Chasing a Big Opportunity in Boxed Wine With Juliet Cofounder, Allison Luvera

0:00Hey, welcome to the Female Founder World Podcast. I'm Jasmine Garnsworthy, the host of the show and the creator of the Female Founder World Universe. Today, I'm chatting with Alison Levera. Alison is building a business called Juliet, and they are trying to reinvent the boxed wine or cask wine category. And I feel like you might be having a bit of a strong reaction when I talk about that, but that is exactly what Alison is trying to tackle by having quality wines, by approaching branding. And it's so interesting talking to somebody who is pretty early on in this whole business journey. They've just closed around a funding, they're pretty new, and she is really trying to set herself apart from a lot of noise in the beverage space.

0:45And so it's really interesting to see what she's doing differently, like where she's spending that other people aren't spending and how she's kind of thinking about the business in a way that when a lot of people in her category are zigging left, like she's zagging right before we get into the conversation i've got a few events that i want to let you know about the first one is for our business bestie members only and as a group business coaching call with sarah panton the founder of vitruvi sarah is seriously just incredible she's been on the podcast before and we've been trying to line up this session for ages so i'm really excited about it finally coming to fruition that's happening this week i've popped a link in the show notes if you want to join and then there's another session that is virtual and open to everyone.

1:26It's an ask an expert Q and A with the beauty formulator behind Sula Labs. Her name's AJ Ade and she has created beauty products that are award-winning for brands like Topicals and more of your favorite beauty companies. She can answer questions about developing a beauty product, like what's involved in working with a formulator, all of that nitty gritty stuff that is so hard to Google. This one is open to anyone. So please link in the show notes, come and join. You're very, very welcome. It's going to be a really good conversation. And then finally, I've mentioned this already, but I'm getting so excited for our in-person event with Barbara Rivera at the Ceremonia store.

2:03It's happening on August 30, and we've hit capacity on the event now, but I have opened up the wait list so you can pop your name down, and if a space becomes available, you will get an email, and hopefully, hopefully, fingers crossed for you, get a space. Okay, let's get into the show. You are now entering Female Founder World with your host, Jasmine Garnsworthy. Alison, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. I want you to give your own introduction to Juliet. How do you explain to people what you're feeling? So Juliet is the first luxury boxed wine. And the story behind it is two and a half years ago, my co-founder and I, who are old friends, we're talking about how many great qualities boxed wine actually has.

2:46So it's eco-friendly. It has less than half the carbon footprint of wine in glass bottles. And it's convenient. You know, it's glass free, it's portable, it stays fresh for four to six weeks after opening. So you never have to worry about having one glass at night and then throwing out the whole bottle the next day because it goes bad. But despite all of these great things, you know, there was nothing on the market that either of us wanted to drink, let alone take to a dinner party with our friends or give as a gift. You know, boxed wine in the US has this terrible reputation. It's just kind of known for being cheap and ugly and low quality.

3:22So we decided to change that. We decided to reimagine boxed wine for women like us who love everyday luxury, but also value the convenience and sustainability that it offers. And so we designed our innovative packaging format, which we call the Eco Magnum. So it's this really chic cylindrical version of a boxed wine that holds 1.5 liters, so actually the equivalent of two bottles. And we partnered with an incredible winemaker and a certified sustainable winery in the central coast of California and launched our first three SKUs last September. And so far, we've been just thrilled with the traction we've seen.

4:05We're in 100 wine shops, restaurants, and bars in New York and California. We do about half our sales online, so we can ship to consumers in most US states. And we've, in general, just seen a lot of momentum in the media and our audience is growing online. So this fall we're expanding our wholesale to a few new states and launching some new products. So it's a really exciting time. I love hearing about businesses that are reinventing an old category and giving it a new spin. I feel like we did, there was so much of that that happened like 2017, 2018. And I saw all of these brands pop up reinventing products with like a fresh spin and really like leaning on branding and marketing and creating something that people felt proud to have in their homes and all these different categories.

