How AI Saved 20 Hours and Improved Customer Experience

Hi there, I'm Will Lawrenson, the host of Customs and Click, the podcast for e-commerce brands looking to solve challenges, share successes and learn what's working in the world we need to see. Each week, we dive into the strategies, tools and insights driving growth. But for now, let's get started. Janie, welcome to the show.

Do you want to introduce yourself? Give us a bit of your background and how you got to where you are today. Yeah, happy to be here, Will. Thanks for having me.

My name is Janie Brooks-Hoyke and I am the managing director of Brooks Winery, which is my family's winery started by my brother, Jimmy Brooks, back in 1998. And I have been leading it since 2004. I pretty much have done all the facets in the company, except I won't take any credit for making wine. What did you do before?

Before that, I was in healthcare. The job that I left before I started working at Brooks, I was one of the co-founders of a company called Silver Sneakers, which was a fitness benefit for Medicare eligibles. So HMOs basically were providing fitness as a benefit to the elderly. One of the most fantastic jobs I've ever had.

Yeah. But still kind of not, well, obviously very different to wine, but still kind of running a business. Yeah. You know, it wasn't a complete start from scratch, trying to figure out how to run this sort of thing.

Yeah. A lot of transferable skills in terms of marketing and growth and data management. and yeah, took a lot of that with me for sure. Yeah.

So what are you obsessed with at the moment? Well, honestly, and I know a lot of your other guests have said this, but AI, I just had a big AI breakthrough day yesterday. And so I'm eager to continue to use it. We have a couple of things going on with AI.

So it's exciting. Like how do you, what are those big break? Well, what areas are those breakthroughs in? Like how, where are you seeing the benefit of AI in the business?

So one where I saw immediate benefit yesterday really through efficiency. So there's a company that we're very fortunate to have in the wine industry who is creating an AI just for wineries, right? So it's going to be like your most sophisticated AI platform for wine. I have that integrated with Claude now, and it ties into our POS.

So all of our sales data. So, and so yesterday I actually, we have 12 different wine clubs, I think, and we make about 50 different wines a year. So trying to figure out what wines to put in a club based on the membership that are going to meet the right price point. I put that all into AI yesterday and it, it, it spit it all out for me in an amazing way.

Like probably saved me 20 hours of my time. So that was exciting. But then we have more relevant to, to what we're talking about. We just launched last week.

There is a company that does, they have a palette survey basically for wine where they have millions of people's data of answering a survey and then matching it to what style of wine they would like. And so we've provided them with all the chemistry of our wines and have just launched with Meta some paid advertising and some target markets just to see how it goes for people to take this quiz and then end up learning which Brooks wines would be the biggest match for their palate and see how that converts.

Yeah, I think that would be a big one. I'd be really interested to see what the quiz looks like and what sort of questions they ask. Because this is something I, obviously, as a CRO agency, something I think about a lot, because it's very much, you've got to ask questions that someone will know the answer to. So if they don't know if they want a citrusy wine or a more floral wine, then they're not going to get very far.

But if they know they like, I don't know, black coffee or green tea. Those are the questions on there. And this company started really, they had kiosks and retailers. So if you wanted to, you walked in and you didn't know what you what kind of wine you liked, right, it would get your results and send you to the Cabernet Sauvignon section or whatever it was.

So through that, they've collected millions of pallets of data. The questions are super simple. How do you feel about it? It's like, stop kind of.

Yes. And it's do you like black coffee? Do you like creamer in your coffee? Do you like green peppers?

It's about 20 questions like that. And then that is what it uses basically. So it is really about understanding your palate and what you like and then recommending the wine rather than kind of a lot of quizzes you see out there, which are basically, you're just, I'm just asking you the questions, which result in you telling me what wine you like. And if you don't know that, then it's only going to give you back what you think you like.

Right, right. Yeah. And I mean, I'm a sucker for the quizzes, right? I take them all the time.

I've bought plenty of products based on quiz results. So it'll be interesting. There's really not anything like that out there for wine. And then the other thing that's really cool about it is there's a food pairing component.

