Zoomelier

It's four o'clock here in Singapore and Nick you're in France, so some time in the morning. It's ten o'clock in the morning here. Ten o'clock, not quite time for wine yet, but welcome to our latest edition of Zoom LA with Nick Martin who is the founder and CEO of Wine Owners. So thank you Nick for being with us today. Great pleasure. Can you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what Wine Owners is? Absolutely, so I'm Nick Martin CEO of Wine Owners which was set up back in 2013 and today it's a business that's focused on technology for the independent wine sector and that covers really everything from collection management, inventorying, warehouse management and latterly and very excitedly because it's just been released at the beginning of May, an independent wine retail business operating platform. What does that mean exactly? So what it means, what does the independent wine retail platform mean? I'm a wine store and I just come to you and get your package and I can better manage my store? What does it mean? Absolutely, so it is everything to do with managing your business in a segment that is a little bit different to many other markets and much of those differences tend to be around the management of inventory. So if you go out and you try and find a generic ERP system as they would be called from the likes of Microsoft or NetSuite, they kind of expect certain things to be given as far as your inventory is concerned. So they expect you to be generating a purchase order before you generate a sales order. They expect stock to be physically in a place and those things just don't work in the independent wine sector because you've got wines that you're purchasing that are going to be delivered, you've got to you, to your own warehouse, you've got wines that may be delivered to a range of other warehouses around the world, you've got wines that aren't be delivered for two years, you've got wines that you're brokering on behalf of your customers that you sold to two, three, four years earlier and those are being sold on consignment. So effectively you're selling them first and then buying them from your client afterwards. And what we found was once we really got into the business of fine wine in particular, that people were spending fortunes on bending these generic wine systems into shape for the independent wine sector and spending tens of thousands of dollars, if not more, on setting those systems up for them and yet still finding that they had to work around the compromises in order to make it work themselves. So we saw an opportunity to build something from the ground up that was just for this industry and which was which was focused on solving those problems but at the same time because we are in 2020 after all and new platforms of course are in the cloud, it's software as a service, it's all about how you can effectively connect your business up and that means how do I make my business more efficient by connecting myself with my suppliers, how do I make myself more effective and grow my business better by connecting myself up to multiple channels to market and that might be just going digital initially in terms of an e -commerce platform of my own but recognizing that we are in a post digital world and wealthy people who are typically your audience are quite hard to get to. Being able to connect with other platforms in order to be able to reach the broadest addressable market that is natural and right for you is a challenge that a lot of people have tried to do but have failed because it's really hard to orchestrate when you're selling through multiple channels at the same time and that's one of the things that our new retail platform called the hub does so well and so a digital operating... Well first of all can you tell us what a fine wine is? Is that defined by price or age or type of wine? It's probably defined as much as anything else by the range of wines that an independent retailer has and it probably isn't necessarily defined by price on the basis that a small interesting producer from the Loire making amazing Chenin Blanc for example, that may retail for let's say 17 US dollars or 20 US dollars is just as exciting just as fine as, I don't know, Au Brion Blanc for example. So I don't think it's a price thing. I think it is about the care with which wine is made. It's about the producers. It's about the relationship that producers want with the ultimate end consumer and the channels to market that they sell through together. I see and so with this platform that you've built and I want to back up in a minute and just hear a little bit more about your history, but this platform you built, if the wine can be a large range is it for any kind of independent wine retailer or only those that are stocking you know a certain caliber? It's for any independent wine retailer because the principle of the hub is that it's encompassing all of the functionality that you need to run your business whether it's purchase order processing or inventory management or sales order processing, customer information management, accounting obviously, and then the turning on of the various APIs in order to start to make your business work smoother. So it's not specific to a particular genre of stock but I think it is the sweet spot is an SME so anyone really from the smallest wine operation up to a business maybe turning over a hundred million dollars. Really interesting. So let's back up for a minute