Empathy Wines: How The Operators of Gary Vaynerchuk's Wine Brand Are Crushing It #TheOnePercent

It's above and beyond, just a great wine for a great price. It's like, how do you make the experience of drinking wine better for the consumer in every way, shape or form? And that's kind of the way we came at that business challenge. And then everything that we do is kind of a manifestation of that goal.

It takes one free person to create change. This is the show for them. We are the creators of the free world. This is capitalism.com and we are the 1%.

Hey, what's up, capitalists? Super pumped about today's podcast episode. It is with the founders of Empathy Wines. Now, if you listened to the episode that I did with Sir Gary Vaynerchuk, we were talking about his rollout and scaling plan for that business. But I wanted to hear from the operators of the business, from the guys who were running it from day to day, because one of the things I noticed while I was at VaynerMedia was that Gary kind of has a head of each business division, a CEO in this case. And so Gary stays in the director's chair. He stays the CEO of VaynerMedia. But all of these other side projects have their own teams, their own head of the project, and that's how he has so many cool projects going on at the same time. So I wanted to hear about their plan for growing the business. It's a big operation to run a wine company and a winery. So I asked the guys who are on the ground floor of Empathy Wines to join me and share with me the process for how they're planning to bring this to the world. And so they go through the origin story of working with Gary, but also the business itself and what their plan is to grow this into an industry leader. If you sell anything on the Interwebs, you're going to really enjoy this chat with the guys from Empathy Wines.

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Presence@Turnkeyproductmanagement.Com Hey, this is Ryan Daniel Moran with Capitalism.com Today I'm joined with Nate and John from Empathy Wines. Guys, thanks for hanging out with me today.

Hey, Ryan, how you doing?

I'm doing great. I've been looking forward to chatting with you guys for ever. Since we set up the. Ever after we set up the interview, I'm fascinated by the. The strategy of what you're building at Empathy Wines. And I sat down with Gary a few weeks ago to kind of go through it a little bit, but I'm curious. I know the two of you have worked with Gary in the past, and I would love to know what the impetus and the beginning of Empathy Wines was. When did you, the three of you, decide that you were going to go all in on this?

Cool. Of course. Well, thanks for having us again. We've actually got this question a fair amount. I think we can quickly go into our backgrounds on how we started working with Gary because I think that kind of helps paint the picture.

Please.

So this is Nate here. I started interning With Gary, I guess exactly 10 years ago as a college student, I was interested in wine for some reason, found it fascinating. And at that time, Gary was pretty much focused on wine library and wine library TV and doing these wine video blogs. And I was just googling random wine terms and came across these video blogs that this random guy was doing and thought he was really interesting and spoke about wine in a very real way. And so I just sent him a random email one day and said, Dear Mr. Vaynerchuk, my name is Nate. I like wine. Can I work for you? And he responded, I think pretty quickly and just said yes.

So I had to figure out the logistics to get out to New Jersey for the summer and intern at wine library and do just a lot of intern tasks. He brought me back for another summer to do another wine internship, which I'll let John get into. And then kind of just followed Gary throughout his career as he focused more on VaynerMedia and building out that agency. I went full time, full time with him in the agency, started this as assistant, ran his book launch, and then worked in the operations side of VaynerMedia for about five years before starting this. I'll let you know, John, introduce himself, and then we'll get kind of more into the empathy wine side of things.

Yeah, John, what is your background in the whole ecosystem?

Yeah, absolutely. I'll keep it brief and I'll try not to sound like a parrot because Nate and I actually have similar stories to how we initially met and started working with Gary. So I graduated in 07, just right before the world started to melt with the financial crisis. Had studied undergrad business and had always thought I would end up with a dream job in management consulting or something. Amazing. Graduated, realized that those jobs were few and far between. And so instead I started turning my time towards the thing that I actually realized I truly loved and cared about, which at the time was food and wine. I started taking sommelier exams and getting very, very serious, reading wine textbooks, spending all my free time on the Internet looking up wine facts and wine videos. And then I inevitably stumbled across this crazy guy in New Jersey who was putting out daily wine videos that were insanely educational but also ridiculously entertaining. And as I watched more and more of them, I realized that the guy behind the screen, Gary Vaynerchuk, was onto something with them. Not just from a wine perspective, but from a business perspective. And kind of like Nate, I cold called him, dropped him a note, and said, if there's ever an opportunity to work together, I'd love to explore it. And kind of similar to Nate, it was a short email, but essentially he extended an olive branch and offered me a job to move out to New York and start working with him on a couple wine startups over a couple of years. The first was cork.com, a wine social network, and then the latter was Daily Grape, which was a mobile wine video app. And that was in 2011 or 2012, I think, right around the time the iPhone came out.