So you can type into it after you've gotten your results. I'm going to make, you know, a steak with a mushroom sauce tonight. Which Brooks wine should I pair with that? And it will tell it back which Brooks wines are the best to pair with it.

So it has a ton of potential. It's a behavior change, right? Like that's what we're not sure of. And when we first launched it, you'll appreciate this.

It asked for your email in the beginning. So we got a lot of people who clicked on it, but nobody actually took the quiz. So we just reorganized it all to where the email's at the end, because obviously we need that to be able to give them their results. So we'll see.

We just launched it last week. So I don't know how it's going. but so funny enough I spoke to a company two months ago maybe three who does exactly this I met him in the UK I don't think it's a UK business but yeah and it was also the I can't remember what the kind of the the other functionality was that he was talking about but the thing that he he was talking to me mainly about was the food pairing and the ability to say this is the dish that we're going for what would you and then it recommends the wine to go with it which I think is really again like really really good because I think a lot of people don't think like that they're kind of well the furthest a lot of people probably go is should i be having red or white depending on what sort of dish i'm having right and basically what sort of red or white do i like right and then this will specifically tell you of course which brooks wine you should be having yeah which you know that's always been an obstacle for us because we have you know 50 plus products and we have multiple vintages and i actually just cleaned up our website this week too because if you went to one of our like collections it had like 60 wines in it who's going to be able to decide when they know nothing about you.

So we really thought, especially for Brooks with how many skis we have, that a quiz like this could really help people identify their best match. And we, of course, you know, I had to have my team taste it, take it first, right? Including my winemaking team and everybody agreed with their results. So I was like, okay, it's, it's for real, right?

Yeah. I suppose, yeah, it's, it's helpful when you've got the experts in house who can validate the tool does actually work it's it's giving the results you'd expect you're good to use it i mean like how so how are you planning to use it is it you planning to use it kind of as an acquisition play to get people into certain offers and kind of acquisition bundles and things or is it a general use anyone can use it and we're just going to guide people to yeah anybody can use it so we have it it's been in the nav bar of our site for a couple years and we finally have built flows that if somebody takes it and what we did is we organized our wines then into what we call different collections.

So are they earthy pinots? Are they vibrant pinots? Are they bolder reds? Are they dry Rieslings?

Are they aromatic whites? So once you've taken it, if your best match was our old vine Pomard, which we have in the earthy pinot noir category, the email then takes you to that collection. So you could find not only that wine, but other wines in that similar style. So that's part of it.

And so we do have a whole email campaign or flow that follows it too. But the ads are new in terms of trying to find new customers, right? We're trying for just for acquisition. So we're doing a lot of lookalike of our club members.

We're going into the zip codes and stuff where we already have a lot of members. And then the third way that we want to use it is in the tasting room. So we have a couple of wine clubs that are customizable. And if it's somebody first visit and they don't know how they want to pick their 12 bottles our tasting room team will give them an ipad with the quiz on it and then we'll that will help guide them with what kinds of wines they should put in their shipment yeah yeah no it makes sense i like that and so acquisition wise getting getting traffic to the site are you early days of testing that or are you now kind of thinking this is a good play to to get new customers in because we can literally push the push that message of you don need to know our wines because we will it brand new like literally we just trying to get people to take the quiz okay so we see i get my first results next week and you know we use a outside agency for all of our marketing and the head of that is super hot on this he knew about this company too and honestly i've been beating it strum for three or four years but unless i have that partner who believes in it too and wants to help me make it effective and i mean he's really really excited and bright.

So I'm sure we'll have to do some tweaking. We already found the one, you know, there was a barrier to taking the actual quiz, but I think once people take it, it'll be really interesting to see, you know, what that leads to. Yeah, absolutely. And so outside of that, then what's, what's been working well at driving traffic to the website?

You know, what, what actually, what, what previously has been getting you to acquire new customers? You know, we, I mean, we obviously have, we've been doing meta ads for a long time And our switch to this company has made those much more successful. But those typically are for tasting room traffic more than anything else. But we've, you know, I've done an email every, just about every Sunday since COVID.

