Who are we?

Three of us founded the company. Rick and Neil Levine are brothers with a long history of collaborating on business projects. Rick focuses primarily on operations, process and marketing, while Neil is an accomplished artist and designer and drives our identity and product design. David Lurie, is our sales maven, and brings his not inconsiderable experience in the hotel and food service world as well as formal training in Switzerland as a chef to our venture. All three of us have spent a lot of time working in chocolate and food, and have a love for and fascination with chocolate and the way we and others respond to it.

Rick Levine

Rick has a 25-year history as an entrepreneur, manager and marketer, and has launched and raised funding for several start-ups. He’s worked extensively in product design and development, technology and marketing, and has worked extensively in Internet marketing and commerce. Co-author of the NYT business best seller “The Cluetrain Manifesto,” he is intimately familiar with the drivers behind the social networking and conversational marketing surge we’re seeing on today’s Internet. His patent on stateless shopping cart technology was one of the few instances of prior art cited by Amazon engineers in their landmark (and notorius, according to some) one-click commerce patent. Rick created several of the early commerce sites for the net and has written on the demands and peculiarities of retail commerce on the web.

Another side to Rick‘s career has been his experience in pastry and chocolate, and with production and manufacturing technology. He started early in his career, working for his father in a high-volume architectural custom ceramics business. While in college, Rick worked in hotel and production bakeries, doing line work creating croissants and other pastries. While his professional career took him towards technology for practical, fiscal reasons, his love for cooking, specifically confectionery, has continued to drive him towards finding a way to combine his marketing, creative and management skills with his love for chocolate. He has spent the last eight years learning about chocolate and confectionery production and experimenting with recipes and production techniques. Rick developed the recipes and processes Seth Ellis Chocolatier uses to produce our candies, and is driving innovation both in our production and marketing development.

Rick was educated as a filmmaker, and has a degree in television and film production from Temple University. He lives in Boulder, Colorado with his wife and three children.

David Lurie

David has a long career in the hospitality industry, beginning as a Chef de Partie at the Hotel Jura Simplon, in Lausanne, Switzerland. Most recently General Manager of Boulder’s five-diamond St. Julien Hotel, his roles have encompassed all aspects of the discipline of creating successful high-touch hospitality and food businesses. Highlights of his career include a position as Director of Catering for the Atlanta Hilton and Towers and for the Reno Hilton. In Reno, he launched Hilton’s first off-premises catering company, and achieved a catering budget of more than $5MM annually. He was General Manager of Merv Griffin’s Resort Hotel & Givenchy Spa, and had responsibility for all hiring, business and marketing planning, and resort operations.

David has been a critic and aficionado of high-quality chocolate since his training in Europe. In his time with the Hilton chain, he championed relationships with America’s premier artisan chocolatiers, and used their products in his operations. He brings his organizational and development skills to Seth Ellis Chocolatier and a wealth of industry contacts. David has been instrumental in tuning our approach to production and growing our understanding of the mechanics of the wholesale chocolate market.

David has a degree from Florida International University’s School of Hospitality Management, and resides in Boulder with his wife and two children.

Neil Levine

Neil is a product and package designer, illustrator, muralist and fabric designer. His prolific output includes textiles, jewelry, architectural fixtures and lighting, graphics, packaging, and product and company branding.

At 14, Neil began working in visual merchandising in a local department store in his hometown of Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, and two years later became the youngest student accepted at Temple University’s Stella Elkins Tyler School of Fine Arts. After completing an undergraduate degree in textile design at the Philadelphia College of Textiles and Science, he worked as a fabric designer for a prominent New York City fashion house. In 1984, Neil moved to San Francisco to paint. Working primarily in pastels and acrylics, he explored themes of spiritual renewal prevalent in West Coast life, experimenting with vibrant color in large landscape, abstract, and figurative canvasses that hang in corporate and private collections internationally. Always interested in scale, he was drawn to larger and larger surfaces, and eventually to mural-sized works. His theatre and city life murals at the Little Hollywood Launderette on San Francisco’s Market Street were named the most dynamic works of 1992 by the mural preservation organization Precita Eyes Mural Arts Center. Levine’s newest mural opened in Alhambra, outside Los Angeles, in the winter of 2005. Executed in mosaic tile, the three-story work is the largest glass tile mural in the United States.

Neil has done design, product development, packaging design and marketing for several chocolate businesses, including Confiserie Suisse in Philadelphia, Gerel Chocolate in Manhattan and at San Francisco’s Grey Rabbit Chocolate.

Neil’s design and sculptural skills are essential to the success of Seth Ellis Chocolatier. He developed and refined the decorative treatments used on our chocolates, does our branding and identity development, creates our packaging, and is the driving force behind the development and modeling of our custom chocolate designs.

Neil lives in San Francisco.

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