Ep. 584 Reka Haros | Get US Market Ready With Italian Wine People

Thanks for tuning into my new show. Get US Market Ready with Italian wine people. I'm Steve Ray, author of the book how to get US Market Ready. And in my previous podcast, I shared some of the lessons I've learned from thirty years in wine and spirits business helping brands enter and grow in the US market. This series will be dedicated to the personalities who have been working in the Italian wine sector in the US, their experiences, challenges, and personal stories. I'll uncover the roads that they walked shedding light on current trends, business strategies, and their unique brands. So thanks for listening in. And let's get to the interview. Hi. This is Steve Ray, and welcome to Get US Market Ready with Italian wine people. This week, we're talking with, Rica Harris, an old friend in the wine industry who has been extraordinarily creative this year in, setting up her winery to deal with challenges, of the pandemic and also exporting Rica. Welcome. To the show. Thank you for inviting me, Steve. Tell us a little about yourself and your background in, both marketing and also in the wine business. I was just looking at thinking back that I started my first job in marketing exactly twenty three years ago. As a junior brand manager at Denon, in, in budapest in Hungary, and that was the start of my marketing career. And I've I've done some brand management with, with Danon, then I moved on to advertising with Leo Burnett, and I had Procter and Gamble as, as, as my client for five countries in Eastern Europe. So the beginning of my career was a deep dive into fast moving consumer goods, and it was very creative from the beginning. And, and then in two thousand and two, I moved to Italy. And at the end of two thousand and two, I with my husband, we inherited this tiny winery, and that was the start of my journey into wine. I wasn't really a wine drinker at the at that time, I preferred cocktails. So It was a really good deep dive into the industry. Going from fast moving consumer goods to, to a slower industry was my first marketing challenge in my brain. How do I adapt everything I know about marketing and selling? And and marketing fast moving products to marketing a product that you produce once a year. So that that was my transition into the wine industry back in two thousand and two. He switched from being a traditional classically trained consumer marketing person, all of a sudden, it became real. It's no longer a client. It's no longer some distant monies that are coming into your corp corporation from another corporation. Now you're responsible for everything. Yeah. That was that was very, that was a difficult thing in going from having also millions of dollars in budget from marketing to owning a winery and becoming an entrepreneur and learn how to be an entrepreneur with no budget. So that was that was really difficult, but I think it was an essential move for me to become who I am today. So I know how to juggle millions of dollars of of marketing budget to doing things without any budget. Big change, especially when, the successor failure of the enterprise rests entirely on your shoulders. Now the winery, tell us a little bit about that. It's in Italy. Tell us about the winery and the Pen wines that you make. It's it's a I like to call it a micro winery. We're in the province of Treviso in in Veneto. And, we have our own vineyards, and we make wine with our own grapes. So it's we don't buy from others, and and we make our own from, you know, vineyard to, to, to selling it. It's all in our hands. And we, we, obviously, we produce prosseco. We're in the land of, of the, you know, the original province of Treviso where before two thousand and nine Perseco was allowed to to to be made. We also have, Revosco, Barpedum Colorado, which is, which which is also local to the northeast of Italy and some parts of of Slovenia. We also have Kavanaugh Frank, and we have the grape called Verduzzo Trevigiano, which is obviously very local. And it makes a wonderful, fizzy white wine. Cool. And how big is the, the operation and how many bottles you produce? We go up to twenty thousand bottles a year. It's it's small. And was it operating as a winery or had it gone kind of derelict and then you resurrected it? Well, it was my husband's dad's, and it, it was his hobby business. Again, in so many cases, it it's a it's a good hobby where, you know, people go and spend their time and money. He didn't keep any records of anything. So when he passed away, suddenly, we had no records of anything regarding his hobby business. So, basically, we had to start it all over and put our own money, you know, normally, young, youngly weds, they put all their money into their own houses and starting a family. Well, we put all our money into the winery. So that's that's how we started back in two thousand two. Okay. So one of the things, I know about riga, and, my listeners now will know about her is she's very opinionated, on marketing subjects, has written a lot that I see on LinkedIn and talks a lot of that. We talk to each other when we're at international conferences, and you're very outspoken on your points of view on that. Give us a sense of one of the statements you made is wine marketing sucks. You tell us where that came from and and why you said that. Why marketing sucks as a piece I wrote a few years ago, and it came out of frustration for what I saw around me. And it started because I was interviewed by an Italian journalist about Y Marketing, and I soon realized