So when COVID first happened and everything shut down, I kept getting emails from wineries and they were so transactional, right? It was just about buy wine, buy wine, buy wine. And I thought nobody's asking me how I am or even acknowledging that in these weirdest of times, can I help you find some wine to forget about it? So I started writing an email on Sundays and we have about 20,000 people on our mailing list because capturing email has been one of my priorities since I got in the business.

And we have about a 50 to 60% open rate every Sunday. They're not all sales oriented. They're very educational. They're very what's going on at Brooks, accolades, things that are newsworthy, new programs.

So that ends up driving a lot of people to the site every week too. And then we do, obviously we have targeted release and promotion campaigns that we do in between. But I think, I put my email and my phone number in every single email and people were like, wow. And I'm like, I mean, sure I get some replies and every once in a while I get a phone call from someone who needs help with a shipment, but Like I'm definitely not overwhelmed and like making yourself that accessible and knowing there's a voice in a person.

Like every time I see our club members, I hear, I love your Sunday email. It's my morning ritual. I sit down and get my coffee and, you know, open up your email. And it's that customer connection that how do you keep it personal, even though we're on this, you know, we're a big, not big business, but we've got a lot of customers.

There's a company over here. I think, I think they're still around called Packed Coffee. and what they is a coffee subscription business okay but they're one of their big things was they would go off direct to source so they would go find small farmers in central america i think mainly central america but i think a bit of like south america and africa and when they sent out your subscription they used to send a like a physical newsletter so it was a printed like a printed one and it was really good you know it had a little bit of salesy stuff in there you know we've just launched this or you know have you tried drinking coffee in this style but then there was all the story stuff and you actually got like interviews with the farmers and like interviews about where like information about where the coffees come from i think potentially the mistake they've made with that is you only got that when you received your coffee which meant you got it maybe once a month maybe every two weeks right as opposed to that every week here's some interesting information or you know here's our new release coffee because they used to do a lot of that as well like a lot of these limited releases so they would have had that opportunity need to send that email on a on a sunday or whenever yeah build it actually sorry you reminded me with the sunday routine part of what they were saying and it was you know you can sit on the weekend have your coffee and read this yeah and i suppose it was quite nice having the physical thing but i think yeah even just just getting that email on a regular basis with educational stuff and interesting things about the coffee and we you know we go back and forth on the physical stuff i mean we're we are one of the most sustainable wineries in at least the united states i can't speak for worldwide, but, you know, so putting paper in a shipment is a consideration, you know, it's, it's, as a marketing person, I'm like, it's such an awesome opportunity to message and to my green committee, it's such a waste of paper.

So, but I'm also of that generation where tangible is important too, which, you know, it's interesting because, so we do have a green committee and it's run by our land steward and she's less than 30. So a different generation than I am for sure. And we're going to do this garden tour this year. And, you know, our first idea was like, well, let's do QR codes.

And she said, everybody hate my generation hates QR codes. Like I'd rather have something tangible. And we're like, what? So we're actually going to have a physical map.

But, you know, I think sometimes we make assumptions too about what different generations want from a communication standpoint. And I'm not sure that we have all those answers. Yeah, it's interesting. Like it does feel like we had a point in the last couple of years where we went too digital and now everyone's kind of like actually do you know what it's nice to have some physical stuff right I have a I have a remarkable which is basically a bit of both because it's a it's a digital notepad but it's it allows me to write yes and then today for the first time in probably five years six years I printed out some documents for the business because I know that I'm just not going to get to them if they're if they're on my laptop but having that physical thing just I It still makes it easier to get back to it.

Yeah. Do you use the Moleskine notebook? Because I use the Moleskine, which is a digital. It records all my game.

I have a Remarkable, which it's a bit of a, it's fine. I use it basically as a to-do list most of the time, which makes it really the most expensive to-do list I've ever bought. Yeah. But I do like it.

It's smaller. It's easier to use on a regular basis. So yeah, I make enough usage of it. So it's good.

I went that direction when I lost my physical notebook because I was a big bullet journaler and I lost it one time and I'm like, what am I going to do? Like every to-do list, every calendar, every, so at least this way I have a digital version of it wherever I go and don't always have to take it with me. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. You could use it on a phone, can't you? Well, I can use it from Markham. Yeah.

