runs the whole program through Archive. She starts most days in Social Listening, scanning new content to see where the brand has been tagged and sorting organic mentions from gifted and paid creators, and even catching the in-store demo posts from the sampling agencies the brand works with. When something is worth resharing, she requests Usage Rights and moves it into the brand's own channels.

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Sourcing is where Archive gives a one-person team the most leverage. Courtney uses Creator Search to get extremely specific about who she wants, with prompts like "health conscious Gen Z hosting summer parties in Connecticut" and "UGC creators showing casual entertaining with seltzers." Because Talkhouse Encore is a Northeast brand distributed in just four states (New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Connecticut), she layers on location filters that narrow results down to the specific towns where the product is actually on shelves: New York City, Boston, Cape Cod, the Jersey Shore, exactly where her summer consumers are.

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She organizes the program in Campaigns by month, so she can watch gifting grow month over month and see how many creators and posts the brand received, alongside total audience reach, impressions, and engagements, all without rebuilding a spreadsheet. She uses Competitor Insights to study the bigger national seltzer brands, not just to benchmark, but to find the creators those brands already work with in her four states and invite them to try a more transparent, better-for-you option.

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"It's that all-in-one tool. The sourcing, the outreach, the reporting, the tracking. Those typical media metrics we've been wanting to measure are right at our fingertips, and I'm not doing it manually in a spreadsheet. That's been a huge time saver."

The Results

• Gifting scaled to 75 creators a month.
• A creator program built from scratch in less than six months, from 10 packages per month to a structured monthly gifting initiative.
• Weekends back, and no missed Stories. Content is captured automatically, so disappearing Story mentions are no longer lost when no one is online.
• Hyper-local sourcing, with Creator Search and location filters targeting the exact towns and zip codes where Talkhouse Encore is sold.

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"As a small and scrappy team with limited budgets, it's kind of a no-brainer as a place to start. Before Archive, I wouldn't really know where to start. Having everything in one place has been so helpful and we're excited to continue growing this program with Archive."