that there's so much confusion about what marketing is, using long words and wrong concepts to describe things, and it just shows how the state of of of marketing, and the knowledge of what marketing is is is not the standard is not high enough in my opinion, and it continues not being high enough in the wine industry. And the more digital forward, we become the less professional we are in the marketing that we do. I, I put myself in there because I am a marketer, so I don't want to stand out and and think I'm not, I'm not like the others. But having professional, experience and, and training, I think, is very important. And I what I see is that that is becoming to lack more and more. And the confusion of what marketing is and how it needs to be done. The fundamentals of what marketing is is missing in the wine industry. So everyone just jumps to the next thing. Everyone does what everyone else is doing, and nothing stands out. If you look at advertising, they're all the same. All the same. The bottle, the vineyards, the, you know, some background about, you know, where the grapes are grown, and that's it. Nothing really stands out. If someone stands out with something closer to lifestyle, or something something closer to what consumers would get hooked on, they get immediately slammed for doing something that is not in, you know, doesn't stand well with the traditional wine marketing. So, that's why I think it sucks. It doesn't put the wine consumer as the hero in the in of the story, but it's always product driven. And we know that being product driven in the wine industry, how many how many brands do we have in the world? How many wineries do we have in the world? What is everyone really saying the same things? Okay. So, let's fast forward to. That's kind of the world you live in, that that's the reality. Here, you have this, strong background. And now you've got a winery, and you've got limited resources, and COVID hit. And you found yourself with a problem early last year. So why don't you tell us about that? Yeah. Well, COVID hit everybody, but, going going back to a year ago, very few people will remember that Italy closed down ahead of the other countries. And also within Italy, my province was two weeks ahead in locking down ahead of Italy. So it was so sudden. It was so unexpected it. It was no we didn't have a plan B. Like, I don't think a lot of people had plan Bs. And all of a sudden, here we were, not knowing what to do. And you see your plants going nowhere, Then you see that orders that had been given were canceled. You see that orders that were planned never arrived, and we were just sitting here. Lock down. We couldn't leave more than two hundred meters away from our house. From the winery. That that's how locked in we were, and and nothing was moving. So it was after the first hit of, like, oh, what do we do? Okay. So we have to throw away all of our plants, all of the marketing and everything that I had planned, I had to throw that all away. And in the confusion of not knowing what to do and understanding that I cannot plan ahead because whatever happens, next week will change. The governments were changing restrictions. We're changing what that what we could and what we couldn't do. There was confusion about who can continue working and who couldn't. And and all of the wineries in Italy until mid April had no, if I remember well, we didn't know whether we could operate or not. So there was a lot of confusion going on. In the meantime, the whole world closed down. And, I realized walking up and down the vineyard here that The only thing I can do is with what I have here at the winery. And that was the stock that stayed here that we couldn't sell because there were, cancellations in orders that didn't come through. So I said that, nobody can take away from me. No government decision, no COVID, nothing can happen that will prevent me to try to do something with the wine that I have in stock. And that's how I started thinking, okay, so that is a certainty that I can hold on to and create something around it. And honestly speaking, if, Steve, you know me, I don't do what others do, so I try to always do something differently, take a different angle. I look everyone's going to the left. Okay. Then I'm going to go to the right. And that's that's the way I operate and everything I do. So while all of the wineries were running to, speed up their e commerce, websites to sell their wines and, and promote it with a lot of price promotion, you know, buy a case of six bottles, and I'll send you, I don't know how many bagging boxes, or the other way around, I did something completely different. And I concentrated on only one of our products, which was the prosecco that was here unlabeled. And there came the idea. I pulled all the strings of everything I've learned in the past, from working an advertising agency, working with creatives, working with brand creation. And I put all that together, and I said, well, we have the unlabeled bottles of prosecco. We have millions of prosecco lovers out there. And I give the product and let people create this new brand. So that, that was the initial idea. And then, and then the six thousand project was, was born. Six thousand, because I was giving up six thousand of our bottles of prosecco for this project, so that would have been the maximum amount of wine that we could sell through this project. And, and that was it. I called all the creatives in the world. To participate in co creating a brand, a label, new label for this wine that was specific for twenty