And John, forgive me, did you say that you started those, worked at those, or something else?

Was part of the founding team for both of them.

And so you were working with Gary for a short time and then you started working on the ground floor of these other wine related startups. Did I hear that correctly?

Yeah, that's right.

Great. And I know that you're the CEO of Empathy Wines. Can you tell me a little bit.

About how that transpired? Yeah. So Nate and I were both working with Gary at VaynerMedia for about an eight year stretch after those wine startups.

And all the while, I think both of us, and I don't want to speak for Nate, but always had a vision above and beyond the agency life. While it was a great learning opportunity and learned tons about.

How to grow brands, how to work with Fortune 500 caliber businesses, getting an insight into what makes them special, but also what makes them inefficient and slow at times.

I think we all the while, we're always like, hey, how do we get back to that, like startup entrepreneurial, build something from scratch.

Passion that we both shared. And so as all great stories start, we were sharing some wine one night and we ended up brainstorming what turned out to be Empathy Wines.

That's beautiful. So guys, this is a question that plagues me sometimes and plagues. I know a lot of entrepreneurial people, when they have been inside a machine, whether it's their own machine or someone else's machine, sometimes that itch gets lost. That startup entrepreneurial itch of, you know, I want to get back there, but I'm scratching all of these other big kind of corporate things that I'm doing or I'm just lost in the, in the sauce of the machine that I've built. So tell me a little bit about when the two of you knew that you wanted to start, like make that pivot from all the things that you were doing inside of Vayner, being a part of other startups advising Fortune 500 companies. And then you said, all right, I want to, I want to start over again. When did you know that the time was right?

Yeah, that's a. That's a great question. I would say, you know, again, we were at VaynerMedia for eight years.

When I started at VaynerMedia, I think there's about 30 people in the building. And then when we left a little over a year ago, there was about 800 in the building. You know, I would say around year six, five or six at VaynerMedia, you know, it became a real business, you know, with Gary Vaynerchuk at the helm, obviously, it still feels very entrepreneurial. They still, you know, there's a lot of new departments and offerings that are popping up. So, you know, there's an entrepreneurial vibe within VaynerMedia's halls that stems from the top.

But I think from a day to day standpoint and what we were working on, it became a little bit of going through the motions, at least for me. And I think once it got to that kind of going through the motions feeling, it was a little bit of, you know, let's build something again. You know, we built or we helped Gary and this amazing agency get to where it was. And then we started hiring a lot of really smart people that have done this before. And so when we got those people in the building, because we recognized that we needed to hire those people, there was this feeling of, you know, let's build and kind of the winery was fairly logical for us.

So that makes total sense to me. And there's also like this big jump that I've seen just by being at VaynerMedia and seeing that you don't do anything small. I mean, the rollout of Empathy Wines has been, has been you guys have basically, you ordered a lot of inventory from the get go. You sold a lot, I think on the back of, of Gary's audience, which I would love to hear more about. But it was, it was like this pivot from obscurity to. It looks like you're going really, really big really quickly. So there's a, there's a little bit of like a whiplash of there's this startup and now you're going everywhere. And I know you're going from managing Fortune 500 companies to starting small again, but now looks like you're big again. Could you tell me what it looked like in the very early stages of getting ready to ramp up? I mean, did you plan on Gary being involved and did you adjust accordingly? Could you tell me a little bit about setting that foundational few months of what is now Empathy Wines.

Yeah, I'll jump in on kind of the ramp up period. So I think to the outside it probably looks like we ramped up like crazy quickly and this thing came together over the course of one or two months. But John and I were working pretty much full time on this for about nine months prior to anyone hearing the name Empathy Wines. A winery takes a long time to.