just to hear a little bit about you. I think when we were getting to know each other for this segment you told me a little bit about how you got to this point, this role, which I'd like to hear. I'd also like to hear a fun fact that you want to share with the audience. I started my career in the restaurant business. It was a long-held passion. I discovered food very early on. I was lucky to have a family and a mother in particular who was part of the Elizabeth David generation, post-war 1950s, fairly bleak landscape in post-war Britain and in post-war London. But there were a group of women who were fascinated by food and impassioned by the writings of Elizabeth David who was talking about Mediterranean cuisine. So that was my initial inspiration. I then got into the wine business. I became a chef. Sorry, got into the restaurant business. Became a chef and had a lovely time, albeit a lovely time not earning any money. And it became very clear that without at that time being a person of means and therefore without the ability to contemplate opening up my own restaurant, it was a tough gig, let's call it that. But it was where I caught the wine bug initially as well because I was given the task of building the wine lists for a couple of restaurants. And that was a fabulous journey. It coincided with the introduction into the UK. This was back in the early 80s of Australian and New World wine that we really hadn't seen before. And suddenly these wines appeared as the market with huge fruit that we really had never experienced before. So that was fun. But as I say, it wasn't for me. The remuneration wasn't there. And so major pivot into market research and consulting for the tech. So I joined a wonderful company called IDC, International Data Corporation, based out of Framingham near Boston in Massachusetts and spent a brilliant six, seven years there. Initially doing research for some of the best tech businesses in the world. And then headed up the sales area there and built solutions for those companies. So everyone really from IBM down to companies that don't exist anymore like Digital Equipment Corporation, Epsom, a whole range of businesses. And doing some really fun stuff. Really fun stuff. I remember a research project back in the early days, a company called Nortel, Northern Telecom, that invented this thing called the paper white screen. Back in those days, screens were black and green text and orange text and I guess comforting on the eye given that tech still use those. But the idea was, would a consumer be interested in a computer screen that mimicked writing on a sheet of paper? Would that be interesting? I mean, obviously, it's a pretty obvious answer, isn't it, these days. But back then, of course, it was all new. And so we dutifully went away and earnestly determined whether the research suggested it was a good idea or not. And of course, the rest is history. So was your fun fact shoved in there somehow with your mother being the Elizabeth David Cook or did I miss it? Oh, well, I mean, there are lots of fun facts, though. I suppose my funnest fact, which is completely not wine related, is, I mean, I think just about me really is, so post Lehman, post the meltdown in the financial markets of 2008, though I met a wonderful bunch of people through a company that I was then working for subsequent to a couple of others called Axiom, a business that was specialized in data-driven marketing and data migrations. And I met a wonderful bunch of people in financial services who felt they wanted to give something back in this sort of post-meltdown world. And they formed a initiative called Money Spinners and decided that a group of people were going to cycle from Land's End to John O'Groats, which is from the very bottom of England right to the top of Great Britain in Scotland, which is 1,000 miles. And we managed to complete that in 10 days and raise, I guess, about 200,000 US. So that was a lot of fun and a great moment for doing something very different and something sufficiently challenging that I'd have never contemplated doing it on my own, let's put it that way. Have you done anything that long on a bike since? Yeah, I've done one more since. I'm going the other way from east to west. So from the east of England through to the very furthest western point of Ireland with a little crossing in the middle, of course, because there's a sea there. Yes, yes, there is. But these days, my life is a little bit more state. Right. So you're not riding through the French countryside? Oh, yeah, I'm riding through the French countryside for sure. Yeah, yeah. But only maybe 40, 50 miles at a time. So it's really interesting to hear about the technology and particularly about IDC, because, of course, we know them. They're in our arena here at Cloudflare. But I didn't, besides the in the, you know, wanting being the restaurant business, I'm a little like it's not a natural course into wine business. I don't think it might be. But tell me, tell us how you got the idea for this business, how you started the business. And then maybe I think I understood from you, the business surprise, surprise for an entrepreneur has morphed or pivoted a little bit from the original idea to what you're doing now. So maybe tell us how it started and where you are today. OK, cool. So it actually kind of all started whilst I was working for a company called Read Elsevier, which is now known as Relx. So back in the day, it was a very large