twenty. Let me go back and clarify that. So when you said you called the creatives in the world, basically, you made it user generated content. I mean, people who you could reach and influence you created a competition for them to to help you design a new label. The the project had different stages. There were there were two audiences to the project. One was creatives, designers, And then the other audience was Priscilla lovers who would want to buy, the wine. So I had two two sets of, of, of audiences to communicate with and create value for them to, for them to say, okay, I wanna participate. And basically for the creatives, the brief was extremely simple. Having worked with creatives, I know that the simple to the point the brief is the easiest for them easier it is for them to to create something in their, you know, the creative thinking needs to be loo liberal enough. And, so the brief for them was to, I said, don't think wine world, think your world, let your mind wander free, design the Praseco label. You'd be proud to open with friends and family. What's inside is already extraordinary. So the whole idea was for them to say, how are you feeling about twenty twenty? And how would you want this prosse code to look like on your table at the end of the year? So what would make you feel proud and be like, okay, now it's time to pop this bottle. And, it it a lot of amazing ideas came through. We had seventy four accepted designs by, by the time I closed the, the submissions. And a lot of them were really moving. They were very personal. They were all about what twenty twenty was meaning for them, right, that this whole locking down, or also the hope of, towards the end of the year, can we be freer? So there was, there were a lot of very, very, very nice designs coming in. And then the audience of the Priscilla levers, I allow them to choose their favorite labels. So it was engaging with them and co creating and having them decide which label will go on the final bottle. So that, that was the six thousand project. How did you, create the list to whom you reached out too. I mean, that's one of the challenges I think most wineries when they look at this will face. Well, how how do I get this word out to people? How did you expand your reach? Yeah. Well, you do need collaboration. So one of one of one very important aspect of this project was collaboration, with people that had that either could increase the reach of the project. For example, I worked with, Richard Cital, the buyer. So we agreed that when I launched the project, he would help me with the launch. So there was an article on the buyer, and, and then everything just happened very fast. That article was seeing by the the group called, they escape my name. Hold on. Give me a second. While you're doing that, Richard Siddle is publisher of the buyer, which is a UK publication, trade publication. And has tremendous distribution and reach. So that was a fortuitous friendship. So, his tweet was seen by one minute briefs, which is a Twitter account that today has. I don't know how many twenty or thirty, even thousand. Designers that work with one minute briefs. And he reached out saying, I'd love to run your brief with my, my designers. And it was that week, I launched the web site on the eighth of June, on the tenth of June, we rend the brief with one minute briefs designers. So that gave an immense push in reaching out to the creatives. In the meantime, I also posted everywhere in all social social media with hashtags and everything, so that also created some interest in the project. So that that you you cannot think of doing everything on your own with you know, working, collaborating together with people who are invested and interested in doing this with you, then it really helps. And that was the initial push to get the the first target audience, which was, you know, designers to get interested in the project. How much did it cost? I mean, isn't that one of the questions the client always ask? Okay. What's the budget? And, your question to the client is what's the budget and their question to you is, how much is it gonna cost? Right? Yeah. So so the whole well, as I said at the beginning, like, we're a micro winery. It's not like we have a, you know, huge budgets, but we do have the need to sell the wine that was, was was sitting here. So we understood that Some of the costs will have to be incorporated into the, the, the pre sales system that we put up. The upfront cost of running this three months campaign, as we can call, is eight hundred euros. So that's Not much. That's very limited. Yes. And one of the things that I think is very important, you know, for marketers to understand that not everything has to cost a lot of money, you can get a lot done if you think creatively, and, and, in trying to solve problems creatively, but especially also with collaboration. I couldn't have done this project without the collaborations that I did from the, the, you know, the agency that helped me understand how to set up a Shopify. It was it ran on Shopify website to Outinery that did all of the designs for them to look equal at the moment when I opened for voting. So that was very important to standardize how each one of the designs would look like on the bottle to Tina who did all the, you know, help me with creative wording, which is also very important to have a copywriter that helps you in expressing exactly what's going on in how you wanna reach to people. So and and Richard with the buyer, these collaborations were essential to make it work. So you have some