Naked Wines’ Founding Story

When you set up Naked Wines, how did you look at making that company different?

We set up in 2008, which was the last crisis, before the current crisis. It was a weird time, but it also meant that everybody was willing to look at new ideas. The whole thought behind Naked was that, wine costs too much money, because winemakers need to spend so much selling it. If we could get customers to buy the wine, before it was made, then the winemakers wouldn’t need to waste the money selling it, which means the customers would get good wine, for better money. This means you wouldn’t need to sell hard to them, so you’d keep them for years, which meant you would have a good business. That was the original thought.

The thing about 2008 was, winemakers needed money desperately, because the banks weren’t lending. We didn’t have enough money to fund them, so the only place it could come from, would be our customers. It was partly inspiration, but partly, also, just desperation, that forced us into that. What we discovered, much to our surprise, was when we went to people and said, here’s a really good bottle of wine and you can have it tomorrow, whatever level of response that generated, we’d get four times that, where we said to people, here’s a winemaker who’s run into problems. You can’t taste the wine, but if you pay today, we can let you have it in a year’s time. People were much more engaged in that, than they were in a simple transaction to buy wine.

Although we didn’t quite understand it at the time, that turned into what we call a virtuous circle, where we wanted to build a company where our winemakers, our suppliers, our founders, our staff, were all in it together. We weren’t trying to exploit one group of people to the benefit of another, but that by everybody sharing in the benefit of the company, everyone would benefit.

We started doing that by making them into shareholders. With shareholders, you do that because they’re really shareholders. The new thing was to bring the winemakers in and make them part of the deal, as well. It took a few years to find exactly the right shape of the business but building it, eventually, into a business where the customer has funded wines in advance and winemakers could leave their day job and set up and just focus on making wine. That’s what made it different. Out of that, a lot of other benefits came, as well, such as, you don’t need to hard sell, because people have already bought. That changes your marketing approach, it changes the way you talk to your customers, your investors and everything else.