Get everything in place, both organizationally regulatory. From a wine side of things, it takes a long time to actually make the wine that we want to make. And so we were working on this for a long time before anyone heard a peep about it. You know, from. I'll let John jump in a little bit on the Gary side of things, but that definitely was a strategy of ours that has been playing out over time.

Yeah, I think just building on what Nate was describing, like, it's funny and it's honestly flattering to hear that you think we went 0 to 60 and have really exploded on the scene and gone big. You know, at times it definitely feels like behind the scenes that we're like this lean, mean machine. We definitely have the benefit of both VaynerMedia and Gary's support. Gary is kind of like in many ways the face of the brand and benefiting from even office space and sharing some resources and the really smart brains over here at VaynerMedia. But the day to day team is really small. So it's just myself, Nate and the amazing first hire that we made, Nora, who leads our customer experience as full time team members. So we're fairly small and nimble and so we're just aspiring to become one of those big brands that maybe we put on the illusion that we're becoming.

Yeah. But I would say that we launched pre sale in November and we definitely knew that we were going to be marketing towards Gary's community. This is. Gary said it a couple times. This is kind of a cool culmination of his life's work. I think a lot of his new audience doesn't know that he worked in his dad's liquor store for 10 years full time, seven days a week, building that brand from a three to $50 million business. And I don't think people understand how much he truly knows about wine. The old school fans do, but not a lot of people in the past two to three years that had discovered him then. And so we knew that again, telling that story and bringing that back to life. And this has kind of been like, you know, Gary's been building his brand and working on both advertising and wine for the past 20 plus years that kind of allowed us to go big quickly and to sell a good amount of wine quickly. So it was definitely a big strategy of ours. And I think one of the, one of the things that John and I are focused on is building the brand in parallel with Gary and letting him do what he does so well in marketing and sales, but also building a brand that transcends Gary because that's how it will become a big brand. And so those are the things that we're kind of focused on over the next 8 to 12 months.

I'm glad you said that because when I was at VaynerMedia speaking with Gary, it was very clear that VaynerMedia was the amplifier of the brands that all of you are working on, that it wasn't Gary's play to make himself the amplifier of those brands. But at the same time, it's hard to not talk about Gary's audience playing a role in at least the initial launch of the business and the products. So I'll pose the same question to the two of you that I, that I asked Gary how, how important or how crucial is Gary's audience in the overall beginning stages of ramping up Empathy Wines?

It was, it was, for us, it was hugely important in the initial stages and we knew it would be. You know, I think wine, as opposed to some other products is a, it's a pretty experiential product. People want to taste it before they commit to buy three, six or 12 bottles. And so being able to have Gary's credibility and Gary's audience attached to this brand off the bat, again added that credibility that someone could buy three bottles and feel like they're getting it from a reputable source and it's going to be good stuff and good juice. And so Gary's community also has been, they're pretty vocal, they're great on social, they're active. And so they've been an awesome sounding board and getting feedback on the product overall and getting reviews of the product and just like user generated content. They've all been like really awesome and supremely helpful on that side of things as well.

So it's been a, it's been a really great thing for us. But we knew that was going to be the case and that was kind of our initial strategy off the bat.

Yeah, yeah, go ahead, John.

Oh, no, I would say just like building on that too. When we were looking at a lot of brands in other categories that have similar business models that have really succeeded whether that's like a Warby Parker for eyeglasses or like, you know, in the mattress world, the Caspers. I think the thing that all of them share with us and wine is a lot of those are really hard categories to Nate's point, to get people to pull the trigger. They're not only not inexpensive, but they're also things that people want to touch and like tactile feel before they actually commit to it. So having the credibility of a Gary and giving the ability to like the trust that he's built up with his community over the last 15 years through the Internet definitely was a something that we wouldn't be able to pull this off without him.

It makes sense from the outside. I mean, just speaking from my own personal experience, I don't like rose. I, you know, I joke that is not real wine. And then, you know, when I was in the office, I'm drinking Rose, going, this is actually really, really good. And here we are talking about it. So there's that like initial spark that I think having that platform and that audience gives you, but I know that that's not the long term play. I know. And thinking that is kind of short sighted to think that, you know, one audience can carry it. Gary was saying to me that you're going to put it through the rest of the machine. Could you explain a little bit about what the rest of the machine looks like after you have that spark from somebody who gives the brand authority? How do you carry that momentum and then transcend Gary, as you put it?

