After reading the WineDirect case and for several days after
I couldn’t get the following quote out of my mind. “By now, I thought we would
have a $200 to $400 million business. I was wrong about the growth rate. We’re
in the business of enabling but these are premium and ultra-premium wineries.
We’re in the luxury business, which is a smaller business and a smaller market,”
Waechter said. Based on what we discussed in class and what we read about New
Vine Logistics I found it hard to believe that even being a $200mm-$400mm
business was a goal, as opposed to something much bigger.
Upon looking into the details of the 2019 Direct to Consumer
Wine Shipping Report, I found that consumers spent $3bn on DTC wine shipments
in 2018, up from $2.69bn in 2018 and that wineries shipped over 6 million cases
of wine in 2018, up 9% from the prior year. What I’m trying to get at is that
I’m generally surprised that WineDirect isn’t the Amazon of wine, expanding
distribution facilities and enabling consumers to legally order most wines on
demand. While it will be interesting to see if Amazon decides to make a push
into the market, which at the moment seems somewhat unlikely, it would be a
great story to see WineDirect continue to grow into a large business,
especially with the colored past the original company experienced.