4:51And I was always like, oh, I should have thought of that, should have thought of that. And now you're saying box wine and I'm like, I should have thought. It's so funny that you say that because it's feedback we get a lot from people in the industry, in the wine and spirits industry that, oh, we wanted to do this. Like we had this idea so long ago. Our executives told us to look into this, but nobody, for some reason, just nobody actually kind of tried to do it. And I think it's because it has that negative stigma. So it is a daunting challenge to, you know, how do you shift mindsets and create that behavioral shift in consumers?

5:30And so, you know, my co-founder and I both have marketing and PR backgrounds. So we felt that we were kind of uniquely equipped to tackle that challenge just based on, you know, where our strengths lie. You guys are pretty new out in the world, but you're getting, you've had quite a bit of traction for such a new brand. What have you achieved in terms of some milestones and what's been working? We kind of launched in, I guess you could say there's been two parts to our journey so far. So we launched and really wanted to do almost like a six month soft launch to test the market and validate a lot of the assumptions that we had.

6:06You know, we made a lot of assumptions about our price point, about our channel strategy, about who our customer was, right? And we weren't really sure if we were going to be correct in a lot of those assumptions, which whether or not we were correct would have a really massive impact on our strategy going forward. So we did spend six months where we were much more lean in terms of everything we were doing from a sales and marketing perspective. We were doing as much as we could in-house. My co-founder and I were personally selling into bars and restaurants and wine shops. And we were doing a lot on our own to try to understand that we had product market fit, that there was a demand for this, that we knew who our customer was that we were talking to.

7:00And we knew that what we were saying and the products that we had resonated with them. So that was kind of the first six months. And I think we made the decision in that timeframe to invest in certain things. For example, we invested in a PR agency, like a really seasoned one with a lot of experience, because we really wanted to have those touch points in the media to not only raise awareness, but also to help us with our fundraise, because we were actually still fundraising as we launched. We fundraised on a safe note, so we were kind of raising on a rolling basis. And so all of that being said, earlier this year, January, February, we really felt as though we had a lot of learnings.

7:42We had validated that there was a lot of demand for this product. There was a lot of interest in what we were doing, and we were seeing the traction we wanted to see. So we made a few adjustments. And then since then, we've invested in a bit of a bigger way in some of our marketing partners in certain agencies in some growth marketing in order to really start acquiring customers and bringing eyeballs to our e-commerce site and to our social media and really start to enable growth in that way. There's been two parts, like we had a bit of a slower launch, which was intentional in order to test and learn.

8:20And then for the better part of this year, we have really started our paid media and done a lot more events and some brand partnerships and really tried to start raising awareness and just growing in a bigger way as of this year. You mentioned PR there and we've already done a group business coaching call together. People who are in the community know about this. And if you're not in the community, come jump in. I'll put a link in the show notes. Everyone is welcome. If you're building a consumer brand. It's so helpful. Just give it a little shout out. I find it really helpful. If I have random questions or need advice on something, I just throw it in the chat there and 10 people will answer you.

9:00It's great. And everybody's kind of going through the same motion. So it's been really helpful for me. If you're not in the community, definitely join. Oh, thank you for that little shout out. But lots of people wanted to know about PR and we get such mixed advice around PR on the pod from people who are like, no, it's not with the money. Focus on, you know, things you can do yourself like TikTok and or like go straight to paid ads or it's more about brand building. It's not going to actually directly impact sales. What kind of spend are you putting towards PR at the moment and why do you think it's a good decision?

9:33Like why is it working? So we have paid about $10 ,000 a month in a retainer since we've launched. And that is kind of, in my experience, that's a middle of the road. You can get agencies that cost more. You can definitely get agencies that cost less. You can get freelance people that have great networks and will charge you less. We made the decision to invest in PR because, again, we felt we had a bit of an uphill battle in terms of de-stigmatizing the category that we're in. And so we really wanted the social proof. We really wanted those media hits. We wanted to be able to say, Vogue and Wine Enthusiast and Forbes and Elle are covering our brand and they think what we're doing is cool.

