SIMPLY MIND BLOWING
In one day Naked Wines customers raised £120K to fund the dream of a South African winemaker
Carmen Stevens needed help.
- Despite being head winemaker at the super-premium Amani winery, and turning out amazing award-winning wines.
- Despite being the first black female to graduate from winemaking school in South Africa, rising to the top thanks to her talent and determination.
But she wanted to achieve something she’d always dreamed of – to make her own wine, for herself. But that’s tricky in South Africa, when you don’t have the money to do it, nor are you white, Afrikaans and male. And when you refuse to believe a word of it when Naked Wines founder Rowan Gormley tells you that he has 50,000 Angel customers willing to make it happen.
At Naked Towers we’d taken a bit of a hammering when we launched MarketPlace two months ago – the world’s first open trade market for wine, where customers bargain directly with the producer over price, and Naked taking just 10% margin. And it was successful to an extent – we sold 250K worth of wine in that short time – with some producers selling on the UK market for the first time, and customers gaining access to some new and interesting stuff.
But a vocal group was dead against MarketPlace and we couldn’t but listen. Too much choice! Too much unknown! they chorused in the forums and social media networks. Then the bids started to dry up and we knew we had to change something.
So on Thursday we moved to MarketPlace 2: ONE winemaker and ONE price, ONE week at a time. Exactly the same as before, except winemakers pitch their wines to us and we decide, based on quality and price, to offer them the weekly slot to pitch to our customers.
So a new dawn for MarketPlace was about to begin. And what a great way to help fund a winemaker, in true Naked spirit! Simply put, we needed 1,000 people to buy a case for Carmen and her dream could become a reality.
We were amazed with the response. Not only did we reach the requisite 1,000 cases, we did so in an astonishing 2 hours 17 minutes. As the sun set on an epic day, the maximum 2,000 cases sold out at 9pm.
Carmen seemed happy enough, writing ‘THIS DAY WILL GO DOWN IN HISTORY FOR ME AS ONE OF THE GREATEST DAY S OF MY LIFE ! I AM LIGHT HEADED , DUZZY , SPEECHLESS BUT HAVE THIS HUGE GRIN ALL OVER MY FACE!!! AMAZING , SIMPLY MIND BLOWING , WOW THANK YOU, THANK YOU !!!!’
Some other amazing stats on one special day:
- 2,000 happy Angels
- 12,000 bottles of Chenin Blanc and 10,000 Shiraz made possible
- 2,000 bottles of premium £15.99 Amani Pendana Shiraz thrown in for good measure
- £120K raised to set up a winemaker in business in 9 hours
- 357 customer comments
- 1 life changed (and maybe 2 little ones!)
This was a true collaborative effort to make this happen made possible by the power of the internet and a human story – between Naked customers funding a dream, other Naked winemakers chipping in and lending their support, Rowan and all the Naked staff being there to help it happen – I feel very privileged to be part of this special story. If you got a bid in too – so should you.
Now I can’t wait for my wines to arrive!
The only question remains – how do we follow that up next week??