Cool. So that's driving traffic. So obviously outside of the quiz, how do you convert people? So new customers get to the website.

How have you built that experience to make sure people can find the wines they're actually interested in and buy them if they don't use the quiz? I mean, so we have honed in on these collections, which is pretty much the forefront of now what you see. And we're very thoughtful about, I could put 12 wines in that collection, but I'm going to put six and then rotate them so that it's not an overwhelming page when people go there. we also as part of our POS system they just launched a dynamic cart carrot so which is really interesting like we always had cart carrots and we would have to go in and say what the cart carrot offer was you know if they have this in their cart offer them this if they don't have this offer them this well now it's dynamic so it will go look at that person's history and if they've bought the sweet pea Riesling five times but they don't have it in their cart it will offer them the sweet pea Riesling.

So that's a pretty cool automated tool. I've never heard anyone use the term cart carrot. Really? I've never heard anyone use that term.

I really like that. Yeah. And then, I mean, that's a very good component of our POS system. That's always been a strong opportunity, right?

Cause you can put a shipping offer in there, you know, we could tell it if you have five bottles, well, if you add one more, you'll get to flat rate shipping at $30. So we've used it a lot and that really helps to convert people as well. You know, we're pretty strategic about holding back certain products and doing releases and limited releases. So we do make a lot of small production wines that are 150 cases and less.

We have referral programs too and loyalty points. So if you're a club member, you get loyalty points. If you're not a club member, you don't get loyalty points. And depending on what club level you're at you the higher rate you earn them okay yeah so pretty much is that just is that mainly achieved through spending or do you have do you allow people to collect points through other activities that you want people to do we do we have some opportunities so birthdays anniversaries in the club they get extra points they get points if they refer someone to the club and then is it a paid membership it's not no so they pay for their shipment but they don't pay like a membership fee And then we also have a green program where if people bring back corks if they bring back refillable bottles if they bring back their wine bag reusable wine bag that we gave them we give them points for those efforts as well And then we'll do different, you know, we do like member month in February.

And so any purchases that month accrue double points or triple points. So we'll do that during different times of the year too. And then we have a nice, you know, block in our emails that's easy for me to add in that says, hey, well, you've got 2000 loyalty points, you know, you should use them, you know, they don't expire or anything, but and they can use points on just about anything, but their shipment. So if they're buying mine, if they're buying t shirts, if they come in and have a meal, they can use points for just about everything.

Yeah, it's an interesting one about not expiring them. I get almost from like a customer point of view, it's well, we don't want to expire them, you should be free to use them whenever you want. But obviously, having the expiry date does allow you at some point to say, Hey, your, your points are about to expire. Do you want to come back and, you know, make sure you use them, make sure you do something or at least I know a lot of programs reset the expiry date if you earn points as well.

So if you make a purchase, then your 12 months resets, which is, yeah, I think quite a, quite a good way of doing it as well. Yeah. We, you know, our average lifetime in our club is longer than the industry average. So we have people that stay longer.

If they leave the club, then they have a certain window that they have to use their points before they lose them. Okay. Yeah. So, and so last time we spoke, you mentioned that the club is like a collaboration between some, some other vineyards.

Well, we have a, we have a club benefit. We have a club benefit that is a collaboration with some other vineyards. So a year ago, it's almost our one year anniversary. We founded something called the Wine Atlas Collective.

And it is a collaboration of seven other independently owned wineries across the United States. And the idea originally behind it was, if I live in Oregon and I'm a club member, I can go to Brooks all the time. But if I live in Missouri, I barely get to Brooks maybe once a year, once every three years, right? So how do I get better benefits being in Missouri?

So that's kind of where it started. So the idea is if you're a member at Brooks or any of those seven other wineries, you are treated like a member at all eight. So if somebody from like Ridge Vineyards is one of our partners, if a Ridge Wine Club member comes to Brooks, they're treated just like a Brooks Wine Club member. They get the same benefits, free tasting, discounts on wine purchases.