Yeah, I think it's funny. I know I just mentioned a handful of other brands that we really admire. Whether it's like Warby, Parker, Casper and the list really could go on and on at this point. You know, away in the travel and luggage space, there are all these amazing brands out there that have, you know, in their own right built communities and found a different path without necessarily a singular person behind it. I think the path that we've been lucky to not need to go down, which all of those folks arguably have, is raising millions and millions of dollars and dumping all that money into customer acquisition. I think for us now we are getting to a place though where.

Making an even larger investment in marketing and acquiring customers through channels like a Facebook or an Instagram is the other side of the equation. We were fortunate to not need to rush to spend those dollars in our first year out of the gate, but now we really want to do that in order to throw, hopefully throw gas on the fire.

Yeah. So the machine is kind of what VaynerMedia does for its clients. More or less smart direct response, media buying, storytelling and content that again is outside of Gary, that talks about the brand and the value proposition and the.

Quality.

And just doing that block and tackle stuff that we do here at VaynerMedia.

Could you tell me a little bit about the infrastructure that will be necessary for all of that? You're making a big play. I know wine isn't a cheap industry to get into. It's not like there's a lack of competitors. It's not like your customer acquisition cost is going to be low, as you put it. It's an experiential product. So what is the infrastructure? What resources did you need to align in order to go to market the way that you did and ramp up the way that you want to?

Yeah, so. So again I'd say we were, we were lucky enough to have Gary for the go to market side of things.

And so, you know, I think the past three months have been us figuring out who, what and why in terms of the people that we should be hiring and the vendors that we should be working with to do those things that I just talked about in terms of content and paid media.

And so for us, it's either.

Getting some advice from people inside these vaynermedia walls or hiring a full time person to run our paid media department that we're going to be building out or it's saying we don't have these things in house. What agencies should we look at and talk to that can help us on producing smart digital director response ads? For us? It hasn't been a one size fits all Empathy Wines hasn't hired VaynerMedia for us to be one of their clients, but it's us piecing together the right team based on what we want to achieve.

Would you tell me a little bit about what pieces of the Vayner empire you've decided to work into your scale up strategy? I mean, you're sitting next to somebody who talks about every kind of content distribution strategy you could possibly imagine. Which pieces have you decided to work into your actual product brand?

Yeah, I think what's so fortunate for us to be working with somebody like Gary.

Even just above and beyond what we've already talked about is that vaynermedia is this amazing community of really talented people, which I think there are 900 now. Of those 900 employees, I think a good portion of them share that entrepreneurial drive that Nate and I had. And so what that means for us is we're going to be the beneficiaries of a lot of people who say, you know what, I want to take my skill sets that I've learned within this agency and apply them to maybe a startup brand like Empathy Wines. And so inevitably, now that we're getting ready to build out and hire more for our team, you're darn right. The first place we're going to be looking to recruit is from within. And speaking with Gary to identify who are the people, whether that's paid media, customer acquisition, whether that's on the production side, whether that's on the creative concepting side and copywriting or design, that have the right DNA and are in the place where they'd want to make that type of career move and that they have the skill set that we need. And so we're going through that process now as we speak.

So that's the recruiting process, you mean, right, John?

Yeah, exactly. In terms of how we build out the team.

And do you know what your promotion thesis is going to be? Meaning if you're listening from the outside, somebody might say, Gary is real hot on LinkedIn right now. If I've got a startup, maybe my play is to go hire a LinkedIn ninja to build the audience there. And yet, I mean, I know that you're next to them all the time. So does that influence who your first hires are going to be? On a strategy level?

Yes and no. I would say that honestly, like a high level strategy side of things. And just coming from the Gary Vee school of marketing, we're all about testing and learning and not being romantic about any certain platform. So I think that those hires that we're looking for need to have the thesis of what we want to do and be able to adjust and adapt quickly. I definitely think that, you know, regardless of what happens, we will be advertising on Facebook and Instagram. You know, we will be doing like SEO and Google and all those traditional things. But in terms of finding the right initial hires to kind of lead those departments and divisions, you know, they're going to have to have that curiosity and desire to, you know, want to produce 50 ads that are targeted at different zip codes, that we produce specific content for those zip codes because we, and it might not look correct on paper, but we know that that's something that we want to try and test. And so, you know, Empathy Wines and definitely, like Team Gary is a environment of test and learn and fail fast and learn fast. And so, you know, I don't think that they want to hire that or the Hire rent. A maker is going to say, hey, you need to know LinkedIn in and out. But they're going to have to understand the theory of what we want to do across the board and be able to execute.

