Ep. 791 Shaping Future Of Retail For The 21St C. Wine Consumer | wine2wine Business Forum 2021

This episode is brought to you by the Italy International Academy, the toughest Italian wine program. One thousand candidates have produced two hundred and sixty two Italian wine ambassadors to date. Next courses in Hong Kong Russia, New York, and Verona. Think you make the cut. Apply now at vin Italy international dot com. Italian Mind Podcast, a wine to wine business forum twenty twenty one media partner is proud to present a series of sessions highlighting the key themes and ideas from the two day event held on October the eighteenth and nineteenth twenty twenty one. This hybrid edition of business forum was jam packed with the most informed speakers discussing some of the hottest topics in the wine industry today. For more information, please visit wine to wine dot net and tune in every Thursday at two PM central European time for more episodes recorded during this latest edition of wine to wine business forum. Oh, no. You didn't have the headphones. So let me translate. So he said, thank you all for coming, and Stevie Kim is great. You know, he couldn't do without me. So, you know, he decided to show up. Okay. That was kind of the No, it, jokingly aside. This is kind of it's a challenging time for all of us. So I think he explained the current situation and their commitment to going, fortune ahead during this very, very challenging times. But as you can see, there's really good energy here. And I'm so, he, he's very grateful to, have your presence. And, This is a good way to see each other, even if it's very brief small window, as a bridge to Vinitley two thousand twenty two. Okay? So let's let's get straight straight away to, the first session. I'm going to call, find a sacrifice to the stage, the Calangelo people. Let's let let's give it a find. Because I've Thank you. I yeah. I've, like, mispronounced his name so many times. Of course, he's he is such a, this is your third time. Right? Second time, I think. No. It was virtual last year. This is a good story. Yeah. Virtual virtual still count. It does count. Yeah. Okay, sir. This is the third time Hainey's been with us. So he's kind of part of the family, the wine to wine family. I'm glad he's back to kick off kick us off today. A lot of things have happened. You know, people I don't know what's going on with people. The only thing I do is, like, go on LinkedIn. And, he is now the founder and board member as of September two thousand twenty one. So something happens. A little bit of back and forth. Yeah. Something happens. So he'll tell us a little bit about that. And I was actually, on, on, walking to the office this morning, long story, Dana already. And I was watching the Of course, I I, you know, I'm a girl so I can do two things at the same time. Like Wow. I'm prison. Yeah. I know. I'm like men. So I can I was watching this YouTube by, Adam Gordon Lovett? No. What's his name, Adam? He was talking about how attention, the the because of social media, attention drives away creativity. And I think, actually, I highly recommend it to, to anyone. It's in it's inter interesting. So although, yes, social media, and, you know, NApp, like Vivi, you know, it takes away a lot of because you crave for attention, like all the reviewers. They want to be the top reviewers. And if you are, like, you've reviewed, like, if you have, like, four and a half stars, you wanna get to the five star levels, right, etcetera, etcetera. So, it I'm very interested in what you have to say and and the audience. And I will also take questions, after his presentation both, from you folks here, in the auditorium, but also online. Take it away. You can do together. Right? We'll do it together. Yeah. Yeah. Of course. Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Glad to be here again. I mean, We're basically on time. Stevie came up to me twenty minutes before and said, Hey, we're starting now. And it's like, what the hell? Something has changed. Definitely a new normal here in Italy. That's for sure. Cool. Let's get going. So I'm gonna talk a little bit about Bevino, obviously, retail, e commerce, and so on. And, but I'm gonna start with saying a few words, about myself. Like Stev Yintas, I'm the founder of Vevino. I have been the CEO most of the time, but not all the time. We did get, CEO in back in 'eighteen. Didn't work out. So I came back in just before the pandemic, and now we have a new CEO again. So so I'm trying to run away from this, and now this time it's gonna work for sure. Anyway, founder, Vivino, been doing this for eleven years now. And it has been an amazing journey, obviously, to get to a place like this too. I am definitely an entrepreneur. I'm also a family man. I think, you know, when you do something like this, You you obviously can't do everything. And for me, in my life, I think building companies and family has been the only two things I've been doing. This is a picture of the family right here. We actually lived in California up till twenty twenty. So, we moved out there in twenty thirteen, obviously, to build the Vino and so on. And and when we came back in twenty twenty, we apparently forgot to bring two of the kids back. So two of the kids are still in California. One in LA and one in SF and the third one that's with us in in in Copenhagen. My background is when I think about where I come from, I grew up on some very, very small islands in the middle of the North Atlantic. Place called the Far Islands, which is fifty thousand people on a rock, in the middle of nowhere. And there was little wine. And if there was wine, it was basically in two categories red and white. What