Ep. 1023 Oli Purnell | Uncorked

Hello, everybody. My name is Polly Hammond, and you are listening to Uncorked, the Italian wine podcast series about all things marketing and communication. Join me each week for candid conversations with experts from within and beyond the wine world as we explore what it takes to build a profitable business in today's constantly shifting environment. In this episode, we're joined by Ollie Purnell, cofounder of the Copper Crew Canned Wine Company. With 14 international wine awards under their belt, the Copper Crew is exemplifying customer centricity. Their focus on premium quality and open discussion of moderation and early adoption of seamless d to c has allowed them to build cache amongst everyday wine drinkers as well as MWs. Today, Ollie and I talk about the value of great market research and what it takes to build a customer first wine brand. Let's get into it. I laugh because we have the Ollie and Polly show today. Ollie, welcome. I have wanted to meet you and talk to you for over two years at this point because you are one of the three founders of Copper Crew Canned Wines. I'm so glad to have you here today. That's right. You're probably the most excited I've ever heard someone to meet me, so that's great. That's that's really funny. There's this great clip of one of the like, this is old school. I'm gonna show my age on this. Robert Smith from The Cure receiving their hall of their their, like, walk of fame, whatever it was, and the MTV, VJ is like, oh my god. Isn't that amazing? Are you as excited as I am? And he looks at her, and he's like, no. No. I really don't think I am. So so that's where we are today. Actually, so the reason that I am super excited to talk with you is that we have been huge advocates for alternative packaging and canned wine, but also just for better messaging and better recognizing who our customers are and just, like, trying to break out of some of this tradition that we are trapped in in wines. And I feel like that you guys have done a good example because you have award winning canned wines. You know? You got wine canned wines that are worth talking about. So for everyone who doesn't, know the brand, can you just give us a little kick down on who you guys are and what it is that you're producing? Sure. Yes. So so we're the copper crew. We make, three canned ones. Actually, no. That's not true. We now make five. We have five different varieties of one. All of our wine is South African. And we're called the Copper Crew because myself and my cofounder here in The UK, Theo, we're both ginger head. That's kind of where the inspiration for comedy came from. And the idea behind crew was that we wanted to share great wine with people, and I guess it's also a Paramount grand crew as well. And the third sort of member of our little team is a guy called Sam Lamson. Sam is based sort of vaguely around South Africa. I mean, specifically, he's kind of in the Cape, but he moves around. He goes all sorts of places. Sam is a winemaker, a very good one and a very young one. So he's our age. So I'm actually now 26, which makes me feel more old, to be honest. But Sam's a year younger, so he's now 25, but he started making wine when he was 20, basically. And he he did a degree in genealogy at the University of Stellenbosch. And he has his own wine brand called Mineralist Wines, which make fantastic wines. They're really sort of they're really high end, basically. He's distributed it throughout The UK, and you'll find his wine on Mission style restaurants. That's the quality that we're talking about here. And we linked up with Sam via my cofounder Theo because he, lived in South Africa for five years, and Sam was a family friend. So we approached Sam with this idea of a canned wine brand, and we felt that Cannes wine existed in The UK already, but we felt that there was no quality option and there was no basically, there wasn't a good brand. So that was the two things we wanted to to build together. And Sam said, Yeah. Great. I'm keen. And that's that. So we I've still never met Sam in person. I've still met Beat South Africa, etcetera, etcetera. But that's the that's, you know, sort of the world world we live in. Did I know that I would end up doing canned wine? No. I had no grand plans. Do I massively am I massively passionate about wine as a liquid? Not particularly. It was a great opportunity, I thought, and it was partly inspired by my time in The States. So I lived in The States for a year where canned wine was sort of, I guess, at the pinnacle. So there you go. That's a full that's a full story. And as you say, yeah, we've now been have brought up to just about two weeks. Alright. We're four minutes in. You've answered my questions. Let's go get a beer. Done. Move on. Alright. So, where to begin with all of that? I guess I'm gonna begin begin with a personal story as we all do. One of the things that I really loved when I was reading the story of your brand is that Fight Forest has, from day one, been remote. I had a full business partnership for two years before I ever met my business partner in person. And I did you know, we touched down in some random airport in Milwaukee, to go to a client meeting, and it it was just like we'd sort of always known each other. And I I know that this has nothing to do with wine, but more about business. I know that a lot of people adopted that sort of remote lifestyle and business, you know, approach as a result of pandemic, but I hear from so many of them that it just never, like, settled into their bones and that now that they're coming out of pandemic that they're so excited to sort of get back to traditional workspaces. And I just look at them, and I'm like, what do you mean, man? Like, my team is all over the world, and I know them, and I love them, and there's no there's no barrier. I don't I don't feel that. And I am more than twenty years older than you. So I don't think it's just a generational thing. You know? Is is it something that when you talk when you go out into the world, the very fact that you mentioned it in the intro, is that just so bizarre for everyone that you interact with that you're like, Hey, you know, these are my people and we've never met? Yeah. A lot of people do find it very strange. I think part of the answer to that comes from actually, if you say that to anybody in the wine industry, the wine industry remains and still wants to be a very face to face business. So that's partly why they find that very strange. I think people will also find it strange, co founding a business with somebody that you've never really met. But that's also, to a certain extent, sort of the conceptive nature of Brits, I think, as well. I think the negative understanding of remote working basically comes usually from people who haven't done it. Or you can have bad experiences doing it, don't get me wrong, that can definitely happen. But I think And we all have, I'm not gonna lie. Every one of us who remote works have dealt with shitty experiences. Everybody has bad experiences, but that's the same as being a workplace. So, as with everything in life, there are good elements, there are bad elements to it. But what I would say about it is I don't think it should should preclude you from doing something. And I think there are great life benefits certainly to being a remote first business. Yeah. It's interesting to me because one of the things that I noticed, and this does have to do with what we talk about on this podcast, is that it made me a much clearer communicator. And I noticed that I still have to work on that because we don't have the benefit of eight hours a day in a cubicle next to each other. You know, if I need something or even just in terms of personal things. You know, if I'm having a difficult week personally, I have to be willing to say, look. Here's what's going on. So I'm working through this. I'm also working on my own things. And just that, like, what I would descri