A dropoff in restaurant business after Sept. 11 forced winery Goosecross Cellars to pump up its mail efforts. But what began as a program to move overstock resulted in a shift in the company’s channel use.
Direct-to-consumer sales, which amounted to 60% of the company’s total revenue before Sept. 11, currently make up 87% of its sales.
Before the attacks, the Yountville, CA-based vineyard mailed out 3,000 postcards on a quarterly basis, touting its Chardonnay to the 13 states able to receive wine shipments. But the falloff in restaurant business immediately after Sept. 11 curtailed Goosecross’s wholesale business, and the winery found itself awash in 1,500 more cases of wine than it had anticipated.
“We had six months of orders cancelled by distributors,” David Topper, Goosecross Cellars’ president said.
Goosecross signed up with WorldShipNet, a San Francisco-based alliance that enables vineyards to send cases of wine earmarked for specific customers to local retailers in most states, legally circumventing laws in 33 states that prohibit distance sales of alcohol. In October 2001, it mailed 16,000 postcards to every usable name in its database.
The postcards offered the wine at a price comparable with the distributor’s discount, plus shipping, handling and taxes. Goosecross sold all 1,500 cases of backlog.
A follow-up mailing went out in January, with another scheduled for May.
The restaurant business has begun to come back, and Topper is quick to point out that his distributors will still receive all the wine they request.
This is despite the distributors’ purchasing more than half of Goosecross’s output. While direct mail customers no longer receive the distributor discount, they do qualify for bargain rates based on volume purchases and membership in the Goosecross wine club.
Goosecross would probably not have explored participating in WorldShipNet if not for Sept. 11’s events, Topper said. He’s glad he did, though: The customers the service allows him to reach have proven very enthusiastic consumers.
Postcards aren’t the only channel Goosecross is now using. “I had more than 600 e-mail addresses from people I couldn’t ship to [before using WineShipNet]” Topper said.
When he signed up with the firm he sent out an e-mail announcement offering distribution through the service. It had an 87% response rate.
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