10:18We really thought that that would, from a consumer perspective, really help our cause in terms of overturning the stigma and making people see the category and our product in particular in a bit of a different light. We also, as I mentioned before, were still fundraising as we launched. And so that ended up being a really great traction point to take back to investors that we had either had a conversation with, but they were still on the fence, or new investors to say, you know, we've launched and immediately we're getting all of this, you know, we're getting all this attention in the press and people really think what we're doing is interesting.

11:00And that validation, I think sometimes can push people over the edge in terms of making the decision to cut you a check because it's very legitimizing. And so it was something that we felt was important. I'll also say that I have a lot of experience managing and RFP and PR agencies, and I've worked on brands that, for lack of a better word, didn't really have much to say. They're either heritage brands where it's sort of maintaining the brand image versus telling a story of a new brand or a new innovation. And so I've seen how in some of those cases, investing in a PR agency is maybe not the best use of resources because there's only so much they have to talk about.

11:52And you're almost trying to orchestrate things to talk about to stay relevant in the media dialogue. And with us, it was the complete opposite case. Like we have so many stories to tell about us as founders, about our sustainability mission, about the process of product innovation, about really everything that we're doing. There's a lot of different stories to tell. And so we felt like we were really set up for success in hiring a partner to help us tell our story because there was just, you know, there's just a lot more opportunity for coverage and for different angles and different types of publications to talk about us.

12:30And so we thought it would be a good investment. And I really do strongly still feel that we made the right decision, even though it's a lot of money for a startup company to part with every month. We can see the traffic coming to our e-commerce site from the articles that we get, and it helps with sales. It's really powerful to go to a distributor or to a retail partner and say, look, all of these incredible publications think that what we're doing is amazing. You should too. And so I think we made the right decision, but it is always a tricky one when you're trying to keep your spend lean in the early days.

13:11It definitely legitimizes a brand. I think if you're trying to build like something from the ground up that is entering a space where the other players are quite traditional, like you're talking to alcohol distributors and you're talking to like restaurants and you're trying to position yourself in a certain way amongst people who like really respect those mastheads. And so I can see how there'd be a lot more value for specifically what you're trying to build. You mentioned fundraising before and I think what you've raised nearly four? Just under four million. Okay, quite a lot. I feel like you just started and you've raised quite a lot of money, friends and family.

13:48How did that all happen? Learnings from the process? Like, what's the insight on building, on raising that much right from the beginning? So we knew we had to raise as much as we could because I just think consumer goods in general, but alcohol especially, it's very capital intensive. You've got to pay for the inventory. You've got to invest quite a lot in marketing and sales right off the bat. It's very difficult to bootstrap in this industry if you want to grow at any sort of clip, right? So we kind of knew we had to raise a bit. With that being said, we initially set out to raise, I think,$1.5 million was our initial goal.

14:28We ended up getting so much. We were so oversubscribed and there was so much interest that kept building as we continued to roll out in market that we did make the decision to raise a little bit more. While we were raising, there was also a lot of economic uncertainty. So there was that feeling of if you can get the money now, just get it because you never know if things will take a downturn and then the climate will change and you won't be able to raise again for a while. So we wanted to really extend our runway. I mean, listen, we were very successful and we're very grateful for the outcome.

15:00We worked really hard for it. But that is not to say that it was easy by any means. I think our fundraise end-to-end took almost a year. and we at first went out to friends and family. We were getting a lot of small checks from friends and family, angels that were in our network. We got quite a few checks right off the bat after we sent out our deck and this was when we were still pre-product, pre-revenue and then we had this lull. I mean, there were like two, three months that went by and we were making no progress. we were terrified because we hadn't made our$1.5 million goal yet. And we were honestly really unsure if we should just continue because at that point, we were getting closer to launching.

