Online retailer Wine.com has seen significant change lately, with the Goldman Sachs-backed company partnering last October with digital marketing and technology group Dolabra in a bid to expand its consumer pool and differentiate its online platform by personalizing the customer experience. The move saw three members of the Dolabra team take up key roles at Wine.com, including Mark Pinho, who now leads the retailer as CEO, Ya-Bing Chu as chief revenue officer, and Niko Conner as vice president, marketing.
After a boom during the pandemic and subsequent retrenchment, Wine.com’s annual sales are now approximately $200 million. The partnership with Dolabra is aimed at hyper-focusing the retailer’s marketing and customer experience to both build on its existing base and more intensely engage with its consumers. “What we’re trying to do is create a space where you as the consumer can actually have relationships with the brands you like, and where we can show you new things you should be discovering,” Pinho tells SND. “And we want to give producers and wholesalers a way to have a more fluent and targeted conversation with their audience.”
“Today you probably have to spend too much time with Wine.com to engage in all the content we offer, learning about the differences in producers, regions, and varieties,” adds founder and executive vice president Mike Osborn. “There are customers who enjoy that as well as our self-service. But the next phase is for us to be more helpful amplifying and targeting these stories for our customers.”
As the company sharpens focus on gaining and engaging new consumers, it’s seeing premiumization within its business, with its average bottle price for wine rising about a dollar to above $32 last year and the average for spirits nearing $60. “The lower end is suffering a little bit more, but the upper and middle tiers are doing pretty well,” says Pinho. “With our early initiatives around customization and personalization, we’re seeing a lot of activity there. We’re seeing that K-shaped economic concept where lower-end consumers are trading down or out and mid- and upper-tier consumers are continuing explore.”
That dynamic has been boosting margins recently. “During the pandemic, we had a lot of customers for whom we became a source for more value-priced wines,” Osborn notes. “For a good six months, our average selling prices decreased. In the past year we’ve curtailed quite a bit of those wines that simply are not worth the operational and freight costs we incur to sell. We’re getting healthier margins as a result.”
In wine, which Wine.com sells across 41 states and Washington D.C., imports are continuing to outpace domestic bottles and are approaching a 60% share. In spirits, the company sells in New York, New Jersey, California, and Massachusetts, with imports representing about 78% of category sales.
Moving forward, Pinho believes customizing the Wine.com platform for consumers can pay off not only for the company but more widely for marketers aiming to connect more closely with wine drinkers. “Right now we’re delivering a kind of choose your own adventure experience for customers. And we’ll still offer that for those who want it,” he says. “But wine may be the ultimate personalizable product, with a lot of different consumer preferences. We want to understand those different audiences and create more custom experiences for you as the consumer. In doing so, we can provide avenues for the rest of the industry to have better conversations with customers.”—Daniel Marsteller
