Birdhorse Wines - an enlightening adventure

As you all know, we worked with Tyler and his wonderful wine making partners on Birdhorse wines for our final project. When Tyler approached us about joining his group for the final project I was very excited. I figured it would be a great experience to take all the knowledge I had gained from class discussions and apply it. What we decided to do was basically build the Birdhorse team an investor deck / board update presentation. This allowed me to think through and work the entire spectrum of items necessary to launch (what I believe will be) a successful business. I had previously seen many investor decks and board decks, but never built one from scratch. For a consumer good, a space I had never worked in before, we brainstormed go-to-market strategy, marketing strategies, product-market fit, the products themselves (which varietals might be best for future years), sales techniques like limiting allocations of certain varietals, and of course, the unit economics and building out a fully working financial model based not on made up inputs or numbers in a case, but real expenses Tyler and co. have incurred over the last year+.

I found the experience to be extremely rewarding, not just because I learned a lot about launching a wine brand, but because I felt for the first time at this school like I had a hand in the launching of a business end-to-end (with the exception of actually making the wine, I guess), something I had not done in my previous work experience or any other class to date. In doing the project I also became convinced that Birdhorse has a unique and compelling story with founders who understand the millennial mindset and can appeal to them in order to sell their wine. It doesn't hurt that the product was great too! Overall, I am convinced Birdhorse will have no problem selling out their stock, and I had a great experience in helping in a small way!