people drank back then was, like, beer and Akavid has anyone tried Akovic? It's good. Yeah. Look at that. Yeah. I could read this fantastic, but, you know, moderate volumes, obviously. But I love products, and I wanted to solve a problem, and that's why I started building, Divino. So we're gonna talk I'm gonna show off some numbers today. I'm gonna talk about the pandemic. I'm gonna talk about Rubino's story and e commerce in general, but let's start with one of my favorite subjects' numbers. So first, we're gonna look at Italian wine around the world. And, These are all numbers from our immense database of numbers. And this one is let's have a look at it here. So where do people drink Italian wine? Obviously, all over the world. And for us, Italian wine, is the second largest country in wine after France. I don't think that's a big surprise. But if you look at this, where is it overrepresented? It's quite interesting to see that Italy, obviously, you know, number one for Italian wines. But if you go up north from Italy, That's where Italian wines are incredibly strong. Germany, benelux, Nordics, and so on. Italian wines do really, really well. You have the US too where Italian wines do well. Russia is a big country. They also do well in Russia, and then you have, Brazil. But specifically, any anywhere north of Italy, Italian wines do well. We're also seeing a little bit of a growth whereas as in in in nineteen, seventeen percent of wines were Italian in in, twenty one, it was eighteen. So a little bit of growth in the penetration of Italian wines. So where did it go well and where did it go not so well? Now we're rewinding a little bit here to get a full year in, and and this was very, very interesting. Right? What countries improved in nineteen to twenty and what which ones went down? And these are this was a special, special year. So this is not necessarily a trend, but let's have a look at what we have here. So Benelux did really, really well. Belgium, and Germany grew by almost five percent just in one year. So quite a big growth. And where did it go, you know, not so well? It it was actually the other wine producing countries. They took it down. So so, France and Spain drank considerably less Italian wine. Again, we don't always have the explanations, but it could be COVID. It could be, you know, people will drink more local and so on during that period. If you look at the US, which is always important, US is around three percent, down in this period. So not necessarily a trend, but but, a lot of things happening during that time, obviously. So I wanna dig into the US because it is the biggest wine market in the world and incredibly important for Italian wines. Again, looking at nineteen twenty, I wouldn't say we see sort of very, very clear things. Again, the darker reds are the ones that have moved during this period. If you look at the West Coast, not many changes there. The really most interesting part here is is is the East Coast and the North of the East Coast. We see, like, a pretty clear increase in Italian wines there. The states that are really dark here there are Americans in the room. You would identify I know these states. I checked it before. But these are not very big states. This is North Dakota and Oklahoma and so on. So so I wouldn't sort of put too much in that. There are low consumption states. But up in the north, that's Pennsylvania up there and so on. These are quite big wine states. So could be something's happening in in in the US when it comes to Italian wine. Another thing which I found really, really interesting here, this is going way back. This is going ten years back of Italian wine. So so, obviously, red wine is the biggest category anywhere, there's a real, real shift going on here. And and this obviously is slow, but but take a look at this. The red thing here is red wine. The green one is white wine, and the blue is is, sparkling wine. And if you look at white wine, how much it's growing, right, ten years ago, it was, like, three percent. Now it's thirteen percent. If you look at sparkling, similar trend, what is it, like, almost one percent, two, three percent, up to seven percent. So real, real growth in in those other categories and red wines, you know, not growing as fast as the other. So we found this very, very interesting in a slow trend, but but clearly something happened here. The other thing we've also seen globally is is this crazy growth of Rose. And and this one actually is based on on the on day to day consumption. So the cool thing you see here is really the the seasonality of Rosay. Right? So people drink Rosay in the summer. Some people drink it all the year, as you can tell, but the growth is so clear here. Right? Over the past five years, there's a clear, clear growth. And this is only Italian Rosay. Global Rosay might be growing even more than this. So so clear, clear growth in in the in the Rosay, consumption. I wanna do one more of these because they're, you know, they're a little bit of fun actually. The next one here is a combination of white wine and sparkling. And, again, we can see seasonality here. So so take a look at the at the white wines again. We drink it in the summer, And then in the winter, we drink less of it. And then you have the sparkling, which is quite funny, right, because they also goes up in the summer, and then around Christmas again. But both these categories also growing over the over the last few years. So some super interesting trends here for for the Italian wines. And we're gonna talk more about data later, but, you know, the amount of data we have is just it's crazy. We have so, so much data, and people always ask us, hey, what does