Victoria Thyssing has spent close to six years at Treasury Wine Estates, working across direct-to-consumer, on-premise and national accounts after starting her career as a sommelier. But it's her work outside her day-to-day role that she's particularly passionate about.
As a member of the Pride in Drinks workstream of the Embrace Difference Council for the past two and a half years, Victoria has been part of an effort to make the drinks industry more inclusive for LGBTQIA+ people, particularly in customer-facing and leadership roles, where visibility still lags.
"Getting involved felt like a natural extension of both my personal identity and my desire to make the industry more inclusive," she says. "The drinks industry is incredibly vibrant and diverse, but there's still work to be done."
What she didn't expect was how much she'd value the cross-company aspect of it. Sitting alongside people from completely different organisations, all navigating the same issues from different angles, gives the work a scope that's hard to replicate internally.
That's also what she thinks makes the Embrace Difference Council so meaningful. Not every company in the drinks industry has a dedicated DEI function or the internal resources to drive this kind of work on its own. The Council gives those organisations something to plug into: education, community and a shared set of values that makes inclusion an industry-wide conversation rather than something that only happens at companies big enough to prioritise it.
"It helps ensure that diversity and inclusion aren't just individual company initiatives, but a broader industry priority," Victoria says. "And I always appreciate that this requires such intentional effort."
Without that shared framework, progress tends to be uneven. Raising the visibility of the work at an industry level changes that dynamic in a way that individual initiatives rarely can.
Across her career, Victoria has seen what happens when people feel like they can show up as themselves at work and what happens when they can't.
"It drives confidence, performance and ultimately stronger teams and better business outcomes," she says. "That's not something that happens by accident."
Her hope is that the next generation entering the drinks industry feels supported from day one, rather than having to figure it out as they go. The work the Council does now is what makes that possible.
