The Grapevine

Do You Deliver? (A Great Wine Shop Experience.)

April 4th, 2017

Anyone who refers to rosé as “summer water” is OK in our book, though the news gets less good from there. Well, good for wine consumers. Not so good for wine shops. [level-members]

Summer Water Societé is a joint venture between Winc and Yes Way Rosé is a delivery service focused entirely on, you guessed it, rosé. And not even the pink stuff in general, but their own bottling. And membership runs from June through August.

Setting aside questions of the quality of the wine – we haven’t tried it so can’t provide anything of an opinion – it’s an interesting concept to build an entire business around, even if it is a “pop-up”-type business. Or perhaps precisely because it’s a pop-up business.

There are at least two lessons here:

  1. If you don’t offer – and promote the fact that you offer – delivery, you’re doing yourself a disservice.
  2. Getting people’s attention and providing an interesting shopping experience is critical to retail success today.

And what’s more attention-getting than building a delivery service entirely around one type of wine that’s popular one time of year? Now, you’d probably quibble that a 12-month membership is more appealing to “serious” wine drinkers. Or that a summer-themed wine club should include other quaffables like vinho verde. But you’d be missing the point.

Because the point here is providing a little something unexpected, even frivolous, that turns a routine shopping experience into something more entertaining. Yes, buying wine is always going to be more fun than buying, say, bathroom cleanser, but that doesn’t mean you can’t make shopping with you less process and more experience.

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