So what I heard you say there is that you have certain strategies that you're absolutely going to deploy. And from there from like a content distribution strategy or an audience building strategy, it's more about the talents that you attract and their willingness to test within a certain set of rules, if you will, and then you'll, you'll double down on what works from there as long as that doesn't conflict with your paid media strategy, which is is absolutely clear as day to you as a team. Did I summarize that appropriately?

Yeah, I think that that's pretty much right. And I would also say that, you know, we don't mind if someone, you know, breaks the rules every now and to test something. And so again, we're not romantic about any certain platform or any certain piece of content. You know, we want our brand and our value proposition to stay in place. But if that is kind of like the North Star and what we always are like producing content and spending money towards, you know, we want to build a team here and give them flexibility and creativity to try and do things.

Makes sense. John, I want to ask a question to you specifically because you're the CEO of Empathy Wines and one of the things that stood out to me was that it seems like Gary has a chain of command where he empowers one specific person to run the company and then he supports where he can. And from the outside, I think the misconception would be that Gary is running all of these different things and so he doesn't sleep. So would you help us understand what the chain of command looks like as the CEO, but you're also leaning on this influential person. What does that look like? What's the balance between the two of you?

Yeah, and I'll preface this by saying that Nate and I are super partners in all of this and that so much of the titles thing can be an optics thing, especially really staged company like this. And I'll say that actually for the probably this project, for one of the first times in Gary's entrepreneurial career, he's almost deliberately been maybe more hands off than he would be when starting a company and like learning to empower. And I think he would say that if you were in the room here today where Whether that be VaynerMedia, he's even self described himself as a dictator. At times in how everything is operating and he's very, very kind of in the weeds. I think in many ways it's been a vote of confidence for us where yes, he's very involved and knows what's going on within the business, but he's fairly been empowering to Nate and I to be able to make the day to day business decisions. And of course we're going to be taking advantage of one, his experience in the wine world, two, his experience as a venture capital investor in early stage companies and three, just his experience as like a business operator. And so we have no ego when we need him or want to get him involved in a decision we're making. But it's also been incredibly both freeing and confidence building to have him kind of allow us to do our things and in some cases learn from our mistakes when they're not critical.

Yeah, that makes sense. I've struggled as a founder with multiple projects myself of not being the bottleneck. So how do you move forward confidently with your decisions with out depending on your primary advisor getting in the way?

Yep. We've actually had this conversation with Gary like a month or so ago and it's a great question. I think, you know, on the onset, like John said, Gary's for most of his other entrepreneurial kind of startups and initiatives, he's been pretty darn hands on. And we've been so close to him for over eight years and seen how he's operated like that that we wanted to keep him in the loop on everything and we wanted his kind of sign off or go ahead with a lot of things even more so than like he wanted from us. And so, you know, we had a really good talk about a month ago and John and I laid out probably like six or seven things. We're like, hey Gary, here's the things that we're going to be using you for. Here's the things that we need your help on, here's the things that we think you should be a bottleneck on and we got alignment on those three things. And basically, you know, John and I and Gary looked at each other after and was saying everything outside of these six to eight things John and I are going to handle, you know, we're going to run this business and then when one of these seven pops up, Gary, you know that this is important and you know, we, we need you for one of these things. And so it was a really productive conversation because again, this is.

A different kind of relationship with us and Gary and how he started a business that actually defining that was important for us.

That's super smart. I mean, I'm really surprised that you've been able to do that early because I know for me the worst business partnerships have been made when you're having a glass of wine and then you look at each other and you're like, let's do this. And then every, all roles kind of bleed over into one another. So I have to ask in that context, what are some of the six things that are on the list.

That are on the. Everybody's got to be on the same page about.