special contacts and skills and assets that you brought to the party here, you know, the network that you have. Is this something that other wineries can replicate, if not, you know, and scales, but that's the question, replicate and scale, but not necessarily specifically in regard to what you did, but the concept of how you went about it, did it, and customized it for your particular need. Customer acquisition was the objective as you described it, not how to sell more to my current customers. Tell us about that. Once you you work very closely with your your own customers, you understand how much more you can sell to them, or how much more how pushy you can be to sell more to them. So I, I immediately understood. And also, once you have good basics in, in, in understanding how marketing works, and when you have to grow your business, then you understand you have to go to customer acquisition instead of just pushing a lot of new sales through the existing customers. So it's a balance you have to find between getting new customers and making sure you keep the current ones and and and and balance that out. So my decision was to go for completely new customers, and, and keep the project separate from our winery, branding as much as possible. One, because I I didn't dare to risk too much to attach it to my winery. And what if it doesn't work? What if it damages somehow the image of my winery? So I I I didn't dare to do that. And actually by creating a completely different site and a new new name to the project, it helped me in starting from scratch to build a different story. Right. And that new story was already catered to the two audiences very specifically. So from the beginning, I wanted new customers. And it was, it was very different from the work that I actually do on a daily basis. With the winery. You know, having the aim to to acquire new customers, you know, at the end of the project looking back, and I looked at the people who bought the wine, eighty five percent of the people were new customers. So, one way to put this is really engaging with a completely new audience and have new clients come in was, was it it turned out to be successful because I mean, eighty five percent of the of the people who bought were people who never bought before. So A corollary to that is metrics, establishing, measurable goals in the beginning, tracking what's happening, so that when you look at that data at some time after the fact, you're able to, put some context and, size to it. Yes. Exactly. Exactly. So I think the brilliance on that is, you know, we know that we know that a critical issue for marketing all brands these days is to tell a story. And everybody's gotta have a story that that has a point of difference that makes a difference. In your case, the opportunity for the potential participants was they can become part of the story. And selling the wine was the story. It was not about the estate or the quality of the juice that's in it or, all the other things that normally producers pay attention to. In this case, it was come with me, with the journey, engage with me, be part of this. And the wine that you're serving at your dinner table, has has now your story, not just you, the consumer, your story as opposed to, Rika's story. I thought that was just Brilliant. Exactly. It was it was a project completely driven by the people digitally. So from the only thing that we did as a winery was to give the bottle and the juice in it. Everything else was cocreated together with the designers and the people who participated in also in buying the product. So that, that, that we all, we were all invested in it. We all had our motivations to make it work. You know? So the key question is, did you sell all the wine? No. We didn't we didn't sell all the wine as I was doing all my a good marketer starts with a lot of Excel files, Excel sheets, and counts. And immediately, I realized that how do I balance the volume with also making sure that I replace the lost revenues. So finding that balance also meant that I hope we won't sell all the six thousand bottles, right? That was one of the things. Because if I sell all those six thousand bottles, then I'm gonna have not enough here, for, you know, whatever happens in the future, what if the production in twenty twenty isn't big enough that I'm gonna need, to have wine here to continue selling to our customers. So that was one of the things. How do you manage that? Looking ahead. But also, I said, we're not going to have tourists coming here. I do have to say that where the winery is is, is smacked in the middle of a touristic triangle. So we have the beaches not far away. We have Venice just over there, and we have the mountains, Cortina Dompet, so it's an hour and ten minutes away from here. So we have a lot of tourists coming through June, July, and August. And we knew that we're not gonna have them coming in. And then I said, well, I have to replace that revenue. And how do I do that balancing my, my, my, my stock? But also selling and getting new clients. So I played a lot with the price, and I knew that pushing the price ceiling for the prosaico would allow me to not sell all six thousand, but it will also allow me to make it make it the minimum that I need to replace what I was foreseeing as as a lost revenue. So it's a bit complicated to to to show it like this. If I had, like, a slide, I would show it, like, in a minute visually. But in words, it becomes difficult to say. So we sold about three, thirteen hundred bottles altogether. So I'm at guilty one here in terms of