Tequila is big business, especially in Mexico. And in an industry long dominated by men, Melly Barajas Cárdenas entered the game and restructured it from the inside out. As the founder of Vinos y Licores Azteca, she’s making history.

This story doesn’t start in a boardroom or a distillery, it starts with her father mentioning that he wanted a tequila bearing his name. That offhand remark sent Melly down a path that took her from being a school teacher and a fashion designer into the liquor business.

Melly has developed herself into an expert. She learned the process from the ground up and became an example that credentials don’t always come from textbooks, sometimes they come from rolling up your sleeves and figuring it out.

In 1999, Melly opened her own distillery in Valle de Guadalupe, Jalisco. While the tequila business is a boys’ club, she didn’t wait for a seat at the table, she built her own. And she hired other women to fill it.

Her distillery is run almost entirely by women, from the jimadoras harvesting agave to the team overseeing production. Barajas makes high quality tequila while ensuring women in the region have access to stable jobs in an industry that often overlooks them.

Melly’s brands master a balance between tradition and innovation. Her distillery uses old school, labor intensive techniques like slow roasting agave in masonry ovens and allowing natural fermentation, ensuring that every bottle carries the depth of flavor that mass production can’t replicate. She like to own the process from start to finish, an approach that guarantees quality while sidestepping industry gatekeepers who still operate on outdated notions of who should be calling the shots.

Success in any industry requires strategy, execution, and an understanding of the market. Melly identified gaps, both in gender representation and in the tequila production process, and leveraged them to her advantage. She mastered the product, built a workforce others weren’t paying attention to, and positioned her tequilas as premium offerings in a global market.

No matter what you’re doing, learn the game, find the weak spots, and build something that can’t be ignored. Barajas isn’t slowing down and continues proving that women can own their own space outright.