Scaling Naked into New Products

Could Naked go into other products?

We’ve tried stuff in the past. One of the things we did when I was there was that we tried beer, in the UK. We tried to see what Naked Beer would look like. It resonated well with customers but, again, the economics of it are pretty hard. Two beer bottles weigh about the same as one wine bottle, but they don’t cost as much. It hurts the economics a bit and, therefore, you have to adjust the proposition to make the economics comparable to wine. In their various Christmas cases, they’ve tried other products, such as olive oil and gin, mostly as one-offs. I think that wine drinkers are there for wine and not a lot else. It’s just a different experience.

What about dark spirits, or even white spirits, potentially? They are higher value.

Spirits is definitely one that they have thought about. It’s a tricky one because it is a different kind of shopping experience. It’s not just all thrown in together. The one thing that we were definitely afraid of, in the UK, to come back to companies like Hello Fresh, is that if they got themselves sorted, would that be a situation where they could say, here’s your steak dinner and here’s the Argentinian Malbec to go with it? If they owned that slightly more frequent customer experience, then that could definitely be something that could be appealing to that kind of customer. But I think it has panned out to be a slightly different buying experience. It’s not quite the same and people do think about their wine on a longer-term basis. But that is definitely a threat. If someone got that proposition really working well, I think that could definitely have an impact on Naked.