Growing Naked Wine

What was the biggest challenge in acquiring customers?

That’s a good question. I think there was definitely one challenge. In the voucher world, with 10 minutes of research, between us, we could find a list of the top 1,000 websites in the UK. Fairly quickly, you can work through all those and get them on the voucher programs and all the rest. The same applies to magazine subscriptions and things. So there is definitely a question about where is the next channel; where is the next thing to go for? Would it surprise me if Naked eventually start to do TV? Not hugely, because TV is very scalable. I would worry that it is not exactly the right consumer for them; it’s probably a bit too young and not the right, affluent demographic for Naked. But the challenge is just finding other scalable channels.

Vouchers are very scalable. It certainly hasn’t run out of steam but, I would imagine, they are starting to think otherwise, because the team that did vouchers at Naked was all over it. They have probably spoken to every kind of website in the UK, at this point. Digital is obviously massively scalable and that’s another one where it’s tough because you are paying for every single eyeball, where wine is a purchase that might take them a while to decide to make the leap.

Is the CAC higher, going through Facebook or digital marketing, versus vouchers?

I honestly can’t remember. I don’t remember it being massively different, to be honest.

What other channels would you use, if you were running Naked today?

I genuinely don’t know. I think there is more to be done in digital but it’s about finding the right place for digital because a lot of the high-growth digital channels have a very young demographic. Like most digital things, they grow fastest in the young, early on. For example, I would imagine that the demographic of Instagram is just getting older, all the time. At some point, that will start to work. You should talk to my friend, Bryn Snelson; he’s all over this stuff.