Ep. 649 David Driscoll | 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, guys. I'm Joy Livingston, and I am the producer of the Italian wine podcast. Thank you for listening. We are the only wine podcast that has been doing a daily show since the pandemic began. This is a labor of love and we are committed to bringing you free content every day. Of course, this takes time and effort not to mention the cost of equipment, production, and editing. We would be grateful your donations, suggestions, requests, and ideas. For more information on how to get in touch, go to Italian wine podcast dot com. Now back to the show. Hi. This is Steve Ray, and welcome to this week's edition of get US market ready with Italian wine people. This week, I'm particularly pleased to have as a guest David Driscoll, who has, he may not say it, but I would say a, a career as a luminary in the industry and being innovative on the retail front and establishing great connections with consumers that, extend beyond just a single transaction. So, David, welcome to the show, and I'm gonna leave it to you to give a a brief introduction of yourself, your position title, and the company that you work for. Certainly. Thank you for having me. My name is David Driscoll. I am the sales and marketing manager for mission wine and spirits in Los Angeles, and I've been here a little less than a year. Most people know me from the eleven plus years. I did at K and L line merchants in San Francisco. I left the industry for about three years. Did some behind the scenes stuff, in tech and distribution, then came back to retail, when COVID hit because there was a retailer in need of some help. And here I am. And making changes and taking names, which is, I think was kind of interesting. Tell us a little bit about why you were attracted to mission and what your mission is at mission. Sure. I would say it's the chance to go back and do things the way that you wish you would have done them with the wisdom that comes from experience. Yeah. It's nice nice to have that opportunity. Good for you. That's great. That's what excited me. So I I live in Burbank, and one of my friends was a big actor in the eighties. He was in a film called Summer School with Mark Harmon and Kirsty Ali. And we always talk about a scene in that movie where they catch one of the students who's a stripper by night, which is why he's always asleep during class. And he says, but imagine you could go back and be eighteen again, but knowing what you know now. He's like, well, I know. And Mark Harmon turns away and says, I hate that kid because the idea of that really bothered him because he knows how how exciting it it would be to be able to be young again with the wisdom of age. And What I see at Mission Wine and Spirit is an opportunity to work with a store that has an incredible history. It's been around for forty years. They've been open since the year I was born. And, getting to do and tweak and make subtle alterations in the way that they do business and watch the success happen. It's something that I feed off of personally. I enjoy getting up and seeing progress, and I enjoy hearing back from customers who are pleased. And as long as those those two things happen, you know, continually, I'm in a pretty good place. So the people that shop at well, you have five locations, I think, is Southern California. And describe the stores. Are they big stores, small stores, who's the clientele? Kinda what defines them. I think your ownership structure has a very interesting history too. Can you give us a profile of that? Yeah. It was started as a tobacco store and small liquor store in Pasadena, Altadena to be more specific, which is the part of Pasadena that's north of the two ten. It's not as Ritzy as the Ritzy part of Pasadena. So it was a very working man's liquor store started by an Armenian family. And, as it's grown, it's become known as a liquor store that has everything. So there are tens of thousands of SKUs in every store. They're not gigantic stores. They're not like a total wine by any means, but they're stacked. I mean, Florida ceiling spirits all the way around the store with many, many aisles they're all relatively similar in size. There's definitely some that are bigger than others, but you're talking tens of thousands of square feet with, with, you know, plenty plenty of of merchandise. So, yeah. And it's mostly, sorry to answer your question about clientele. It's it's everything. And that's one of the things that endears me to the ownership of Mission is the is the preoccupation with never outgrowing the working man's needs. As in, like, we sell very, very inexpensive products. We sell, like I said, we still sell tobacco. We sell lottery tickets. We sell hot cheetos. We sell Gatorade. You know, there's there's a neighborhood store element to mission that's never gone away despite its incredible growth after forty years. And, At the same time, we sell Opus one. We sell Don Perignon. We sell, you know, forty thousand dollar bottles of Macallum. So it's literally everything between the sun. And it's sort of fun. I've never worked in an environment like this. That was half boutique store half, you know, old school liquor store. Then and that's fused those those two models together as successfully as they have. Okay. So what's your mandate, if you will, that you got from the owner, the mission for mission, as I say, What's your objective personally and and for the company? My