the data say? And And we say data really doesn't say much. Yeah. Gotta ask them really, really smart questions. And then maybe you'll get some answers. But we did a few of these for this, and I think it's so much fun to see what's happening with the data. So let's talk about the pandemic. Steve, hinted a little bit that a lot of things have changed during the pandemic, and I promise you it's been a crazy year. So I'm gonna show you something you might not have seen before. But I've noticed, I I do like numbers and graphs. Sorry about that. But the the green one here is something that Google did. It's a mobility index. So in order to find out what actually happened here, we've tried and found to find the correlation with mobility. So Google does, like, the Android smartphones and so on, so they built this index called the mobility. So they can measure how much people are moving. So the green line here is Google's mobility index. It's all public. You can take it. But it's reverse. Right? So when it's all the way up there, people are not moving at all. And if you look at this green line, it's clear that when you get to March of twenty twenty, mobile index just goes up, meaning that people are not moving at all. And then you have the second one later on in the year. It goes way, way up. The thing is the blue line is actually online sales. And we think at least there's a pretty clear correlation here. Right? So when people couldn't move, they were buying a lot more online, and and this was very, very clear to us too. So people are stuck at home. They're gonna be drinking, and they're gonna be ordering online. That's very, very clear, but it's funny to see how strong the the correlation, was on this one. I wanna dig a little bit deeper into some of our numbers, actually, in details. And and this one is is is actually new buyers coming to the platform every single day. So normally before the pandemic, we would convert around five hundred buyers. And so normal users convert them into buyers every single day. And and, you know, if you look at the the early this is starting in September of nineteen, it goes up on Black Friday, it goes up on Christmas, and then after, it just goes back to a normal level. Again, around five hundred, every single day. But then something happens. And and and you have to remember that it's it's easy for us to be smart around this and now. But when we hit February, and, you know, we sell wine in seventeen countries around the world, we were like, like, what the heck is going on? It was really difficult for us to know and see what was gonna happen. And the first thing we did, actually, was like, okay. We're stopping all marketing, no hiring. Nothing. We just said, cool it down. We do not know what's happening here. And, actually, in in Hong Kong, where we have an office, we couldn't ship for, like, five days. I'm like, okay. This could be a problem. If we can't ship anywhere in the world, we're in trouble, then it opened up again in Hong Kong, and and people were sitting at home. And they said, You know, we actually won mine, and we're gonna order it online. And then numbers went up in Hong Kong. Okay. Maybe there is something here. And then we hit sort of March twentieth, and number just kept going up. And now you look at this graph here and you see it it just keeps going up all the way up to two thousand new buyers every single day. And and that's obviously interesting, but I think one of the really interesting things is if you keep going that line, it stays really high. So our normal before was, hey, we can convert, like, five hundred buyers every day and five hundred users into buyers, but that number is a thousand now. So there was a shift, and it went up, and then it landed in a new place. And I think that's a that's a big, big deal. Something that really happened there that that really changed the game quite a bit here. Someone might ask, what is this partnership? You see there's one day with ten thousand users? It's, do you guys know post malone? Yeah. So he launched this Rosay, and people liked it. So around ten thousand fans came and bought that in one day. So, they liked this Rosay, for sure. And, do you wanna mention this one because there is obviously a change in the market? If you look at what people are drinking over the past five, six years. Beer is declining. Spirit are increasing, and wine is sort of relatively flat on the on the global seat. It's important to have how included. I also wanna mention that that the wine market how big it is and how small the online the e commerce part still is. This is a four hundred billion dollar market, and we estimate maybe thirty billion or so is online. There was a definite shift during the pandemic, but we're still just scratching the surface. So it is gonna come over the year, but it's, you know, we're not done yet at all. It's just getting started. That's my takeout in the least that a lot of this is gonna move online, and and there's still a lot of growth, to be had. So when you wanna do something like this, when you wanna take something and take it online, what do you look at? And and we look at primarily three things, convenience, supply, and price. And and sometimes we think that, you know, things just go online by themselves. You know, everything is gonna go online. And that really isn't true. Things go online or to a new platform when they're better. They just don't it it doesn't happen automatically. We still go into the supermarkets because we think it's better to buy groceries in the supermarket. If it was better online, we do it online. And the same goes for for the wine industry, you gotta be good at convenience, supply, and the price. If