Same thing if they buy online. And what's been really neat about it is we're all very sustainably minded. Like the people that we pick to be part of the collective are all, you know, innovators, all sustainably minded. Hospitality is a huge part of their program, which there's a lot of wine businesses that don't care about hospitality.

They're all about just wholesale and scalability. So that had to be super important. And then across us, we make 43 different varietals of wine. So there's a lot of exploration.

you know there's a little bit of crossover like we have a finger lakes producer well we both specialize in riesling the washington producer and the texas producer make a lot of bigger you know warmer climate wines so there's some crossover but overall it just allows people if you if you live in new york and you can't get out of new york you might be able to go up to the finger lakes and take advantage of your membership benefits yeah yeah i really like that I think that's a great idea.

Did you, is that something that you guys have had to build separately or did you have a tech provider who was able to sort that? No. So we, I mean, we built the network. The interesting thing though, was we all agreed from the get-go, this wasn't about sharing data, right?

We're not going to share each other's databases to make this happen, but how do you validate that you are a member at one of the seven wineries? So we did have a tech person build a database basically in an API because most of us are on the same POS system. So when somebody walks in, as long as they give their email that's tied to their club membership, it goes out to the database and we'll come back and tag them as a member of one of the other wineries. So then we're able to do it.

Yeah, it's in the database, so cool, you're good. And honestly, let's say you can't validate somebody, we're not going to turn them away, right? What's the harm if a brand new person coming in and learning about Brooks? So does that mean, so can they use the points across different places or just like the other benefits when you are there in person?

Just the other benefits. So the points are specific to Brooks, but we all provide like free tastings when you come visit. So everybody gets to use that free tasting, whatever the discount is at the entry level club for website purchases, they can use that too. So one of the things that we did this year, because the tasting and traffic last summer, when we launched this, everybody sought visitation like crazy, but we weren't seeing a lot of online sales.

So this year, starting in January, we did a content rotation. So like one month I would write just about, and it was in one of my Sunday emails, just about Ridge. And to tell my membership all about Ridge, why they should be excited about Ridge. They should go visit Ridge, but also here's a coupon code to go buy Ridge online.

That has driven a lot of e-commerce for all of us now too. Yeah. So just promoting each other. Yeah.

Yeah. Properly. I'm not just, not just, or by the way, you know, this, your membership card gets you into, to these other places. It's actually, yeah.

You guys care about each other and support each other rather than just tick to box. Yes, we've signed up. Cool. Oh, for sure.

Like the, the stress that you would have hoping that your email generated a lot of sales for your partner winery, you know, that was important, right? Yeah. For sure. Yeah.

I was just thinking, oh, and you know, I think in general too, running hospitality programs well in the wine industry is expensive, right? And I think as wineries in this group, we all understand that e-commerce is one of our highest profit margins. It gets people to buy your wine, but you're not hosting them, right? I mean, hopefully you'll get to at some point, but to have growth, it's really got to come through e-commerce because our buildings and our staff can only see so many people and we're all very busy.

So we're all very focused on how do we continue to improve the e-commerce side of this relationship. And also just distance, right? I might not want to drive an hour or two to get to you to pick up some wine when I could just get online, place an order and have it shipped to me and probably have But what, next day, couple of days? Depends, depends on where you are.

And it depends on what time of year, right? The share is with the heat across the country, shipping becomes a whole different monster. Oh yeah. I mean, it's difficult to really understand as a Brit, I suppose, because everything here is, you know, I think everyone says your standard delivery will be three to five days.

I'm generally surprised if I haven't got something within two days, just because it generally just doesn't take that long. it's yeah it's not a big place yeah yeah yeah I know I always feel that way about Amazon when I'm in a major city you could get it the same day I'm like what like yeah within a couple hours yeah yeah no that's that's kind of handy I mean it's not always it's not necessary yeah it's rare that you need something that quickly and if you do you probably go out and get it yeah well and wine shipping in the United States is difficult for sure so you every single state has different laws and regulations so you have to be permitted in the state that you're shipping into so we have permits in 47 states they are all different they are all every year they all have to be renewed every month they have to pay taxes and fees to every one of those states so compliance expense is really expensive i mean that's the one downside to shipping and then we're also locked into only using fedex and ups pretty much the postal service does not deliver wine in the united states Is that alcohol?