my objective is to build credibility, first and foremost and almost, solely right now. Everything that I'm doing is about turning mission wine and spirits into a destination for people who are looking for good things. I would say previously they were a destination that had everything. So if you were looking for anything, it's possible they might have it, which was the strategy. Let's carry as many things as possible, and that way we'll grab as many customers. I'm sort of fine tuning elements of what they do to focus on unique products that I think in today's market add an air of credibility in in a sense that, oh, wow. Mission's featuring this product this week. I know that that product's been talked about in certain circles that I follow on social media and online, that's cool that they know about that. And it says something about their buying and their merchandising that they would know to, you know, focus on these products right now. And that could be anything wine, beer, spirit, cigars, anything across the board. I would assume from that that if there is a new trend brewing that you guys would, have a whiff of it and have probably have the prod more than one product, but products, in stock already when people are discovering things since they come to the store for discoveries. Is that fair, fair statement? Very fair. And he's, my boss is sort of relying on my my understanding of the market, he he's very aware of the general market. He's been doing this for decades, but he doesn't know the nooks and crannies as well as I do. These small pockets of wine and spirits where there's real opportunity due to the lack of understanding about how to source those products, what constitutes quality in those spheres, and how to market them once you have them. Is it an age thing? I mean, you're not young, but you're certainly not old. That there's I come from a generation where, you know, they were the old major brands, and that's what everybody had. And now there's this absolute explosion, in Whiskeys, bourbon, in particular, and rye, and, you know, tequila, and all the the categories of, Agave, spirits, and all that kind of stuff. So it the whole marketplace has changed along with, consumer interest and and preference. Is it true that people still have loyalties to brands, or do they, like, graze within a price or concept category? That's an interesting question. If you would have asked me five years ago, I would have said brand loyalty is completely dead. Yeah. That's that's what I was fishing for, but, yeah, okay. Right. Right. Yeah. I mean, I wrote a I think I wrote a blog called that. At some point. But but at the same time, I'm working in a in an in a sort of an old school environment that still caters to a lot of brand loyal customers. So it's not dead, but it's certainly on life support. The future of the business is definitely curation. I believe that finding a way to make curation scale is pretty much everybody's goal. Whether it's a third party marketing company or a retailer or a supplier or a bar or a restaurant, they're curating an experience. And if you can Instagram that experience, even better. If you can share that experience visibly with some sort of video audio or photo, I mean, that's really the goal to getting publicity and morality right now. But Well, it it just let me interrupt and and and it define curation because there's a couple of different ways that you can look at that. I think of a curator at a museum whose job is to say, these are the significant pieces that tell a story in in a museum. Are you talking about aggregating the way people communicate or the selection of the products themselves? I would say both. How are you curating the shopping experience and how are you curating the recommendations? In terms of what are you featuring, what are you focusing on? The importance of that lies in the fact that our market is so incredibly saturated with new brands. To your point, things have changed. We have a lot more product on the market than we did even five years ago, let alone twenty years ago. Is there an age thing at play in terms of that? Absolutely. If you were somebody who cut your teeth twenty years ago, you might be completely overwhelmed by the amount of new brands that you need to know about and have an opinion about when customers ask you, which is very, very difficult to keep up with. And I would say it's almost impossible if you don't actually care about the work. As in, like, if you sell alcohol, but you don't consume it and enjoy it, it's a very different thing to do compared to somebody like me who drinks every single day, sometimes from three pm until ten pm, constantly. I'm constantly enjoying it. And so because I enjoy it, I remember it. And because I remember it, I can tell other people about it. And what I'm selling, at admission is a curation of the wine and spirits world through my experience. And there's enough people right now that find that valuable. And my job is to figure out a way to make it scale so that as many people can partake in that curation as possible. And we're gonna get into what we were talking about earlier about engagement, but I wanted it just for the benefit of the listeners. David used to publish a newsletter that was incredibly widely read. And so his opinion It's it's more than just the buyer for a particular store. He was a guide, if you will, for what's new, what's interesting, what's real, what's authentic, what's meaningful, what's