we look at Rubino, what we wanna do is starting with supply, we wanna have the best supply in the world. Like, nobody's gonna compete with us on supply. If you go to visit us in Germany, we'll have forty, fifty thousand skews, like incredibly good supply. We wanna have great, great prices, because it's gotta be competitive. On the convenience side, I'm gonna touch on that a little bit later, but it's not necessarily what we wanna do the most. Like, convenience, if you can walk a hundred meters and buy something, that is pretty convenient, and we're not gonna be able to do that. So convenience, we might score a little bit lower. One of the reasons why wine really isn't there yet is because it's still it's it's quite funny. You you think about technology and digital, all those things, and it's actually a little bit of the older audience that does most of the buying on our platform. You would think that it's like the the TikTok and Snapchat, Snapchat generation, but it really isn't. It really aren't the ones that drive the volume here. And the reason for that is is, again, this is on our platform, is that the the price points are actually a little bit higher online. So people don't buy much five, six, seven dollar wines online. You have to get to fifteen, twenty dollars to make the shipping and so on work. So, again, as we get more sophisticated, better, less expensive shipping, I think that's gonna go down. But the facts are right now that that the older generation is still a lot of the people that are actually buying the wine, online. So we talked about convenience before, and I wanna talk talk to talk to you guys about a sort of a a new thing, and something that also happened during the pandemic. If you look at at at what the traditional e commerce is, and then there's another category called On Demand. What we do is, like, traditional e commerce, you know, you go to a website, you buy it, you get it in one, two, three days. You usually have a really good selection. You usually have good prices. It's things like vivino, vino dot com, and panico, and so on. But over the last few years, on demand has become very popular, which means you get delivered in the same day. Like, one to three hours, It's a little bit more expensive. You probably don't have a great supply, but you get it quickly. And that's like DoorDash and Drisley and so on. And I'm gonna dig a little bit more into that. But first, I wanna show you what what the effect was for the on the pandemic, And and I will tell you guys that the guys that did on demand did incredibly well. So these numbers are from second measure. They, they measure credit card usage. And, like, the the fat line in the middle is us. So we look at our scrubs and say, yeah, we did really, really well. But the ones that did on demand, meaning, like, three hour delivery, like, people were thirsty out there. I need my boost right now. And, and they did so, so well during this this period. People, one of their, you know, wine quickly. Obviously, when it comes to the end of it, they also get hit a little bit harder, whereas we sort of stabilized at a at a, at a better level, I would say. But these guys did really well. The new thing that's happened is that there actually is a new category. I don't know if you've seen this much in Italy, but there's these new companies that are what we call vertically integrated. And, Its companies like Flink, Gorillas, and Geter. Is there anyone here in Italy that does this, you know? K. It's it's really big in Germany. It's really big in the Nordics. Basically, they do ten to fifteen minutes delivery. And, like, it is incredibly fast. It means that you you sit there in your chair and, like, within ten minutes, somebody knocks on your door. And that's gonna be wine, that's gonna be convenience, everything. It is a new category. And the way they do it is because they're integrated, they would actually have dark stores and, and, pick up themselves and they go on their bike within two minutes they're on their bike and off they go. The reason why I mentioned this is because this company like Gorillas, they started a year and a half ago. They have raised one billion dollars. So somebody really, really believes in this concept as something that could change a lot. So I think it's really interesting. And for the wine industry, I think it also matters because the next thing that's happening now is that we're getting even more used to buying online. Right? There's this new category, by the way, Gorilla slogan, it's faster than you. I think that's kinda cool. But it's true. Right? If you're gonna go to seven eleven and buy something, they're gonna be faster. They're only a one way to go, so they're only gonna come to you. But but I think this is interesting. Because what's happening now is that we're taking another category within wine and groceries, all those things, and putting it online. So what we used to do at seven eleven, that might also disappear, because of this. So literally ten minutes, it's super duper impressive if you if you haven't tried it. Is the business model gonna work? Are they gonna make money? Who knows? At least, they're putting massive resources into to these, and that's gotta influence the the wine industry, for sure. Wanna talk a little bit about Vivino here. Have you all tried Vivino? So why did I start this company? Well, I started this company because I was standing just like this lady here in front of a wine aisle and not knowing what to buy. I wanted to to solve a problem. And look, I'm not the big sort of McKinsey guy that would do a lot of research. I just thought to myself, you know what? I can't be the only one who has this problem, and turned