Most brands these days are a clever name and good looking label that an advertising department can run a campaign around and a distributor can push down the pipe. Nobody really thinks about the idea of building a brand by changing the way you actually market and sell the wine. If you could approach these tactics differently and appeal to the consumer and trade in a way that makes their lives easier, this new vehicle would become the brand in itself more so than the pretty label and tasty juice. Stormhoek, Twisted Oak, Pinot Blogger, and Sacre Bleu have pioneered direct marketing for a wine brand and have found some success doing it this way. However, the next generation of wine brands will learn how to break down the barriers of the industry and start actually selling the product in a unique way.
Here are a few steps that we plan to follow:
- Start by getting the wine setup in DTC and find a few retail partners that you can sell DTT
- Develop a young millennial sales force who are appealing to the wine clubs out there for big DTC shipments and the hot restaurants and wine bars that will want to buy DTT
- Of course, it’s important to have the suppliers, importers, and negociants on your side so that you can change up the juice and roll out new varietals and blends on a regular basis. Check out Cameron Hughes — he’s killin it doing it this way.
- Finally, get a big distributor involved as a logistical partner, but keep them out of your sales efforts or their antiquated ways will kill the organic nature of your brand.
We’re trying to take Tastevine in this direction and if things start to build, then we can do what us tech geeks really enjoy and build a software system, which will manage the sales, inventory, and accounting between all parties in the sale, and thus drastically reduce sales costs. Hopefully, we can take it to this level and help benefit a lot of the quality long tail wines out there that are sitting in distributor warehouses.
