Luke joined the wine industry in 1997 and spent the following 20 years building online wine businesses globally. He joined Cellarmasters, an Australian direct mail wine business, in 1997 before moving to launch Foster’s European wine club in 2001. During his time in Europe, Rowan Gormley, who was running Virgin Wines, persuaded Luke to join him at Virgin to create a new online wine model. Virgin was challenged and Luke returned to Cellarmasters in Australia and was involved in selling the business to Woolworth’s in 2008. Luke was then hired by Rowan to launch Naked in Australia in 2012 which he ran for 3 years before being promoted as the CEO of Australia and US under Rowan when Naked was part of Majestic Wine. Luke now runs SLOCACH, an online sports coaching marketplace, based in Australia.
There’s a lot of reasons why that works, just from this angle of a subscription. By the time Naked launched its angel concept, the idea of a wine subscription was still the thought that you subscribe to something and, every three months, they send you a case of wine; you come home and it’s sitting on your doorstep. You might like eight of the bottles and there are four you don’t and you question as to whether you are really getting value there.
What Naked said was, the reason a subscription works is not because it gives us the ability to ship you a case of wine. The reason it works is that you make a commitment to us and that commitment gets repeat purchase. Rather than getting you to commit to getting a case of wine, every three months, that we ship you, what if we just get you to commit to deposit the money and then you pick the wines. Again, at the time, people would say, that’s not true. But it really is. I remember doing the analysis and nobody was really giving people a ‘mix your own dozen’ subscription plan. In the end, that’s what Naked did. It said, hey, you put your money in, you’ll get an intellectually easy to understand deal on putting that money and a 25% to 50% discount because you are doing it and you’ll get to pick the wines you want, rather than have the wines sent to you; mix your own case.
What we had learnt at Cellarmasters and then realized, at Virgin, is that subscriptions matter. Naked was the iPhone 11 of that original iPhone of subscriptions. We realized that what sucks about subscription is that people hate being locked in; they hate the fact that wine gets sent to them that they didn’t order and they hate the fact that they get little choice over the wine. Let’s reimagine subscriptions and Naked Wines’ angel model really is a reimagined subscription.
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Luke joined the wine industry in 1997 and spent the following 20 years building online wine businesses globally. He joined Cellarmasters, an Australian direct mail wine business, in 1997 before moving to launch Foster’s European wine club in 2001. During his time in Europe, Rowan Gormley, who was running Virgin Wines, persuaded Luke to join him at Virgin to create a new online wine model. Virgin was challenged and Luke returned to Cellarmasters in Australia and was involved in selling the business to Woolworth’s in 2008. Luke was then hired by Rowan to launch Naked in Australia in 2012 which he ran for 3 years before being promoted as the CEO of Australia and US under Rowan when Naked was part of Majestic Wine. Luke now runs SLOCACH, an online sports coaching marketplace, based in Australia.