Yeah, I think if I were going to paint in broad strokes, the places where we're leaning fairly heavily on Gary are to create opportunities and get him involved in things that.

A typical business like ours just wouldn't have in the earliest stages. And so what I mean by that is business development opportunities and partnerships with.

Large size brands. And maybe that means getting our wine poured by the glass with a major company or a major restaurant group, which that would just be a non starter conversation without having him at the table from the onset. And so Gary's an incredibly good salesman. How do we, with the, you know, the percentage of time that we can steal from him, how do we put him in a place to help us sell?

Yeah.

And things that, you know, I think we had conversations about before that, you know, John and I are leading now are like, you know, what, what pieces of software, what marketing tools are we going to use for this business? And so that was stuff that we ran through Gary before of, you know, hey, there's this email service we're looking to sign up for or there's this cool new text messaging platform that we can sell our wine via text. And so before it was, you know, let's schedule 15 minutes with Gary, sit down, take him through it. And you know, usually he was like, great, go. And now we're like, now we just send him a text and say, Gary, we're signing up for the service.

Things like hiring and kind of team structure, he generally wants to be kept in the loop on to give like high level sign off. But from a, from a who or what skill sets, you know, he's empowered.

Us to do that.

Now obviously from a PR side of things, we would be, we kind of dumb not to use them where we can. So when PR opportunities come up or appearances, you know, that's something that we bring him in on. And so a lot of his, what we're going to rely on him for is marketing and sales. And like John said, Those kind of big deal things. But from a day to day standpoint, you know, it's us now.

Yeah.

The other thing I would say, Ryan too. It's funny, I was chuckling a little bit when you were saying some of the worst business experiences can be had when after that great glass of wine and that great idea comes up and you decide to press go with your partners.

That's mean.

Yeah.

When there's like that confusion about who's responsible for what and how all the players work together. I think what's really, really probably can't be overstated enough is that Nate, Gary and I are really good friends and we've known each other, worked with each other for so long and have like, you know, a decade plus worth of trust built up that if there is ever any confusion or we feel like there's ever a situation where it's like, hey, are you doing this? Am I doing this? How should we best work together that like, those things can be sorted out so quickly with like, whether it's a quick text message or a quick phone call or just a super, super honest and frank conversation and being like, hey, this isn't working. Whereas in other businesses that might lead to like tension and friction and ultimately like real conflict. I think we've been able to avoid a lot of that stuff just based on our, our, our relationships.

I don't mean to spend too much time on this rabbit hole, but I mean, just two days ago I'm speaking with a friend who is maybe going to become a partner in a project and the conversation always comes up is like, okay, how do we protect the friendship outside of the business? And so the fact that the three of you are friends for 10 years, that had to have come up or you just have some other understanding that.

I've got to hear about.

So how did you, how did you manage that?

Yeah, Nate and I lived together for a while and were working together at the same time. So both roommates and like close, close colleagues. And so there was a, there was a point there where we were quite literally almost spending 24 hours a day together. And I figured if we made it through that we'd be able to make it through anything. In all serious, I think it's. And I'd love to hear Nate's thoughts on it, but it's probably like a mutual admiration and respect and understanding that like, allows us to do the things that we do together and just like a just being willing to communicate. It sounds so cliche and so corny, but like, I think the second that you bottle things up and don't share and you have like a hesitancy to say what you actually think, that's where those issues arise. And we've never really had that.

And Nate, is this where you completely contradictory and say he was a terrible roommate?

I have no respect whatsoever?

No, I would agree mostly. But I mean, you know, John and I have also had probably like five or six, you know, really serious conversations over the past six to eight months. You know, I think we didn't come into this business being naive and thinking that this was going to be easy by any means. And, you know, there's definitely headaches every day.

But.

I think since we have worked for so long together and John and I have lived together, and, you know, obviously our respect for Gary, it makes it a little bit easier.

When you've just communicated for so much for so long. I think if the communication stopped, that's when we would all say, okay, there's a problem going on here. But since it. But since it hasn't stopped, and regardless of what that communication is, it's all good, you know, we can figure it out and get through it. But I think once. The second that communication stops is when there's going to be issues.