out I wasn't. So so it's all about helping people drink better wine. You know, solving the pro the problem you need to solve is easy. You this wine bottle in front of me, is it good or not so good? That's all. The challenge is that there's a lot of wine out there. A shit load of wine out there. So, So we built this product now, and that's just been going on for the last ten years. You know what? You scan a bottle of wine. We'll give you all the information. Obviously, you can buy the wine through the app too. We have ratings, reviews, prices, very important, and also taste and so on. And, obviously, you can buy it through the app now too. So so the product's been doing really, really well. I wanna talk a little bit about what we really believe in here. I think, first and foremost, Our core mission here is to help people drink better wine. And it doesn't matter if you're in a supermarket or if we're selling you a bottle of wine. We always want you to drink the better wine. We think the most important people here are the people that make the wine and the people that drink the wine. They are the key people in this industry. And we're not gonna sell, you know, ads to push certain wines up. We want you always to drink a better wine. We think that if we get a best possible wine in front of you, you will come back and buy again. So it's an incredibly important thing for us to be independent, and the only interest we have is to give you the best possible wine. So with with WineApp, obviously has been, quite a bit of competition, but over the last few years, things have changed. We're not seeing a lot of competition anymore. I would say by sixteen, seventeen, there wasn't much out there. Obviously, retailers out there that have wine apps, When it comes to a wine community, there's no one even close me being modest again. But, that that is the way it is. We're getting we're we're still growing fast and we're by far, the biggest in this space. Let me give you some some numbers on that. Fifty three. Million app users, two hundred and fifteen million ratings that are made in the app, and, like, one point seven billion bottle scans, two hundred thousand wineries, fourteen million wines, and our users look up around two million wines every single day. And around twenty thousand installed the app every single day. Just gives us incredible amount of data and helps our users pick, better wine. So so the next question, obviously, is why should people buy wine, through Reno? And and that is a valid question. There are a few things I wanna focus on. First, if you look at the supply side, that is incredibly important. In in the ability for people to buy almost any wine no matter where you are. So we're not there yet, but we have in most of the markets incredibly strong supply because we combine all these retailers and and put them together. The other things that we think is really important is the data that we have to help you pick a better way. So recommendations, data, personalization, and so on. It's like we build all this data about wine. And on the other side, we build all this data about people, put those things together, and we can match you with the best possible wine. If you haven't tried the app recently, one of the new features is a, what we call a match for you. You know, you have the rating already. It's a four point one. But on top of that, we have what we call a match for you. And what that means is that we look through all the data, and then we sort of guess how good a match is this wine for you. And that's based on all the data we have in there. It's a very, very cool feature in my in my opinion. The rating itself is is something sometimes challenged by the industry, but we believe that a peer to peer rating made by, like, casual wine drinkers is the best way to go. You know, I think experts in some of the years are fantastic. They they know a lot of things. They're gonna rate. They're gonna give you reviews and so on. But this is a different thing. And it works really, really well because you have a lot in common with your peers. Yeah. And this is what it can look like. A lot of these reviews, people are, you know, funny on this and, all kinds of things. We also Read, we also have machine learning and AI that reads through all these reviews and sort of puts that all together, and so we can tell you exactly what the wine tastes like in a structured form. So although these texts seem like a little bit chaotic. We can actually go in and sort of aggregate that and give you a profile of the wine. Something that hasn't been done really at scale before. Good. I'm I'm trying to keep the time here. We're still good. Right? Two more minutes. I wanna wanna finally, I'm not gonna send you an pitch, but I wanna, you know, make sure the industry knows that we obviously work with with the industry in in so many ways. I think the most important thing here, if you're winemakers, whatever you are, you know, make sure your wines are available on the Vino in as many places as possible. I mean, for us, that's what we want. We want our users to be able to buy your wines. That's number one. Then we have a few other things. We do, we do offers via email and so on. We do sponsorships to make, put videos and other rich content on there. And then a new thing we just started, which we think is is has the real potential. We're testing this in the UK and in the Netherlands. It's a retail program. Obviously, like I said before, you know, most of the wines are still bought offline. One most of the wines will actually be still being bought in a supermarket. So we're building this new program that's being tested right now to help people, you know, drink better