significant, particularly, obviously in spirits, but, also significantly in whiskey too. So It's not just you making a recommendation here. I mean, your recommendation carries a lot more weight than just the buyer for mission liquor. So talk about, you you would use the word engagement as kind of part of this whole curation thing that it isn't just a matter of selling something to somebody one time. Can you expand on that? Yeah. So let me give you an example. I sent out a newsletter earlier this week about Armen Yac. And I had a lot of Armen Yac that I had secured quite a while back, actually. So my pricing was really sharp because it was based off of pre pandemic pricing. And I sort of sat on it for a while because I knew that I didn't have the customer base yet at Mission to be able to tell enough people about what I had and why it was important. So now that it's been, you know, ten months, I've got a pretty sizable group going that's reading the emails and the new Mission newsletter that I send out. And I did a long form article about why armagnac might appeal to you beyond just how old it is beyond its price, beyond how it tastes. It was sort of using photos from trips that I had done in France showing meals and buildings and people. And it was it was sort of it was meant to tingle something in their brain that had this romantic sense of recreating that experience at home. As in a lot of people I know are gonna say, okay, here's a bottle of arm and yak. You say it's good, but I mean, what do I do with it? And so I've already now spelled that out. Like, this is the history. This is the romance. When you're in France, this is what you eat. This is how you think. This is what you're doing when you're in Southern France in Gascony drinking arm and neck. And I think I sold ten thousand dollars worth of Verminiak in the next twenty four hours because it wasn't just a sales pitch. It wasn't a it wasn't an alert that said, hey, these are in stock. It didn't have points. It didn't have flavor descriptions that broke down twenty seven different, you know, things you might taste. It was it was an appeal to the senses. It was an appeal to something greater. So take that the next step. Obviously, it's more than just the product description or flavor description, which is significant and different. But and you do a newsletter? Okay. And some social media posts and so forth. But how do you reach out to? How do you gather more people who recognize, hey, this is pretty cool. I wanna be part of this. I can learn stuff here. How do you reach out and bring in new people? I would say word-of-mouth is the number one thing that I depend on. I, one hundred percent, depend on other customers telling other customers about what we're doing. And It's funny you asked that because it came up earlier today when I was meeting with some of my colleagues about how quickly do we want people to know about what we're doing at Mission. And the answer is I want a slow leak I don't have the the capacity to curate a VIP list for ten thousand people right now. I don't have the operations capability, and I don't have the product. So I need to build to that, and I need to train everybody at mission while we do that, how this works. I mean, I've already been through this. I've already done that. So I know exactly where it's going and where it's gonna lead. It's it's it's gonna lead to a situation where we get bigger and bigger and bigger, and we're expected to maintain a certain level of quality. And back to your original question, if you rely on word-of-mouth, then the services and the curation that you provide have to be stellar. They have to be so freaking good that somebody stops what they're doing and says to their friends, you gotta get on this list. You need to start shopping at Mission. And, you know, over the last ten months, I've called in thousands of customers. Many of them who were my old customers, who were thrilled to see this level of attention and detail back in retail, especially at a time when everybody's looking to scale through tech. And when you scale through software alone, you lose the human element. And I believe this is my whole career that when you when you remove the human element from, from sales, you really, really open yourself up to the supreme consumer disappointment as I've also seen throughout my career. Oh, that and that is definitely something nobody wants. So it's clearly it's not transactional in terms of one time transaction. The idea is to get somebody in, but It's it's it's the lifetime customer and maybe the journey of discovery. I've learned a lot of things by reading some of the things you've wrote, and I think I know a lot. So even for experienced people, there's a lot to explore and it's dramatically exploding. But now there's all this social media stuff. Where do you do? We're overwhelmed with stuff. And all these, price comparison sites from wine searcher to the Vino2 liquor dot com that that have all this, all kinds of different It's an overwhelming sense of, my god, there's so much out there. How do I how do I wade through all this stuff? You become the guide, the the person who, they can look to for saying, okay, this is it. That must breed loyalty. Right? So how does that fit into this world of technology and e commerce, and specifically the concept of third party facilitators? Well, the reason that I'm not a big fan of third party facilitators is that they remove the biggest asset