publishing and information business with interests in business publishing, in science and in some other interesting areas like legal. And at the time, which was late 1990s, it was starting to recognize the threat from Google. And they pulled together and internally a working group called Imagineering, believe it or not. And the idea was how can the business learn and digitize in order to face up to the threat of Google and a digitizing world. And I was very excited to be part of that group. And I really wanted to do stuff. I was really enthused. There were, of course, initiatives that were going on within the business. But the whole environment of that period, you know, post that dot com bubble bursting was really very energizing. And that was really at the point at which I started to believe that one day I really wanted to build a business. And at around that time, I played around with a proof of concept with a wonderful person who has become my business partner within Wine Owners, at the time was running his own software development business and was very successful. And we had employed him within read to do some work for us on databases and some database applications. And he was brilliant. And, you know, he delivered on time to budget and was super smart. So his name is Walter, Walter Fisher. So we built a proof of concept back then. I paid for it. He didn't kind of, you know, fair, I guess, but I was a client at the time. And and that really was around collection management. The idea was the wine enthusiast, wine collector, wine lover had various had various seller management tools. But, you know, there really wasn't that much around. This was way before Seller Tracker, of course. And so we built a proof of concept for that. And, you know, one of the things that we were constantly talking about within the business at that time was end to end solutions, don't just build a point solution, because if you build a point solution, then, then you're facilitating your, your addressable market to do a thing, but you're not providing them, you're not providing them the full, the full roadmap. And therefore, you're forcing them to go off and have a problem somewhere else, in terms of having to figure something out manually, whatever. So anyway, so we always thought in terms of end to end solution. But it was a sort of around the time that things were getting really busy at Reed. And I was doing it between the hours of, I don't know, seven in the evening and one in the morning. And it wasn't really sustainable. So after a year or so of playing around with that, we, we, we put it on pause. But then fast forward, 10 years later, and the world had changed a lot. We weren't any more reliant on things like least line and dial up modems and things that were really slowing down a lot of these application solutions at the time. And I was working for a company called Axiom. This this US based marketing services organization, and it felt like now is the moment to do what we had played around with historically. And of course, by then I'd spent, you know, 20 odd years working with data. And, and in fact, what we do today is is very much the combination of technology, data, and, and wine. So, so that's the journey. And that's the logic behind how we got to where we got to. And we started planning the business in 2011. We started developing in 2012. And we launched in 2013. So do you consider Walter a co founder? He's very much, very much a co founder. He's technical brains. He's the, yeah, he's the guy, he's the guy who made it happen. You know, I was the guy who, who, who understood what the market needed or wanted. But he was, he's, he's, he's been the most amazing business partner. And then, of course, and then, of course, and actually, he was really instrumental in the pivot talking about the pivot. Sorry, I didn't get to the pivot. I should talk about it. That's the most interesting bit, right? So the pivot was, the seeds of the pivot was sown day one. And Walter had, had previously built a really interesting business, which was a white label business within the property space, which was a conveyancing system, which is basically the legal process for buying and selling a house, that estate agents, real estate businesses were able to take on themselves, brand up as their own, and then offer on to their clients as a sort of package turnkey solution, which added value to their offering, and at the same time brought the cost of conveyancing way down. So when we started Wine Owners, and we were focused on the consumer, as we were, which was, how, how do we help a consumer organize themselves, value their collection, and be able to buy and sell between each other? That was the, that was the end to end solution of the consumer piece. But at the same time, we saw an opportunity within the business side, because we saw a very traditional business, a classic long tail market, a bit behind the curve, very much wedded to the idea of an account management model, which of course is very natural when you think about the sorts of conversations that they want to be having with their customers around wine and wine appreciation. But it meant that those businesses were serving the very top slice of their customers, maybe the top 5% if they were lucky, and everybody else who was in their customer database really was very poorly, if at all, managed. So we saw an opportunity to bring CRM into the business of fine wine. We saw CRM as being all