Do they just not deliver alcohol? Yeah. Yeah. And you have to have a signature because you have to prove that you're over 21 for people to sign for it.

So you can't always just ship to people's homes. Like there's a lot of stuff that goes on behind the scenes and logistics that makes shipping wine harder. Yeah. And it's, it's, it's heavy.

It's heavy. So it's expensive to ship as well. Yeah. On the, so on the retention side, I do feel like there's, there's obviously a lot of people who, when they find a wine they like they'll they'll buy it they'll just go back and they'll buy it again and again but what else have you found either just ensures those people come come come back or you know for those for those people who may be not as tied into a specific wine or and are happy just to buy whatever they come across really how do you try and make sure those guys are coming back and and spending the money with you and not you know we have a a couple things so just before you answer so deep so we have a few places like uh like majestic wines so like a wine warehouse where it all they do is sell like wine and well spirits and beers but it's not a not like an off-license or a liquor store it's a it's a big warehouse do you do you have similar things do you have a similar we do but again it varies by state in some states grocery stores can sell wine in other states they can't so in those states, you find big retail beer, liquor, wine stores right next to a grocery store.

Now, some states have changed their laws to allow grocery stores to start selling wine and spirits. And that's a whole, that's really tough, right? Because you've, these businesses have been built about being able to do that. So yeah, we do, we have a mix of both.

And again, it depends on what market you're in. You know, there's a lot of still state run, Pennsylvania's state run for wine. Oregon State run for liquor, but not for wine. So you just have so many different variations on the model.

Less distributors who have to deal with that in all of their individual markets. Yeah. But back to kind of like how we get people coming back. I mean, one of the things that we do as well, at least in person, we have a lot of events.

We have something called our member mixers on a regular basis. We have one coming up. I think it's the end of July. That's going to be a cheese throwdown.

So, you know, people, we try to keep, and I would just say in general, like we cast the broadest net. Last night, we had a paint and sip class with an artist at the winery. We have special dinners that we do. We have a full-time kitchen.

Our menu changes quarterly. Our wine flights change monthly. So it gives people a reason to come back. And, you know, that's just a benefit of having a lot of different wines.

A lot of wineries make four or five wines a year. They can't change their flights all year, you know, so we, it's a strategy for us to be able to have so many different offerings. You know, we're, we're a certified B Corp. We're members of 1% for the planet.

We're Demeter certified for biodynamics. So we have all these sustainability reasons too, that if that's what somebody loves and they're trying to figure out what winery they're going to support, that makes a big difference. So whether it's a different event type, a different wine type, a different sustainability philosophy that we have. we try to provide as many reasons as possible for people to find a reason to love us.

And our, you know, our story too, there, there's so many people that love our brand because I stepped in when my brother tragically passed away in 2004. And there's a lot of people that feel, you know, akin to that for their own lives and their own reasons. And so, yeah. Yeah.

So it sounds like you've, you've put a lot of time and effort into actually building the experience and building a brand and not just, hey, we sell wine. Do you want to come and buy our wine? Yeah. Giving people that reason to come back again and again.

So it's not all about, you almost feel like it's not all about the wine. It's about, you know, what event are you guys doing? Let's go to that event when we just happen to get some of that wine and maybe while we're there, we'll buy some. Yeah.

When I built our winery in 2014, we were in this tiny, tiny space and it was a big decision because it was a big investment, obviously. And it wasn't very far away from where we were. And we had basically no traffic and no visitors where we were. So building a place where you were hoping that you would have traffic.

But I refused to build the typical tasting room because the typical tasting room in the wine industry is where somebody walks in. There's somebody standing behind a bar. You get to taste four to six wines. And then they basically want you to buy or join their club and they want you to leave.

Like they don't want you to hang out. There's nowhere to sit down. They give you like the tasting notes leaflet and just say, cool, there's your wine. Go find a seat.

and just enjoy and that's it. And I don't enjoy that. I don't enjoy it. I'm also a sucker for it.

