When Elizabeth Fauerso returned to San Antonio in late 2001 after a peripatetic marketing career that began in San Francisco and took her to Mexico, Europe and the UK, she was freshly intrigued by the city of her birth.
“I’d lived in all these places. … London is such a formed city. San Francisco is a formed city. You can participate,” she said, but the creation of them is largely complete. “In San Antonio, I felt this sense of possibility.”
That same year, Pabst closed its operations at the Pearl Brewery, ending 118 years of brewing along the San Antonio River. Later in 2001, Silver Ventures purchased the 23-acre brewery site, with big plans to redevelop it.
Fauerso would eventually help create what has become a San Antonio landmark when she was hired in 2011 as chief marketing officer for what was then known as the Pearl Brewery.
Today, the Pearl is one of the most vibrant neighborhoods in San Antonio, a culinary destination that retains a sense of its history, home to Hotel Emma and apartments that command some of the highest rents in the city.
Over the years, its gathering spaces have attracted thousands of people to events Fauerso created, from its longtime farmers markets to the Tamale Festival, Échale! Latino Music Estyles and Olé, San Antonio, a four-month-long series of music, food and art events focused on San Antonio’s historic connection to Spain as part of the city’s 300th anniversary in 2018.
“Her work has had a profound impact on Pearl and San Antonio,” said Rose Reyes, president of the San Antonio office of Giant Noise, who has worked with Fauerso on every major event and initiative.
Now, Fauerso is once again building from the ground up. She has left the Pearl, where for the past year and half she served as CEO of Potluck Hospitality, focused on growing the Pearl’s culinary scene, to launch EBF Development and Design Studio.
As her own boss, Fauerso will offer clients 25 years of experience creating meaningful spaces that can draw in and connect people.
“When a place matters, it gets used,” she said.
She spoke to the San Antonio Report about her unusual upbringing, the work she’s done at the Pearl to make it a cultural gathering spot and what she hopes to accomplish as a design and placemaking entrepreneur.
‘An alternative spiritual community’
While Fauerso was born in San Antonio, she did not grow up here.
Her mother, Josephine Bain Fauerso, traces her San Antonio roots to John Smith, who served as a scout during the Battle of the Alamo and later married a descendent of the Canary Islands before becoming the city’s first mayor. She left San Antonio to attend the University of California at Berkeley, where she met Paul Fauerso, a musician and Transcendental Meditation practitioner.
The couple moved to Seelisberg, Switzerland, where TM founder Maharishi Mahesh Yogi had located the movement’s headquarters to the historic Sonnenberg hotel. They returned to San Antonio to give birth to Fauerso and her sister Joey Fauerso, an artist and 2022 Guggenheim fellow.
They lived in the King William neighborhood, near her grandmother, Agnes Mathis Bain, and her great uncle Walter Mathis, who had arrested the neighborhood’s slide into ill repute by buying and restoring many of the grand old houses there.
The family traveled back and forth between San Antonio and the “alternative spiritual community,” as she described it, in Seelisberg before moving to Malibu, California. She was 4. Her father wanted to pick up his music career again, and the couple helped open a meditation center nearby.
Fauerso recalls a free-range childhood, exploring the gardens around the old Swiss hotel, later attending a Montessori school that emphasized nature and creativity in Malibu, “which was still very hippie-ish” at the time, she said.
Visits to San Antonio solidified Fauerso’s close relationship with her grandmother, a grand dame of the city whose sophistication enchanted her granddaughter.
When Fauerso was 8, the family moved to Eastern Iowa to help found Maharishi International University, which offers “consciousness-based education,” combining accredited degree programs with the study of TM and Ayurvedic traditions. Fauerso and her siblings attended the K-12 school associated with the college.
‘Fast path to barista’
As Fauerso related in her irreverent episode of Texas Public Radio’s series “Worth Repeating,” — which also captures her droll sense of humor — the experience included both a deep grounding in traditional western education as well as classes in meditation, yoga and Ayurveda.
“It’s funny now, when people ask me, ‘Oh, have you tried meditation or deep breathing for your stress?’ And I’m like, um, yes — yes I have,” she said.
At her grandmother’s suggestion, she returned to San Antonio to attend Trinity University, where she immersed herself in classes on comparative religion, art history, philosophy and photography. Fauerso credits the influence of the late philosophy professor Lawrence Kimmel — and specifically, his teaching of German philosopher Martin Heidegger — with getting her first job after college.
“When I would describe my studies at Trinity, people would joke that I was on the fast path to barista,” Fauerso said, sharing an anecdote she often uses to explain why she’s such a believer in a liberal arts education. “But I got my first job because I could speak Heidegger.”