about the collection. We felt that if someone was really into wine, it was irrelevant whether they were a banker or a roofer. It was all about their passion and their journey through wine. And so we decided we would engineer the platform to be white labelable from day one. And that proved to be a good call. Our first business customer actually went live with their business platform before we went live with our consumer platform, which is a business in the UK called Corny and Barrow. So, and a very prestigious fine wine merchant, one of the oldest in London, a brilliant, brilliant company with some extraordinary agencies. And so we're very lucky to get them on board. But that was the start of our business to business journey. And it just became more and more obvious as we got deeper and deeper into different application solution areas, that it was business to business software in a market, which had really never been properly served by industry specific solutions that properly met their needs, which was where the future was. And so that really was the journey that took us to where we are today, where we now have a full blown independent merchant retailer solution as well. But that happened via initially private client reserves management, which is essentially collection management applied to the business of wine where merchants store on behalf of their customers, then into inventory for initially for a club called 67 Palmar, which I believe is due to open in Singapore sometime early in 2021, an amazing private members club focused on fine wine. And then, and then in the US, and subsequently globally, a business of warehouse management systems for fine wine. So that provided the platform for us to then be able to make the final jump into the retail market. It's so interesting. And I guess I always thought that, you know, maybe there was inventory management for different kinds of collectibles, you know, but similar like art or things that you store things that you might trade as opposed to consuming yourself. So it's interesting that there really wasn't one. I have a couple questions. We only have five minutes left. And I found in doing these clubs or TV interviews, we often get cut off. So I wasn't gonna leave at the very end. But just in case it takes a while, you have been exposed probably to more interesting wines than most of us who are watching this, or will watch the taped part. And on Zoomelier, we've asked repeatedly, give us some ideas of what wine we should be drinking when we're on Zoom calls like this. What wine should a software developer drink when they're, you know, heads down, maybe coding? What wine should we drink when we're celebrating? And what wine should we drink, maybe if we're under attack, so at a bad time, and you've probably seen some pretty outrageous or really unique wines. So any, a few of those, any of those, we'd love to hear some insight. Okay, well, so on a Zoom call, I would probably, I would go for something bracing and with lots of facets to it. And, and I'm a great fan of the best Chouinard from the Loire Valley. And there's a lot of it. And it's a very dynamic area that's, that's, that's fast evolving, lots of bio dynamism going on there. So I would, I would, I would be very happy to have a Zoom call with a bracing bottle of Chouinard Blanc. Now, as far as the developers are concerned, obviously you need to keep a fairly clear head when you're coding. And so you probably want to provide, sorry? I'm taking notes for each of these occasions. So you really want a wine that's relatively low in alcohol. And, you know, I know some developers who adore their wine, but there are quite a lot else who don't know that much, but, but who are, are keen to learn. So I think, I think I'm going to go to Germany for the developers and I'm going to give them the choice of a, an amazing Auschwitz or, or Beren Auschwitz or something like that from one of the great producers. And that's such a fast evolving market there as well. But someone like Marcus Molitor makes the most extraordinary sweet wines, obviously, as does Don Hoff. And I could go on. Whereas, sorry? We're down to two minutes, so just make sure. Okay. Whereas, whereas on the other side, you know, you've got the six, you've got the, the emergence of drop-in wines and a whole bunch of brilliant, brilliant, brilliant producers who are making incredible dry and very moderately alcohol wines. Other than that for celebrating, I think I would probably just not mess about and open a bottle of 2002 Monfortino, which is drinking incredibly now is undoubtedly one of the greatest Nebbiolos I've ever had the privilege to drink and is so incredibly Burgundian. It's, it's, it's quite beautiful. Okay. Well, Nick, thank you very much. It was great to hear the story of your business, wine owners. And I think the new product is called the hub. Is that correct? The hub.wine? The hub.wine for any independent retail wine owners out there on the business to business side. I've taken notes on all of your suggestions. The last one being the 2002 Monfortino Nebbiolo, which I am unfamiliar with. I mean, a long time ago, I did graduate from Yellowtail, but I think I'm still not up to the fine wine collectors. So it was great to have you on, hear the story of how you built this amazing business and be part of our Zumelier series. So thank you very much for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. All right. Have a great day. Bye-bye. Take care.