Naked Unique Business Model

How, exactly, is Naked different from the other wine clubs in the market?

Naked has really been based around the wine maker as the central person, and around the customer and the connection between those two. Really, that is what the naked part of Naked Wines means; there is just nothing in between. You get to see the full, unbridled truth. As they put the wine maker central, it’s less about this amazing bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape and that Châteauneuf-du-Pape is an appellation that you absolutely need and all the rest. That is a lot less important than the story of the person who has started this vineyard, in Provence, and how they got it together and the challenges they faced, and the choices and crises that they faced, along the way.

They really put the wine maker at the center of things and, in the early iterations of Naked Wines, you actually backed a wine maker. It wasn’t that you just put money into the general fund of Naked Wines and that was used to support wine makers. It was more, I back this actual individual wine maker; I have £5 a month go to one wine maker and £5 a month go to another one. That talks to the fact that the early iterations, which they then moved away from, were really about putting the wine maker centrally.

Some of the stories are just really wonderful. Carmen Stevens was the first black female wine maker in South Africa and it was just the kind of story that people really get behind and feel an ownership of. That was what Naked was based around. Here is this wine maker; you can see her story. Not only that, you can talk to her, you can review her wines and have her respond to them. You can meet her on the tasting tour, when it happens in the UK. It was really about putting them centrally, whereas a lot of other online wine clubs tend to be much more about the wine. It was the classic long-tail Amazon model which is, if a supermarket has got 50 wines, we’re going to go online and have 2,000 wines. We’re going to list every wine we can find. We’re going to cover all the appellations and we’re going to have this depth.

Naked isn’t that. Depending on the time of year, it’s about 500 to 600 wines listed, but it’s much more about the wine maker stories behind them. I think that’s what makes it unique. What is really lovely about that is that is actually makes the whole thing quite consistent. Rowan talks about the business model, but how much of the price of your bottle of wine is going into the sales and marketing of that wine and that’s just dead cost. When you add that up with the dead cost of the bottle and duty and the VAT, suddenly you discover that your £7 bottle of wine doesn’t have a huge amount of wine in it. Whereas if you can cut out some of that sales and marketing stuff, then you really can get better quality wine, for a better price.

It just worked really well on that level of, here is the wine maker; we’re doing the selling for them, because you’ve bought into this story up front. Now you are getting great quality wine from them that you really believe in.