In San Francisco after graduation, a family friend connected Fauerso with Fernando Flores, who served as Chile’s finance minister in President Salvador Allende’s cabinet before becoming a political prisoner after the coup by Augusto Pinochet. Forced into exile, Flores and his family moved to Palo Alto, where he developed an integrated workflow and management framework that would underpin the many companies he would go on to found.
That framework was influenced by his own study of philosophy, including that of Heidegger, and Fauerso landed a job with Flores’ consulting firm.
Her work for Flores’ consultancy took her first to Mexico City and later to Mannheim, Germany, researching and writing case studies of management projects using Flores’ framework.
Fauerso was in London on Sept. 11, 2001. It was the day after the culmination of months of work creating a multi-day event around California wines; her boyfriend had also just left her. Fauerso was devastated. It took a few weeks to get a flight out — to her first home, San Antonio.
Creating community
Fauerso had been back in San Antonio for almost a decade when she was hired by the Pearl in early 2011. She married Chris Senn in 2006, and had immersed herself in the city’s art scene. She recognized that the city’s affordability helped foster a tight-knit, collaborative community of artists.
Her marketing career continued; she worked at two agencies here before joining Dallas-based Dieste, at the time the largest Hispanic-owned marketing firm in the country.
As vice president of strategic planning, Fauerso once again traveled the U.S., Latin America and Europe, leading teams in consumer and market intelligence for global brands like AT&T, Procter & Gamble and Levi’s.
By 2010, a handful of businesses were operating at Pearl, including Andrew Weisman’s pair of restaurants, Il Sogno and Sandbar. The Culinary Institute of America welcomed its first class of future chefs.
About that time, Lionel Sosa called Fauerso, as did another former colleague, Erika Prosper, whom she had worked with at Garcia 360. They urged her to pursue the marketing job at the Pearl. At the same time, Bill Shown, then Silver Ventures’ managing director of real estate, said he got a call from a mutual friend, urging him to hire Fauerso.
He supported then-CEO Darryl Bird in bringing her on, and 12 years later describes Fauerso as “a godsend” who became his creative partner “in everything we did here.”
Fauerso said the first thing she did as the chief marketing officer at the former brewery “was to make sure conversations in the development process were oriented around the end user” and how the team could help create emotional bonds to the nascent campus.
This was before any apartments had begun welcoming tenants at the Pearl, but Fauerso already understood the property as a neighborhood, “a living, breathing space.” The work she had done for years — understanding how people connect to brands — was about to be tested.
At the time, the main programming at the Pearl was the weekend farmers market. Fauerso added the Latin music series, and then the Tamale Festival — whose overwhelming crowds ultimately led to its demise, she said — and in 2018, Olé, San Antonio.
That sprawling, summer-long program, which celebrated the art, culture and cuisine of Spain, was more than just a series of events. Collaboration was built into every aspect of the program, which brought over dozens of artists, chefs, musicians and dancers from Spain, each of whom collaborated with the community in some way.
“It was purely her vision,” said Reyes. “Elizabeth is a deeply committed, marketing visionary, and it’s been a privilege and a blast to work with her.”
At the time, Fauerso and her husband were living at the Cellars at Pearl, raising their daughter Josie, who was born in 2013, amid the bustle of events and people.
Shown identified her work on Hotel Emma, which opened in 2015, as among Fauerso’s most influential accomplishments.
She worked closely with design firm Roman and Williams on what’s known in the business as FF&E — furniture, fixtures and equipment. She oversaw every detail of the hotel, from sourcing furniture, naming spaces, designing uniforms and curating the products for sale. Fauerso even guided the creation of the hotel’s signature scents.
From Potluck to entrepreneur
In early 2022, the Pearl split its core businesses into three stand alone entities, and Fauerso pivoted to take the helm of the newly created Potluck Hospitality, working to support the Pearl’s existing restaurants and develop new concepts and partnerships. She said she found the work, while more operational than what she was used to, helping restaurant operators and staff understand the why behind the work they do, satisfying.
But in the back of her mind, an entrepreneurial tickle began. She started mulling what it might mean to launch her own company. She also began to formalize, much as her early mentor Fernando Flores did, a proprietary framework that would allow her to systematically tackle projects of any size or complexity.
Then she watched the Barbie movie.
“I don’t know if this is embarrassing to admit, but when I saw Barbie, it just … I just listened to my body, and I was like, why wouldn’t I do this? My parents are teachers. My mentors are huge risk-takers. My closest friends are risk-takers and entrepreneurs — without exception.”
She is realistic about the risks and challenges she will face as the sole proprietor of EBF Development and Design Studio. She’s currently in the exploratory phase with a handful of potential clients in and outside of San Antonio.
But she’s also sure of her decision. As soon as she made it, a calmness and certainty came over her. “It kind of opened up the universe,” she said.