wine in the supermarket using our data, but not necessarily using the app. So this is also something we're very, very excited about. With that, I'm gonna say thank you very much. We're gonna take some questions with Stevy. First of all, thank you very much. We had a small snafu because and it was, my bad because, for the audience online, because you need, like, five minutes. I introduced Hainate straight into his session without, stopping. So the live sessions were actually streamed through the kickoff because they need a little space middle, we'll go home before we start a new session. Let me do it again now. Yeah. Do it again. Okay. So we will take some questions. So I know for the online people, they were a little bit frustrated, but If you have any questions, I will now also go on to the, this session and take questions from online students online, participants as well. In the meantime, I do have one question to kick off. Sure. Okay. So how does this work? Like Vivino in Italy, for example, is it different from Vivino France and Vivino USA? How does it work like structurally? Yeah. Great. Great question. Obviously, it's all, like, it's it's different companies, but all owned by one entity. So it's all rolled up to one holding company as as such. But when it comes to buying and selling wine, we're still somewhat siloed, which means that the supply in Italy is mostly Italian, meaning we have retailers, producers, and so on Italy selling to Italian users. And that's what we're slowly changing now that that we want Italy to ship to all the countries in Europe. US is probably gonna be harder, but most of it is still siloed. So Italy is is Italian and so on and so forth. But that's gonna change over the next couple of years. So I actually have an online question, from Joseph Jim Kofsky. They're, like, challenging my pronunciation this morning. He says, are are you here, Tim? Actually, I thought he was, attending, in person. Anyways, he asked, it's kinda similar to my question. Does the wine rating depend on the country where I scan the wine? Oh, yeah. No. No. It does not. So all our ratings are totally global. Doesn't matter. So and all ratings are global. All ratings are equal. So that's also, you know, some platform struggle with people rating one star and five star. And then this person is good at it. This person not so good at it. We we've not been compelled to actually change that. So all ratings are equal. As soon as a wine gets ten, usually, or twenty ratings, the ratings are solid. So it turns out that, you know, when people go to a restaurant and get really, really mad at a waiter, give a one star. They don't get as mad as a bottle of wine. So we have much less one star ratings. We have a really nice distribution, so they're all global. Okay. Then I know we have a question from the gentlemen in the back, and then the lady and and Robert. Oh my god, Anton. You actually have a question or you're just saying hello. Thanks. Yeah. So, let's go in that order. Would you mind introducing yourself, but especially with mask. I don't know. I can't recognize you. Hello, everyone. My name is Dezate Winifachi. I work for a wine producer, Masotina, but my question, I just wanted to say that I've seen your documentary on Amazon Prime disrupting wine, and I invite everybody to see it because it is very interesting. My question is, I'm developing a Vino, an app about Vino with a friend of mine. And, we are facing a big problem, which is we don't know how to create the initial database. And, no problem. How did I did you do that? And the second question is when you launched, Vivino app in two thousand ten, I guess. Did you already know that, it would have turned into a marketplace or e commerce? Thank you very much. Yeah. Starting with the data, and I I've always talked about that for a long time. This is this is the core challenge of of the industry is that there was no data available anywhere. So so, basically, we started. I was back in Copenhagen back then, and we built it one hundred and manually. I sent emails to every single wine merchant in Copenhagen, and said to them, hey, guys. I'm doing this thing. Can I come in and take a picture of every single label in your shop? So I did that day after day after day, and then we built a beta team to actually add beta to that. So that was stage one, build thousands and thousands of labels, and then slowly, we did all kinds of hacks. We did, like, a competition and said, hey, send us labels, and we'll match them and you could win a cork through all kinds of things to to hack it. So it it's the biggest challenge of building this, for sure. And and the the thing is you can't you can't wait with launching. You have to launch it to get more labels. So you can't wait till it's perfect. You have to launch something that's a little bit crappy. And so, so it was really, really tricky. And we had to launch with a relatively weak database, but then we started to get labels in, and it got stronger and stronger. So the second question was on the commercial side. Did we always know what we're gonna do? And and, you know, I work a lot with startups and and very often startups sort of pivot and say, no. No. We thought we're gonna do this. We're gonna do something else. So we knew exactly what it was. We didn't know how hard it was gonna be, but we knew from day one that the obvious business model here is to, hey, you can scan a bottle of wine, put a green button down there and buy it. So putting that in a slight decking business, yeah, we get that. That's easy. So turns out it's harder to build it than to put it in a slight deck So it was really difficult, but we knew, early on. Yes. Okay. We'll take the next