Rande Gerber

Origins and early life

Rande Gerber was born in New York City on 27 April 1962, grew up in Hewlett on Long Island, left Hewlett High School in 1980 and took a marketing degree at the University of Arizona before spending his twenties as a model.

Work and career

He crossed to the other side of the bar in 1991, opening The Whiskey inside the Paramount Hotel in the New York theatre district. Until then the bar of a hotel was where guests drank because they were already sleeping upstairs; Gerber made it a room the whole city came to, installed it as the house bar of the W hotels, and repeated it as Whiskey Blue, Whiskey Park, Stone Rose and the SkyBar in Los Angeles. In 2013 he founded the tequila Casamigos with George Clooney and the property developer Mike Meldman, after years of having a blend of their own made for them in Mexico, until the distillery told them that a thousand bottles a year required a licence.

They went through more than seven hundred samples before settling on one, and named it the house of friends. Diageo bought the brand in June 2017 for $700 million, with a further $300 million tied to ten years of performance, a four-year-old tequila that had sold 120 thousand cases in 2016 and was growing at better than fifty per cent a year. American law forbids holding a bar and a liquor company at once, so he let the Gerber Group go and kept the tequila.

Personal life

He married the model Cindy Crawford in 1998, and it is their own household that states his place here: the Algemeiner reported in April 2020 that Crawford, whose husband it described as Jewish, was making the Passover brisket from his grandmother's recipe.