Scaling Wine Makers

Do you think there are any limitations to Naked’s growth, in onboarding new wine makers, as they get to scale?

I don’t think so. In the months before we launched, we took a week’s trip, from New Zealand, over to Perth, meeting all these wine makers. Basically, going through our book. We met three types of wine makers, at the time. One type would say, this is a crazy idea; you’ll never get it to work. Thanks, see you later. The next type of wine maker went, this sounds too good to be true; if you ever get it working, come back to me. The third type of wine maker said, this sounds too good to be true; I’m going to give it a shot. It was that third type of wine maker that we launched the company with.

But within 12 months, within Australia, people from both the other two groups were coming to us and saying, hey, how do I get involved. I think that the Naked Wines model can work for any wine maker and it’s proven that. I think the limitation on Naked is not with the wine makers, at all. I think it’s in continuing to grow out. It’s product range and it’s price-point range and being able to get different sectors of the market. That is its challenge.

Do you always think it will be individuals? We’ve seen Jesse Katz, in the US, who now works with Naked. Do you think they are going to sign bigger companies or smaller wineries or businesses? How do you see that evolving, five years out?

Again, that’s a difficult question and it will be speculative. I know what I would do, but I am no longer directing that.

What would you do?

I’d stay away from that. The reason I would stay away from that is the reason that Naked worked is that it connected people. Naked customers were buying from a person and they were a part of the story. They went to a dinner party and they might not be able to tell you what malolactic fermentation is, but all of a sudden, they can sit down with a wine and tell a story about that wine. They weren’t talking about malolactic fermentation; they were telling the wine maker’s story. They were also saying, by the way, I’m an angel in this. So they were a part of the story and they were able to talk about wine in a way they hadn’t been able to before. Then they realized, when they started talking to the wine makers, the wine makers actually talk about wine in the same way they do and there is just a whole bunch of people in the middle that make it confusing.

I think that’s a really powerful part of what the Naked proposition is. When Cellarmasters started, it had an amazing proposition, as well. People in Australia were drinking terrible wine, to be honest. They didn’t know the full potential of Australian wine and Cellarmasters said, actually, we can use wine clubs to get them to do that. By the time Cellarmasters got to the year 2000, it was a business and it had lost its heart. It just had its head and it was hitting targets. I think that Naked would be foolish to move away from that human connection. A wine maker is the artist behind a wine and that connection is really, really critical.