question from the lady. Okay. I'm Diane Heck. I'm an important Oh, hi, Diane. Didn't recognize you with the mask. And I'm a VIP ambassador from New York. So my question for you, honey, is how does your distribution model work in the US and as between states? Must you start with a pro with a retailer as a partner? How does a producer get onto your site and get to distribution? Yeah. So so we mostly have retailers on in the US right now because of of the regulation. So when we started to build supply in the US, we said, okay. How do we get going here? And the best way to get proper supply going was to do retailers because then you add, like, a thousand SKUs instead of twelve SKUs. Right? So we're very happy on retailers, but we also allow wineries on now. So we have more and more wineries on. We work with wine direct. So a lot of the partners that they have can go through us. So mostly retailers are doing more and more wineries. So in the US, it's either, as you know, retailers are direct. That's the the two different things. But the available supply varies very much from state to state. Like, you take New York where it's really hard to ship in. Most of the retailers in New York, are retailers from New York only. Whereas in California, it's more open. So you have from different. So it's like a big puzzle of of different supply in different states. Okay. We'll take your question from Robert. Thank you, Hina. I I'm in an interesting situation because, now, the wines that we produce in France are getting a lot of scans. We're in about twenty thousand scans, a month, which seems to be quite a good number. Our biggest market in the world is the US followed by Russia. We are getting far more scans outside the US proportionally than I would expect from the US. I'm interested to see what you see in terms of number of scans per market, per wine, what is it that makes? I mean, we we are doing incredibly well on scans for Russia and Poland, for example. Yeah. Obviously, it is that specifically is a challenge. Right? Because, for us, we don't we don't we're not open in Poland yet. And in Russia, it's it's it's illegal to buy wine online. So we actually I think Russia is for us. I think it's, like, it's definitely a top ten market, maybe top five from a user point of view, but we can't do anything. So I asked them locally. I said, hey. I can we do something here? And then they say, yes. We deliver. So you deliver. But isn't that selling online? No. No. No. No. They buy then we call and ask you if they're a policeman. If they say no, we don't deliver. And So so there is something's opening up in Russia and so on, but but it's really hard for us. We would only be able to help you in the seventeen markets where we are. And then, obviously, it sucks a little bit that one of them is Russia, which is, has a lot of use it and wine drinkers too. Yeah. We have few Russians in the room. I'm one of which Svetlana. Yes. Hello. I got a question. Hello. My name is Svetlana Villa Kaniva. I'm here. Hi. Nice to meet you. Having well, a sort of a technical question. Few months ago, there was a sort of a scandal, in Russia. One bulk line from, ex, Republic got very high marks. And we knew that, it was done well artificially. And I know that some people, refused using Vivino because they can't believe. So how can we cope with that? Yeah. We we do Sorry. My name is. Yeah. Yeah. No. That's a good. So so I I I think I remember something about that. I don't remember the details, honestly. But we do these cleanups on a on a regular basis to find out if people try and manipulate. And, we know it's there. And this this could have been political. Right? Yeah. So So if something is, like, if somebody raised a wine and says, hey, we think it's this this is good. I like, who are we to judge them and say it's not that? So we are really, really careful with removing things unless it's clearly some kind of fake. So so it is a balance all the time to figure this out. And when it becomes political, it's also, you know, difficult, and we had problems with categorization because where do we put Crimea, for instance, and so on. So so it's really tricky. But generally, dealing with ratings that are manipulative. It's it's an ongoing battle, and we do a lot of these things every single week to, to try and help that. Well, honestly, we don't see too much of it We have ways of testing because a lot of it's based on actual pictures taken, and it's really heavy to take that many pictures and rate and so on. So so it is an ongoing battle. I I don't know really well about that particular situation there, but thank you. The lady in the middle. Hi. My name is Carrie Coiser. I'm currently a student in the food and wine at the BBS in Bologna. And my husband and I just recently opened a wine import company into Northern Ireland, bringing Italian lines. But something that I'm not sure if is on the periphery for Vivino. My husband's an avid user of your of your app, by the way, for years, he's so enthusiastic about it. But as someone personally who's very sensitive to a lot of added sulfites, I used to make wine at a winery back in Texas a long time ago. And, any wine that's not naturally made tends to make me turn bright red. And, I have quite severe reactions to it. So I'm wondering if in the future, along with all of the descriptors you have, if there is going to be some sort of indicator of quality, whether wine is bulk produced or is is there even a way to crowdsource that sort of information of wine sensitivities? Yeah. That's a loaded question. They're not I'm not sure. Yeah. I'm not sure it is appropriate, but because it's complicated. Yeah. You've touched on a lot of different issues