Everyday Wine's Dan Gillett shares his strategy behind taking wine retailing online

[00:00:00]Good lovely mate. Thanks so much for that. I guess we can start with the cheers.

[00:00:03]Thank you very much for this. Um yeah, obviously Everyday Wine's founder and creator and building this business up over the last few years. Um many people probably won't have seen your face before or heard about this business possibly if they're not into wine, but I guess going behind the scenes to you yourself, how did you get into the wine industry and and how did you sort of build this business up?

[00:00:22]>> Yeah. Um well, I grew up in Marlborough and so I I worked in the wine industry from a teenager. I was in vineyards working through school holidays and whatnot. And then um I I had a a cafe and a coffee roastery, then a wine bar. Basically started importing wines about 10 or 11 years ago.

[00:00:41]Uh we started an import business called Wine Diamonds and then that led into retail. So, about 5 years ago we started Everyday Wine, which was a a wine shop on Cuba Street in Wellington.

[00:00:53]Um and now we're based up here in Auckland full-time and all online. We made some big changes, you know, 3 years ago we shifted the business online. So, we closed the bricks-and-mortar stores and just focused on running from one place from from a warehouse.

[00:01:07]That meant a whole bunch of efficiencies for us. Like we were able to, you know, stop double handling everything, send it straight out the door from where we imported it to, you know, directly out to the customer. That sort of signaled the change for us where we we could see that the writing was on the wall.

[00:01:23]More and more people become sort of budget conscious. I think the wines that we offer now, you know, we've really driven home, you know, value and like that sort of cost proposition. So, we make and produce a lot of wines ourselves. We have um a whole lot of wines that producers make exclusive exclusively for us.

[00:01:42]And the whole point is really just trying to drill home value and, you know, eliminate all of the margins involved and try and give everyone like the best possible wine at the best price. So, when we made the change all online, we also, you know, really changed our pricing model. So, we were that sort of traditional importer, distributor, and retailer.

[00:02:03]>> Yeah.

[00:02:04]>> And you know, traditionally everyone sort of adds on a margin at every step.

[00:02:08]And we kind of changed all of that and said, "Well, we'll we'll import and we'll sell it directly to the consumer."

[00:02:13]You know, that did change the way we did things. Um but what it means now is like a bottle of wine that might be $40 on the shelf is more like 15.

[00:02:22]>> Yeah.

[00:02:22]>> You know, so it's huge savings.

[00:02:24]>> Same product as well.

[00:02:25]>> Yeah, just the same. And, you know, that change in in price has contributed a lot to our growth. Like, you know, the fact that we are doing this, we're a lot more aggressive in pricing with, you know, with how we operate. But people seem to respond to the fact that we're delivering, you know, really high-quality wines at much better prices. And that's fueled a lot of our growth. I think there's there's been a few changes. Like, more and more producers are aware of margins and and so there's there's been a shift towards a lot of smaller producers wanting to sell their wines directly to >> consumer.

[00:02:55]>> Importers, I haven't seen much of a change there. You know, like most importers would still sell to a traditional wine shop or a restaurant or a bar.

[00:03:04]Um and and and often they don't like to blur the lines because, you know, then it does get challenging. You know, you sort of become one or the other. Um somehow we've we've managed to stay in both camps. So, we still supply lots of restaurants and bars.

[00:03:19]Um and and, you know, hotels and everything.

[00:03:23]Um but we also have this growing retail business. So, um the yeah, the change the change I think is is probably from um smaller producers selling direct to consumer. There's more of that happening. Um and and then importers it's probably going to stay the same.

[00:03:39]>> For you guys, what is the sort of 3-to-5-year goal going forward? Do you have an idea of what what that could look like?

[00:03:45]>> Yeah, I mean, right right now we're we're sort of head down just wanting to grow the range and grow the offering. Um you know, when you are growing a business that there's always operational challenges to work through. You know, like we're trying to figure out long and hard how how do we ship wine to the South Island faster? You know, it's little things like that for me which I find exciting. [laughter] But but it is like the the key thing I'm trying to do at the moment is sort of widen the range and improve the product offering and and let the wine sort of lead it.

[00:04:15]And then you know, everything else will sort of slot into place. Yeah.

[00:04:20]I'm not thinking too you know, too far ahead in terms of growing and trying to be this big thing. It's more about like how can we do what we're doing really well and and execute on that whole idea of like great wine, really great prices and a great service.

[00:04:36]>> Build that tent and people will come.

[00:04:39]Just build it yeah, totally yeah.