burying the lead. One of the things we haven't talked about was how the stuff got sold. And one of the solutions you were able to create was a way to sell direct to consumers in the United States. From Italy? Can you give us a short and simple explanation of it without the details of how that worked, but conceptually what happened and and how it worked? You know, when COVID hit, all of the companies had to adapt and and find ways to to move on. And, by the time mid May, I think it was, we found a local company here that works, not only with wine, but works a lot with local wineries. And sending wines. And they offered the solution for us. They have an important in, in the US. So all of the wines went through their own importer. So we gave them the boxes, and they took care of all of the rest. So it went from here to the US importers, warehouse where it got cleared, and then from there, it went to consumers. So you sold in reshipbers of twelves or sixes, whatever, and then this company then repacked according to the orders that came from the United States, or did that happen in the United States? No. We packed everything here. Okay. So it was per order. It was per order. What was really interesting for the US that I think is worth, saying is is is the grouping of orders. So we realized that the more people would buy, the cheaper it would become for them to per bottle to buy wine. So my friend Anna Keller from from Keller Estate, she was one of one of the people that immediately jumped at this and said, I wanna help you. And she reached out to her customers, people that buy Anna's wine. She's in the US. She's a US producer. Yes. She's in Sonoma. And, she she reached out to her customers and said, Hey, this is what it is. Would you like to join in, and so she put a list together of people. So all that grouping went to her, to her place. And then by grouping all these orders and delivering it into, to one place, makes made it cheaper. For people to buy the wine with delivery directly to them. And the same happened with a friend in in New Orleans, and the same happened if or in North Carolina, same happened for to Los Angeles. So grouping was was was was a very interesting turn. I it wasn't planned, but seeing how the prices we were giving for delivery, it just made sense to don't get one case. Get ten cases, and that's where we, we, it was an incredible increase in, in, in sales. So what I particularly like about this is this is a very creative way of when everybody says no, you cannot sell direct you cannot sell imported products direct to US consumers legally in the US. That's a right reserved only to domestic producers. You found a way, and it worked. It worked because our local logistics partner has that solution. So it's not my solution. It's not sprees a winery solution, but it's theirs. So they have they have the contacts to get this done. Okay. My point is, it very simply, if it existed, it existed for everybody. You are the one who doubled on to it, found it and exploited it for this particular project. Can you talk about who that is? And is is that something that is replicable for all people? It's not, that difficult for other wineries to find their local, suppliers that can do this. As I said, our supplier is a small tiny company that works with DHL, TNT, FedEx, you you you name it with all of the big, you know, shippers. And they just found, you know, they they signed contracts with them, and they group that they decide, like, okay, sending to the US, From here to there goes with DHL. And then from there on, it's their importer in place that decides who's going to be taking, you know, the twelve cases to Sonoma. And there, we, we would not lose track, but we would have a new tracking system to, to look at where is the wine going. So, you know, our local company is affiliated with mailboxes, etcetera. And I know of other affiliated offices in the province of Treviso that do the same service. So it's just really looking and searching, you know, as a buyer, you're looking for for services, you you really have to do the work and find the right supplier. Okay. So, bringing it to a close, there is a lot of innovation and creativity here. You have a background in it in terms of marketing and, training both at the corporate level and presumably, academically. What can a listener take from this and apply? Not necessarily copy that what you did because you were trying to solve a specific problem and now open to basically a new channel for selling in US. For for most people who are listening, what what can they take away from this and put to you some media? What I say normally to marketers that are in the wine industry is look outside the wine industry, what other brands are doing, brands that people consume on a daily basis. There's a lot to, to learn from non wine brands when it comes to marketing. Another thing that I keep saying is, don't always think of, you know, the execution part of whatever you're doing. You, you need to fit that into the strategic long term vision. Of, of the brand that you're working with. And very often, that long term vision of where are we going, what do we wanna reach in three years, five years is, is not even considered. So the sure term thinking of let's do this. Let's do this campaign. Let's do that campaign. Last, you know, two weeks, three weeks, three months. And six months later, people forget to look back and see the effects of things. So there has to be a better balance between thinking long term in terms of marketing and also the short term, which is activating your sales