of the transaction for me, which is the email address. If I'm not interacting with the consumer directly, and I'm more I I would say I'm most more powerful with the written word than with you know, any other skills that I possess. I think having a an email list with a few thousand names of passionate people on them, I can do some, you know, some serious, some serious damage. That's the big part of the third party marketplace that is completely removed. Now it's really just a price and convenience experience. Like, what's the cheapest price that I can get it for the easiest level of convenience? How, you know, do I need it tonight? Can I get it delivered with a DoorDash driver? What do I need it for? And like I said, that's sort of a race to the bottom. I'm sure there's plenty of capitalists and investment folk who would disagree because they're probably making millions off a strategy and they're laughing. You know, saying, oh, you know, obviously this is not ineffective because we're millionaires. And I would say great, but that's not the kind of business that's very interesting. In the sense that the people that work in the wine and spirits business who really enjoy it, they don't necessarily wanna see parts of their job eliminated for the sake of profit. That would that's been a big theme over the last five years for me. It's just all different people, people that I still keep up with. People that are dissatisfied with the wine and spirits industry. You're gonna see a mass exodus of some very, very talented people who are important to the health and of of our ecosystem getting out of the business because their jobs are being made less and less relevant. They're turning into Amazon warehouse workers in instead of knowledgeable, you know, professionals who have spent decades training their palettes and learning about all these spirits. So I I think you hit on an absolutely again, I'll use the phrase mission critical issue. And I I've been seeing it with the e commerce thing. At the end of the day, the the beverage alcohol industry is old. Okay. And highly regulated. So there's a lot of independent stores here that runs counter to the way America has evolved from, you know, to Costco and all these, national retailers where you see the same thing in different stores in different places, but it's like the same thing as opposed to independent retailers. And there's still a large section of the beverage alcohol industry. That's not going to change, and that's because of regulations. Yes. Total Wine is coming to Connecticut. Yes. Total Wine is coming to Massachusetts and that. It's having major impacts in the business. But retailers like Dev Max and M and R in Connecticut and Capies in in Massachusetts are still there playing those roles of That's my hometown liquor store, and that's important to me as opposed to just getting whatever I can get cheapest, you know, from Amazon or conveniently from somebody overseas. But I don't think most people in the industry recognize that fundamental difference that it's maintaining the ownership of the customer data through e commerce, that is an absolutely critical point of difference that makes a difference. It's the most important thing. It's the number one thing that I've done since day one that I walk through the doors, which is how are we gathering consumer data? Not in a way that, you know, for spamming people or to sell it. It's just just so we can communicate with people. Like, how do I tell somebody I'm thankful for their business and I wanna give them something special the next time that they come in. It it's more from a I need to get in touch with my customers so that I can tell them all of the wonderful things that I plan on doing for them. You know, and people are so careful giving away their data, but I found that personally, I haven't had any problem getting access to consumer data because people are more than willing to sign up for a newsletter that curates and takes care of them, in exchange for their loyalty. My sense is, you know, when I read your stuff, I'm not being sold. I'm I'm being educated. And, I think people appreciate that. So when you first got there, you had said you deconstructed the website and all e commerce thing and kind of restructured it in, in line with what your vision of where this thing is going. Where do you think you fit doing mission on your own with what one other person helping you. This is not like you don't have an agency and and all these tech people behind you. You're the guy answering all the emails first thing in the morning. Switch told me. Right? So it it's very, very personal. How how can other retailers learn from this or apply some of these things if they don't have the technical knowledge or the on the technology stuff, but also the the business knowledge of, Beverage alcohol industry in the range of new products and all that. You got your you're like playing a piano. You got your fingers on all kinds of different things at once. Not everybody can do that. So is there some things that what you're doing can apply to other retailers who are looking to survive in the future? I mean, yes and no. The the my job security lies in the fact that I I am one of a few people in our industry who can sort of navigate through these different realms. And, you know, I feel like Dalton and Roadhouse sometimes Patrick Swady's character. You know, he goes and he he's hired as a bouncer to help a, you know, a bar clean up its