that are not necessarily correlated, but Yeah. I I take it away. There's certain things we can do. Right? So so one thing there's been a lot of demand for is is categorizing why as well as we can into, like, organic and natural Yeah. And so on. So so that is becoming bigger and bigger. And I just think we're gonna add more and more categories to that. Mhmm. Finding the data is hard. We also have demand for coasters. Hey, we'd like it to be show if it's kosher. So we'd love to add as many of those categories as possible. But some of them are hard to do, and the labeling isn't always clear and so on. But but it is something that adds a lot of value for for a lot of people. So we wanna do it more and more We're gonna start with a more organic and natural tone. Interesting. Thank you. Okay. Is there any more question? Okay. I have one from Anton and Arda, and those will be the last two questions before we close. Hi. Hi. Another Russian. Hi, Hainey. Hainey. Hainey. Hainey. I got spanked so many times. Hainey. Okay. Good to see you again. I have a question about the competition because I'm I'm not sure if it's if the, delectable, if, even there anymore, I'd I'm not sure. But, was it was it any moment, when you, saw this new up when it was appearing back then, and you thought to yourself, oh, they're doing something differently, or what is the state of competition today? Why why didn't start? I mean, why why doesn't they make waves? Yeah. Yes, all the time. Obviously, that sort of drives you also that, holy shit, these guys are good. And when delectable launched around the same time we did maybe a little bit later, but around the same time, I thought to myself, holy shit. They're they're actually getting all these songs and influencers from board. And they're gonna do really well. And for many reasons, I think they ended up not doing, and and they ended up selling it to, to Galloni in in in New York. But I always look at the competition, see what we can learn from the competition, but I also tell people not to obsess with it. Because, look, if you have a good core product, you shouldn't go around copying all these small features and and stuff. Just just stay with your core and learn and and and and so on and so forth. So, yes, definitely inspired by it all the time. So why is it so hard? Well, it comes back to what you said earlier, really, like, building this data and this flywheel that keeps maintaining the data is incredibly hard. And if you wanna build a good lineup, you need to have the data. And we have really, really good data now. And the size we have right now, I sometimes say to people, it might actually be the minimum size of a wine app because of the wine wine business being so long tail you need tens of millions of people to actually maintain it. So someone coming in with tens of thousands of users, it's just not possible. So so it's really, really hard to compete, but Fortunately, you know, people come from the side. There are a competition in in specific niches and so on. And, obviously, that's great for the user. So competition is always good, but we wanna win, obviously. So Okay. One last question for Martha. Hello. Thanks for the talk. My name is Arda, and I'm a business developer in Alien Airlines of which actually, if you don't know, is a client. So I have two questions. The first one is about the reviews because now that I'm in the market, I understand that Vivani's Vivanios scores are very important and shape really the, you know, ideas of the buyers, and I understand the value of democratization of these reviews. But do you think about incorporating any sort of somalia professional review system to create maybe more credibility in the review scheme. And the second question, because you talked a lot about the data and artificial intelligence, do you think it's possible through a total artificial intelligence mechanism to understand the style or the, you know, preferences of the customers because there are many people that are against this, approach. Yeah. Yeah. Let me start with the with the som thing. We we actually have some ratings in from experts in the app. And so so we have a little bit of that. Would we have others in there too? Yes. We really try and so there's incredibly good people under, you know, they do reviews. And we have these algorithms to try and push those reviews up. Not their ratings. The ratings count the same, but if someone's really good at doing a good view, the algorithm tries to to push those reviews up. So we're trying to promote the people. So if there are some and very good people on there, that will be pushed up. So I think that matters. So the next one was about AI and so on. Yes. I think it's gonna help us figure out the style and so on. We've we've used this machine learning to determine what the taste is like. If you haven't seen the taste characteristics in the app. I it's quite magical, I think. But AI is gonna help us. It's gonna be a tool to make things faster and better, but it's not gonna solve all these problems. I think it's gonna enable us a little bit. Okay. It's a, nine forty five. Let's give it up for Mr. Zachariasen. Mr. Vivina, thank you very much for joining us. Thank you very much for coming back. And that's it. You guys have to leave their room because I have to sanitize with the ghostbuster. Get out for now. Thank you very much. See you soon. Listen to the Italian wine podcast wherever you get your podcasts. We're on SoundCloud, Apple podcasts, Spotify, email, IFM, and more. Don't forget to subscribe and rate the show. If you enjoy listening, please consider donating through Italian wine podcast dot com. 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