15:50And if we weren't able to meet our goal, we weren't going to be able to pay certain bills that we needed to pay in terms of the inventory. So there was definitely a couple of months where we were, you know, really honestly, like very unsure if we were doing this right, if it was going to work out. And then, you know, we got our product in hand. We rolled out into the market. We started getting press. We started being able to show sales online. And once we had traction points to show, things really turned around and we started getting a lot more meetings and a lot more interest in what we were doing.

16:27And I think all that to say the learning that we had is pre-revenue, pre-product, keep your expectations low. You're only going to be able to convince so many people to invest because at the end of the day, they're just investing in you. You don't have anything to show of your product, of your business, of anything. You have an idea. That's great. A lot of people have ideas. So really, they're investing in you. And the people that are going to invest in you are the people that you happen to know. Right. So, so it's a little bit of a difficult proposition if you, you know, are pre-product, pre-revenue.

17:02But once you're past that milestone, I think as long as you can show traction, if you've consistently hit different mileposts, if you can show a media hit, if you can show, you know, traffic to your site, your audience is growing, your conversions are going really well. If you can just keep showing those little data points that signal success and that signal that you're on to something, I think that fundraising is a lot more, it's just a lot more achievable. Like for us, we felt like it was still difficult. We were still talking to a lot of people, but it was more about finding the investors that were the right fit and we were the right fit for their thesis versus, you know, trying to just convince people to take a gamble on a couple of women that thought they had a great idea.

17:51So it was very different after we launched. The next thing I want to talk about is hiring and team. What was your first hire and why did you make the decision that that was kind of the title that you needed to bring in-house rather than outsourcing or an agency? So our first hire is our social media and content manager. And she's fantastic. We were so fortunate to get her to join the team. And it was just so important to us that we had somebody in-house managing content dedicated to how we show up in the social channels because as your audience probably knows, if you are managing a consumer brand in this day and age, you are also sort of a content brand or a media brand.

18:40The need to consistently put out content that is relevant and engaging and authentic and that's the only way to grow an audience. People are nodding. yeah listening and then nodding like yes I mean content it's really daunting the sheer volume that you really need to put out these days especially now that video is sort of the the star and that is a lot more difficult in my opinion but it's just so important and so we didn't feel comfortable outsourcing that for lack of a better word especially outsourcing it to somebody that would have their focus potentially split between us and a couple other brands they're working on.

19:21We really wanted somebody to own it in-house and really help craft and build that, the brand DNA through the lens of content. And I think it was a really smart decision on our part. It obviously was an informed decision because we both, my co-founder and I, have experience in marketing, but it has definitely helped us excel in social media. I think our content is something that we get a lot of comments on in the positive way all the time. Also, it's helpful to have someone in-house because then you really have that one-on-one dialogue with your audience. It's something that you can learn from a lot easier if you just have one person managing it all.

20:07And so we've evolved our content over time just based on what's working, what's not working, what people are DMing us in saying. And I don't know if we would be able to be as nimble or put out as much incredible content if we didn't have somebody dedicated to it full time. And then our other hires are primarily in sales, our wholesale sales team. We have a VP of sales that oversees the country. And then we have a person on the East Coast and a person on the West Coast. You're working in marketing beforehand. Were you at Vogue or Condé Nast or a publisher? Is that right? I started my career in fashion.

20:45Yeah. Did you leave that job to start this or had you already left? Like what was your transition from the full-time workforce into entrepreneurship? I'm always so curious about people, like how they make that leap. Did you know you were going to do this or was it like a more gradual thing? It was a more gradual thing. So I spent the first half of my career, seven or eight years in fashion media. So I worked at Vogue. I worked at InStyle. I was at Town & Country. I was on the marketing side working with the luxury fashion advertisers. So that was my job. I loved it. It was a great role. I learned so much and I'm so much savvier from a digital media perspective because of it.

