Painting the towns: drinking while drawing sparks robust gains for a Raleigh firm.

• Author: Walker, Cameron
• Position: NC TREND: Paint, sip, profit

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Most alcohol-fueled ideas quickly run out of gas, but the paint-and-sip franchise Wine and Design is only heating up. The company started as a single studio in Raleigh in 2010 and has grown to 66 franchises from the East Coast to Hawaii, with more in the planning stages. Eight employees staff the Raleigh corporate office.

CEO Harriet Mills, now 35, had an infant at home and had lost her job as a sales representative for Hillsborough-based Vietri, which imports dinnerware from Italy, when a trip to Charleston, S.C., changed the course of her career. She and co-founder Emmy Preiss, who have since parted ways, conceived the idea for Wine and Design after attending a paint-and-sip party there.

"We took the class, and two bottles of wine later, the painting was amazing," she says. "I woke up the next morning, and it was even better." The two drew up a business plan, secured an $8,000 loan and opened the first location three months later. Classes sold out quickly due to a Groupon ad buy, which Mills estimates brought in 10,000 customers.

"It was the worst economy to open a business," she says. "But it worked because it was $35 for a good night of entertainment. It was cheap, it was different, you got to bring something home, and you actually got to talk to your friends." Classes are still $35. Men are scarce--99% of Wine and Design franchises are owned by women--but with a flurry of such companies booming, they don't seem to be missed.

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Husband-and-wife team Marianne and Craig Burt approached Mills with the idea of opening a Wine and Design store in Cary. The idea of a franchise was born. "Back then, I thought franchising was really only for McDonald's, Wendy's ... the big corporations. But come to find out, anybody can do it," Mills says. "Once we had franchising on our website, we had people calling from all over. North Carolina hadn't had the paint-and-sip concept, so it spread rapidly because everybody wanted it."

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The original paint-and-sip business was Painting with a Twist, started in Louisiana in 2007 by Cathy Deano and...