Jeroboams: ‘a modern fine wine merchant… can’t just sell people wine’
Six months after launching its new Exchange platform, db catches up with Jeroboams on the growth of the site and its next steps. Arabella Mileham reports.
Speaking to the drinks business six months into the launch of its new fine wine Exchange, CEO Matt Tipping said it had been a very successful launch. It has already doubled the number of customers that are interacting with the Exchange since it went live. There are good numbers of customers bidding and a “relatively stable” number of cases on the site, suggesting customers are continuing to list and refresh the site, even as things are sold.
Having had six months since launch, the Exchange was now in a “good spot”, where most of the “inevitable niggles” that follow any kind of launch have been worked through, with the result that it is proactively looking to start chasing sales.
“There’s been a good range of wine selling through it,” Tipping told db, pointing to the popularity of Bordeaux, Champagne and the Super Tuscans in particular, predominantly wines that are “perhaps still relatively early in their drinking windows.”
“It was always hard to know exactly where you’d get that sweet spot between what people were looking to sell and what people were looking to buy. But we’re a merchant that is very strong in those European areas so it’s no surprise that the customer’s reserves reflect that,” he said.
“The aim over the next 12 months is that it continues the rate of growth that we’ve seen since launch and to see if we can keep that moving, although it will inevitably start to flatten off as it matures as far into the future,” Tipping said.
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Sales director Lucie Parker said that the exchange was launched in response to customer requirement, arguing that “if you’re a modern fine wine merchant, you can’t just sell people wine. You’ve also got to allow them the opportunity to sell it and then buy more. You’ve got to create that space for them, so this is part of our longer-term plan to grow and acquire more customers and have this service as part of our offering.”
Currently, the Exchange has mainly be used by private clients, but the team are already thinking about the future is and how to utilize “this lovely, mature stock we’ve got on the Exchange to service the on-trade”.
It is, Tipping argued, the next logical step now that the Exchange is in place, and will enable the fine wine sales team to use it as a “curated list” that on-trade and merchants can look through to see what is available, and how to make those purchases.
Meanwhile, the fledgling cellar plan is still in its early days. “We’re just about to start shouting about it”, Tipping told db, but has already generated a lot of interest, having only gone live on the site last month
“We’ve had a 30% increase in cellar plans just from the fact we were talking about it and saying it was coming, and we also have a further waiting list of customers that are waiting for the automated service,” Tipping said. “So just even talking about it and explaining what’s coming has generated a lot of interest.”
It is ideal for collectors who are “relatively early in their journeys, perhaps in their mid 30s” he said, helping them learn about wine and “have a curated service that is a little bit less scary than going straight in to in-bond and en primeur,” he said.
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