and pushing sales through. There there's a lack in in thinking in terms of this. And then another thing that I think is is really important, especially moving forward, is how do you engage with your consumers? And it's not just sending emails. How do you do a two way engagement with your consumers? How do you get them engaged and hooked on what you're doing? Have them participate because that's how you you create more loyalty. That's how you create more, you know, cocreating with the consumers is such a winning thing in marketing, but I don't see that happening a lot in wine marketing. And and I'd like to see more of that. And the key to the six thousand project was really in the cocreation of what the label ended up being, which was called the refresh. Which is was very nice for the end of the year of two thousand twenty to we all wanna hit that refresh button. Right? So So as I listen to what you've said, and I agree with everything you did say about the co creating the other word that's used here is user generated content. I think, cocreating is more powerful concept than just user generated content. And you're basically enlisting other people to tell your story in their words. To their friends. In this particular case, you've moved it up a level or two so that they're participating not just telling the story, and they take ownership of it. And I think that leads to the the device I give to most of my clients is you need to take responsibility for selling and marketing your products. You're bringing something into the US, you can't just leave that to your importer or distributor or some other people down the line. At the end of the day, it begins with you and it ends with you. And if you come up with creative ideas, people are gonna wanna get behind that because it works and it sells. And, at the end of the day, that's what we're trying to do. There's nothing more powerful than than as a consumer that you feel that you're being taken care of, that you're being hugged, that you're, you're, you know, that, that, that your word matters. So giving the opportunity for to give a voice to the customer for them to speak up and make choices is is incredibly powerful. Power. Now, you're giving them the power to be part of this brand, and, you know, not everybody can own a winery like you, but, they can get the satisfaction out of participating in making a select, successful wine project. I thought it was brilliant, and a a big thank you to Ricajaros of Srisso winery in the Veneto. Is there anything that you wanted to add? I thought what you just said was was wonderful. So Thank you, Steve, for having me and, having the opportunity to share, what I did last year. It was very gratifying. It was wonderful to to to be able to do this and and You know, we were all locked in our own countries, but I felt so close to all of the people that were all over the world because we were cocreating something together towards the end of the year, you know, to have that bottle on our tables. And, and say, like, we've done this together. It was, it was really nice also for me, not just because So you said you're, you're doing this again, or you're doing another project. Where does this go? What's next? It will be a different project. It won't be about, it will have our wines in it, but it will be, a different project to support a local community up in the dolomites. There was back in twenty eighteen, there was a horrible storm that uprooted a lot of the trees, all throughout Veneto and Trintino. And we know that the trees up in the dolomites are extremely important. And then this year, there was a lot of snow. So a lot of the hiking tracks, and especially one that I really love that is an educational track has been destroyed. And communities there don't have money to clean up the mess. And what we are going to do is to donate a hundred percent of the profits for them to to clean up and restore the tracks, the hiking tracks. So what's the name of that project and how can people who are listening to this, participate or learn more about it? It will be launched soon. It it will probably have the six thousand project as it's it's running brand, but it will I I'm still thinking, but I think I will host it in a completely different website, which is part of my new enterprise that I'm launching soon. So Okay. So is there a a social media site or plat or a place that you talk about this stuff. Is it I'm I'm wondering here, you know, LinkedIn, where could people who who were listening to this and you're not telling me now? And they wanna see what's going on. Where can they go? Two weeks hence, that, they can find out about this. Everyone can link up with me. I'm everywhere Rekaharis, in all of the Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, you will find me under my name and and and surname, And I'll be blasting out about this everywhere very shortly. So So you'll see it. I will repeat it on my LinkedIn feed for anyone who's listening. So you will find out, about the new project. Rika, that was just a a fabulous interview. Thank you very much for participating with us and sharing the creativity of of what you've done, and I look forward to success of what's coming down the pipe. This is Steve Ray with Cat US Market Ready with Italian wine people. Part of the Italian wine podcast, and I wanna thank Ricajaros for being my guest this week. And we look forward to seeing you back same time, same place next week. Thank you all very much. Thank you, Steve. This is Steve Ray. Thanks again for listening on behalf of the Italian wine podcast.