Yeah, that makes sense. So one of the things that I've noticed about what you have done in the rollout of Empathy has been an attempt to differentiate the product apart from. From other wine companies. For example, you have the. The quarterly subscriptions, you have the text sommelier. And John, if you tell me that it's you behind all those texts, I'm gonna laugh out loud. You've positioned it as a $40 wine for 20 bucks. I've seen attempts to kind of attempt to run away from the pack in that way. And I was hoping you could shine some light on the overall business strategy or the numbers behind the strategy that we don't see from the front end marketing of the business.

Yeah, I think, yeah, there's a lot to get into, like when it comes to the nuances and like the specifics of the offering. But I think at the very highest level, we were saying, how do we create a winery or a wine brand that over delivers for the dollars that the consumer is spending in every way, shape, or form? And so when I say over delivers, that could be looked at in a lot of different ways. It could be the price point, which we're definitely trying to hit. We're trying to deliver a wine that would otherwise cost twice the price for half the price purely by the business model and selling direct. But then the other ways that you over deliver on value would be in the form of customer service and experience. So the packaging and like everything from the way you unpack the box to the experience of the wine getting to your door and like the personal touch of that, right down to that sms. So that sommelier on demand service that we provide, hopefully of somebody ever being scared of having a wine list handed to them again, like that's what we're trying to solve. And it's above and beyond just a great wine for a great price. It's like, how do you make them the experience of drinking wine better for the consumer in every way, shape or form. And that's kind of the way we came at that business challenge. And then everything that we do is kind of a manifestation of that goal.

Yeah, makes sense. So I wanted to wrap by asking you about the product rollout because in wine.

Your time to market takes a lot longer than, you know, white labeling, a spatula. You know.

The time to market can be a long time. So I'm curious if you hit roadblocks, obviously, on the way to bringing that product to market and what you did during those frustrating times to keep the whole company on track.

Yeah, I mean, we definitely have, I wouldn't call them roadblocks. I just say, you know, it's our first year, so it was a lot of learning experience for us. Gary was, you know, obviously in the retail business for so long, but this was, you know, we're a winery, we're making our own wine. And so I think one of, one of the hurdles was communication with customers and being able to say, hey, your wine's going to ship on this date and it's going to be to you at this date because, you know, things, you know, bottling could be pushed back because of, you know, something happens, packaging could be pushed back. And so I think communication with customers has been.

You know, a little bit of a challenge as time goes on. I think after we get through our first vintage in general, things should flow in a very similar way year over year. That being said, you know, like you said, it's a, it's a pretty long time to get the wine in someone's hands. It's an agricultural good. You know, we're picking, we're picking the grapes, we're making our wine. We're not bottling any, you know, bulk juice. This is the wine that we're making. And so, you know, that's great because that's what we want it to Be. That's the authentic story and that's we want to make the wine that we want to make. But year over year, it's an agricultural good and things happen and vintages are different. But that will be something that is. It's not something where you can just take consumer feedback and change it the next month. We can't. So I think that's the great thing about our business is it's ours and it's also a challenge of it.

John, would you add anything to that?

Yeah, I think to your point, like, wine is really challenging in that, you know, we're already right now planning for the 2019 vintage that will be released in this, you know, the back half of 2020. So there's these hugely long lead times. And I think for us, you know, we, you know, Nate and I have this, had this great experience of branding and marketing and acquiring customers and all that expertise through VaynerMedia and like, using that playbook. But this is our first go around when it comes to things like logistics and even like customer service and being as close to the customer as we are now. And so those are things where as you're building a business, you're kind of like.

Fixing the plane as you fly it in some scenarios. And so a lot of it comes with headaches and challenges and, and those can be intimidating challenges. But it's also just.

I think it's in our nature to be excited by trying to figure out that conundrum.

Well, gents, I am fascinated by how you were rolling out this company because you're going into a big market with huge valuations, huge hurdles, huge challenges, and you're doing it differently than any other brand that I've seen. I'm obviously a fan because, you know, I have 100 cases or something on their way. So we do a segment here, capitalism.com called Wine with Wine. And I have a feeling we'll be seeing a lot of empathy wines on the show. So I'm rooting for you guys. I can't wait to watch the whole brand story. And thanks for hanging out with us today.

Awesome. Thanks. Thanks for Ron. We appreciate it.

Thanks so much. Enjoyed it.

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Sam.