act. And then as soon as the job's done, he's he's on to a different bar. And that's been my life over the last four years. I'm on, you know, I'm on my fifth job in four years because it's every time I go somewhere, I'm I'm once the job is sort of done, I I I kinda lose interest because fixing things is so is so it's so paramount. It's it's either we fix it and we make it better or, you know, we don't fix it. And if you don't wanna fix it, then I'm gonna go somewhere else. But the, you know, the issue in terms of how can this be helpful, I would say if you're a retailer that doesn't have a website that tracks consumer order history, not for the sake of spamming them, not for the sake of tracking them, but specifically for the sake of you understanding the nature of your customer spending habits, and how you can better improve your experience around what that customer wants, then you're gonna be out of business, you know, within five years. And that's all that tech money coming in and skimming the cream off the top. Right? Yeah. I mean, there's just too many other people doing that. So then you get into these sort of indentured servitude relationships where you have a liquor store that's dying, but it's it it's kept alive on dialysis by a third party marketing site that feeds them orders. But Kashap can only exist so long as they have that business. If if one of these third party marketing sites shuts off the valve, then, you know, it's over. So I don't wanna be in that position either. And I don't wanna be just a fulfillment center. I wanna be the person driving sales, not reacting to sales. You know, I'm not gonna turn down pre business. If it doesn't interfere with the model that I have running, but I'm definitely not gonna depend on that type of business. The, I I had interviewed Gary Fish, who runs Gary's wines in marketplace, coin and marketplace in New Jersey four stores there and a new one in Napa. And he expressed it this way. He said, drizzly helps, you know, sell things. That's great. He said, but the e commerce tool that he's using helps him build his business for the long term and and build customer relationships. And I I think that's that's fundamentally different. And then a lot of retailers have to kind of get out of the nineteen forties and fifties, and I'm sure I'll be vilified for this. But, you know, It isn't just social media and blaring things out there. It's it's furthering the relationship with the the dialogue with the customer, even if that dialogue is not happening in synchrony. Right? Because offline, you know, you can happen offline, you can ask something one day and get response to next more within an hour versus a conversation, which is in real time. Right. A hundred percent. And I would even liken it to, like, like, a creative school. Right? Let's let's say Photoshop or a music editing system. Right? You've you've now got top of the line recording equipment if you're an artist, and you can make whatever album you want. And you can make the most professional album of all time. But what do you have to say? You know? Yeah. I mean, like, just because you have the ability to now get a message out there and to perfect the quality of the the sophistication of that message doesn't mean your message is going to be heard. I would rather have something to say and have a less effective way of saying it than not. And, you know, that's sort of the that's sort of the situation that I'm in. It'll be heard more. Yeah. Right? And which is what you want. It's not what you say. It's what people hear. Yeah. I mean, we're not I'm in a position right now where I don't necessarily have the most sophisticated technology, but I could make it work because I know what the message needs to be, and that's more important. If somebody said to me, you know, what are we gonna spend money on for marketing this week? I would say we're gonna spend money on really good product and delivering that product at a really good price. If you have the right products at the right price, that's your marketing. That's the, you know, the Razon Debtra. That's it. Okay. So running tight on time, but I did I did wanna ask this. It is a, a podcast on Italian One. Talk to me about the role of Italian wines in the California market. You know, there is a a big difference. I've seen the numbers that, you know, penetration of European wines much bigger in in East Coast, certainly in New York, Miami, and all that kind of stuff. California is very California centric. What is what is happening with Italian wines in the California market from your perspective? Well, it's an interesting situation because, obviously, I worked for a retailer for more than a decade that did a lot of its own selection and own importation. Right? We were selecting wines that were either not available in the United States and clearing them through, you know, a a friendly importer. And and that was that was a really great way to differentiate your selection. So as a result, though, you're not necessarily purchasing from the main suppliers. And What I've noticed is more and more people getting involved in importing some of the bigger names. So you have gray market and you have, you know, the standard importation of the biggest names in the industry. And then you've got boutique stuff that speaks to the, you know, the more nuanced consumer. And the goal is to blend as much of that across a broad spectrum as you can at at least that's my strategy. So In some