21:26But I've always loved wine. It was a personal passion of mine since I had a college internship in Napa. So I had in the back of my head that I wanted to pivot my career to wine and spirits. So I pivoted and worked. Actually, it's a funny story. I had trouble shifting from fashion to wine and spirits. Nobody would interview me. I didn't have the experience they were looking for. And so I worked part-time at a high-end wine shop while I was at InStyle. So it was like my last two years in media. And I did that nights and weekends. And I just literally, you know, running the cash register and doing tastings for the customers.

22:09But I learned a lot in having that. Hold on, hold on, hold on. Did you, did you have the idea for Juliet while you were doing this or you were just like, I love wine. I want to be around. I didn't want to be an entrepreneur then. I think I was, I just more really wanted to shift into wine and spirit. So I wanted to work, like my dream at that point was I want to work for like the bigger brands. Like I really wanted to work at, you know, like Moat Hennessy or Perna Ricard, which is where I ended up working with these bigger organizations. And I'm like at that point, I'm a director, right? Like I'm like a mid-level employee.

22:45They're not going to hire someone with no experience. Like I couldn't even get an interview. So that's why I did this like part-time gig just to try to like get something on my resume that sort of proved that I was serious about this shift and that I actually had some knowledge. So I did that. And then I ended up getting a really big role at Perna Ricard. So I was working in marketing. I was overseeing marketing for the luxury division. So I spent a lot of my time on Paris Jouette Champagne and Absolute Elix and the Glenlivet. And that's where I actually got this idea that I wanted to be an entrepreneur because I was fortunate enough to work with a brand called Tequila Avion, which at that point in time was still a startup brand that Pernod Ricard had a minority investment in.

23:37And so they operated outside of the organization in terms of they had a much leaner, smaller team. They kind of did things their own way. And I loved working with that team. I was just so inspired by the founder and the president who have gone on to launch several other brands. They're incredible. I was just so excited about the way they were doing business. It was just much more nimble. They were experimenting more. They were taking risks. They were being more creative. And they weren't really bogged down by this bureaucratic red tape that you see in the larger organizations. And there's no right or wrong way.

24:14There's merits to both approaches. But it was just much more exciting for me personally. it was something that I really thrived in that environment. And so that's when I said to myself, okay, I really love this. Like I want to launch something of my own. Like I want to be an entrepreneur. I had always loved wine. So for me doing it in the wine space made a lot more sense. The last thing I ask everyone who comes on the show is for a resource recommendation. It could be a book. It could be another podcast. It could be a habit that you have every day. Just something that's helping you as you've been up leveling and building the business?

24:48So, and we talked about this in our community chat. One thing that's really helped me is, you know, some people call it a mastermind. I just call it a group chat. Having a group chat of, you know, I'm in a chat with about 10 women. They're all really successful, either founders or people that are, you know, really far along in their career. They're all women. And just having a chat where you're checking in on each other daily and exchanging ideas and resources and just like asking each other the tough questions and having real conversations about challenges has been really helpful to me to have that, you know, that small little community to lean on for support.

25:29I think that there's a lot of bigger communities that have also been helpful. Like I'm a member of Female Founder World. So for me, it's all about community. It's all about, it's really comforting when you have a challenging job, like being an entrepreneur, to have other people to lean on, other people to talk to, to keep you sane, to give you advice. There's nothing more daunting than feeling like you're going at it alone. And so just having those people you can tap into, whether it's a mastermind or a group chat of 10 people or joining one of these communities, like to me, that's been the difference between going crazy and feeling like, you know, I couldn't do this and feeling really confident about my ability.

26:10So that's something I would recommend that everybody really seek out if you don't already have it. Great advice. Allison, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you for having me. quick shout out to all of our business bestie subscribers if you are loving this show and you are building a consumer cpg or e-commerce business or you're about to build one this membership will give you access to the people experiences and the tools that you really need to build your dream business head to femalefounderworld.com forward slash subscriber for more

26:49Thank you.