I feel like I've taken up this person's time. I better buy something, whether I like the wine or not. So when I built Brooks back in 2014, I was like, I'm going to build a place I want to go hang out in. So it has always been comfortable.

It's leather sofas and we've always done table side service. We didn't have food in the beginning. We have a full food program now, but it is about the experience. And to this day, we still talk about the started during COVID.

Like we want to be the safe place. We want people to feel like they should come gather here and that when they do, they're free from the rest of the world. Right. And that started during COVID.

Now with our political situation in the United States, like we just want to be this really safe, happy place for people. They can come have a cup of coffee or a beer or a cider if they want at Brooks. They don't have to have wine you so you you're set up to be people's local i don't know how local people are but you're set up to be like a place that people would happily just come to just because they fancy a drink as opposed to a lot of vineyards which are i have to book a tasting or you would only go there if you're if you want a tour or a tasting and yeah and then you you probably don't go back whereas you're very much there all right well let's just pop down there and have a drink we're very accessible.

We're very inclusive. You know, we don't really care what people drink, just come drink at Brooks. And we have beautiful views. We have beautiful gardens.

Like we've made a lot of investments in our grounds too, to just bring that, the calmness, the experience, the hospitality, the differentiation between us and everybody else and things that matter to people. Yeah. Yeah. Amazing.

So what's the, what's the big growth challenge at the moment? Yeah. I mean, the biggest growth challenge is how do you acquire new customers? Right.

I mean, I think that always is. We have great customers. We have great repeat customers, but how are you doing acquisition? And I spend a lot of time on the road.

And when I'm on the road, I do a lot of wine dinners. I do a lot of wine festivals. And a lot of that is to try to find new people. You know, obviously this meta idea that now we're going, we're not just trying to drive tasting room traffic, but we're trying to broaden, you know, hopefully we'll figure out what the right model is and optimize it and then be able to go you know past test markets because right now we're just test marketing are you you is it is it feasible to sell a sample like a sample like a flight online or is that is does it just not work so that is a really good question there is a company actually and we've used this with the wine atlas collective with the eight of us they re-bottle 750s into 180 milliliters.

So it's like a quarter of a bottle. Yeah. And they're a licensed winery. They have a bottling facility.

So we've done virtual tastings with them where you get one bottle from each of the eight wineries. Okay. And that has been really cool. We're looking at using that for our holiday gift giving this year.

You know, we'll still have typical 750 packs because the person who wants a full bottle will buy a full bottle. But to provide that $45 to $60 grab-and-go hostess gift, co-worker gift, I think the potential volume for that is important. There have been a couple of companies over the years that have tried to do the small sample bottle things. And we worry very much about the quality of the wine and what happens to it once somebody else re-bottles it.

This company that we work with called Master the World, they've got it nailed. She's a master sommelier. They know what they're doing. They're tasting the wine for quality.

They know it's fine for at least six months. But I think that's your, I would assume your question is promptably, we got to get it in their mouths, right? If we can get it in their mouths, that's how you acquire it. How much realistically does someone have to spend the wine to have it shipped to them if they're placing a normal order?

If they're placing an order for, like, say, a case, it's $150 to ship to the East Coast and close to $100 to ship on the West Coast. Like, it's a high barrier to entry for sure. Yeah. So to try and get new customers in, can you convince them to spend $150?

Or can you convince them to spend $45, $50, $60 on the sample kit or sample set? Yeah. And the sample sets are really, the packaging is awesome. There's plenty of room in the packaging.

It's a really nice box to communicate any messages. There's room for QR codes. You can insert tasting notes. Like it's a really smart product.

Yeah. But you made it sound like that's not happening now, but it's something you're looking at? Well, we've done it with the Wine Atlas Collective, but it's something that we're considering for the holidays this year. Okay.

Yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you so much. If anyone were to reach out to you, what's the best way of doing that?

Janie, J-A-N-I-E at brookswine.com is the best way. Yeah. All right.

Amazing. Thank you so much. Thanks so much, Will. That's all for today.

I hope you enjoyed this episode as much as I did recording it. So make sure you hit subscribe if you're looking for help with landing pages or website. Find me on the day. Until next time.