cases, I'm buying from Italy directly or I'm buying from, you know, an exporter, and I'm having that cleared through somebody that I know who runs the importation. In some cases, I'm buying from the major suppliers. And in some cases, I'm buying from people like Oliver Macron who's, you know, a small importer that does a really great job of curating just Italian wines. And I have to figure that out. Right? He's the man. Great book, really cool stuff, and he's a longtime friend. So You know, the trick with marketing Italian wines is I don't think that wine spectator and Venice and, you know, the wine advocate are driving sales of Italian wine at this point. It's still driving Napa. It's still driving Bordeaux, but it's not necessarily driving sales of Italian wine. I'm finding that food culture and, diet and all of these new age, you know, gluten free Mediterranean style living is really the foundation of all the questions that I'm getting. Somebody calls me with a menu. They don't really care about how many points they got. They don't really necessarily care about the history of the vineyard. They're they're they're looking to throw a party outside for twenty five people, and they're all gonna eat Italian food and they'd like to pair some Italian wines with the menu. And in that case, it's not really about the label or or the prestige. It's more about what do I know about Italian wine that can help them and are the wines that I that I'm picking for them exciting to them? Which is the way people buy it in Italy. Okay. So one of the other issues with Italy is, you know, it's one of the largest exporters of the world and also has the largest number of one of largest number of Indigenous grapes. And yet, most people are only familiar with, you know, Barolo, Brunelo Cianti Prosecco, those top few. And there's this incredible range of things that are out there. Is California open or ready? For things like, Sacramento de Montefalco or Nero Davala, which is becoming really popular volcanic wines, and, you know, things like that. Absolutely. I'm selling sardinian wines. I'm selling sicilian wines. No problem. Volcanic whites from Sicily, you know, from Aetna. All of those wines with, like, a volcanic mineral streak in them. Those are super popular. I sell Verdicchio by the case. I'm selling alpine white. Wow. We couldn't give that stuff. There was a time we couldn't give it away. Yeah. Well, it's so much better now. It's of a it's of another quality. You know, there's people that And that's true of Swave too in Val Pollachella Right. For that matter. Right. Hundred percent Swave, Piro Pan. And then Piro Pan is like one of our top sellers right now, and that's, you know, it's an inexpensive label that goes through Gallo, but it's quite good for the price. Oh, and they have a whole range of things too. So okay. So bring it to a close last question. I'm sure you get, I use the word million. Maybe it's thousands, but lots of calls from wineries, from importers, distributors, every, you know, e commerce people, everybody and his brother who has wine to sell. And there's a lot more of those than there ever used to be. How do you handle this inundation that I'm sure you're getting of I just need a moment of your time to tell you about this wine or this spirit? I, you know, I remember Well, first of all, I'm a I'm a human who likes to be treated like one. So I'm very careful about how I handle those. I'm very respectful, and I'm I definitely do my best to answer everybody's email personally and with care. I'm more than willing to take an appointment so long as, you know, the wines that are on the list represent something that I think I can use, you know, from the get go. But, you know, it's an open door policy. I've been a distributor. I've had to make those calls. I've had to do the exact same thing that other people are doing, and there's nothing worse than some prick fire at a store that thinks he's, you know, god and wants to use that relationship to leverage something out of you. It's very frustrating. So I would say more than most wine buyers I'm pretty open. I'm easy to find. I'm easy to contact. I'm more than willing to taste anybody's selections. And even if I don't bring them in, I'll be brutally honest and say, you know, I don't think I could use these wines for whatever reasons. But I don't have a way of screening. I'm like I said, part of the job is making time to do this. And I don't have a lot of taller interpretations for people that don't answer their emails or use the I'm so busy excuse you know, pull your head out of your ass and get it together. We're all dizzy. Well, I wanna thank David Driscoll for a great interview, and I love to actually have you back. I think there's a lot more for us to explore. We only scratch the surface of it. But, I've always been impressed with what Dave has been doing, I'm a big fan. And I want to thank you for sharing your thoughts and, your frankness in this interview. Well, thank you for having me. Always a pleasure to be with you, and always a pleasure to speak with you, Steve. So big thank you to, David Driscoll for being our guest this week. And tune in next Monday, and we'll have another very interesting guest with some very, very strong opinions to be shared. Thank you very much for listening. This is Steve Ray, and, saying goodbye for get US market ready with Italian wine people. This is Steve Ray. Thanks again for listening on behalf of the Italian wine podcast.