Tell us about how you have been running your DTC subscription model for Domaine of the Bee?
Back in 2010, Tony Laithwaite told me that the best way to sell regularly to a group of people was to persuade them to join a ‘Club’, so that they would receive wine while they were subscribed. Up until then, we’d just been writing a hopeful letter every year. It took us until 2013 to launch the Wine Club, but numbers have grown steadily ever since.
How important is DTC to the business and to make sure you get it right?
Domaine of the Bee has been running its wine club since 2013 and built up a strong loyal customer base who not only buy its wines on a regular basis but take part in tastings and even come out to the vineyards and help with the harvest
DTC is 70-80% of our business, and is absolutely fundamental to everything we do. There are so many advantages: predictability; fast feedback; control; data; relationships with end drinkers; as well as, of course, better margins (but you have to do a lot more work to earn them).
You are working with and have also helped Marzipan, the e-commerce drinks subscription platform, develop its product for wine producers like yourself - why did you want to invest so much of your time with its founder Adam Wood?
I bumped into Adam at Katie Jones’ Domaine Jones winery and got chatting. What he was building sounded right up my street. And when the rug was pulled out from under us by our previous provider, Adam stepped up valiantly and brought us on board in just six weeks.
Adam is incredibly helpful, and deeply understands what he is doing. I have invested my time because I can see we are building the platform that will secure the long-term future of our DTC business.
What are the key benefits that a platform like Marzipan can offer a business like yours?
Domaine of the Bee works with Marzipan to run its DTC wine club subscription service
The big Achilles heel of the big ’shopping’ providers like Shopify and Woocommerce is that they don’t really understand recurring subscription shopping. If you buy the same brand of dogfood every month, or razor-blades, they can automate a recurring spend, but if you subscribe to a ‘discovery case’ that varies every shipment, these services do not cope at all well.
Marzipan brings together a number of services from a web shop to recurring subscription functionality, events etc, and offers them as a package.
How have you used Marzipan to develop better relationships with your club members and DTC customers?
Our customers’ user experience is much better with Marzipan, now that we have been refining and honing what we offer them for a year - and there is more to come. And we have fewer payment failures, fewer queries from customers trying to access their accounts, and a general smoother experience all round.
Do you use it for customer segmentation and if so what are the key things you need to get right in this area?
Marzipan has some built-in functions that allow you to see what customers are doing, and with our different Wine Club packages, we are already able to divide people into groups, but with such a small customer base, we know most of them anyway. As we grow, we’ll have the capacity to develop this further.
With your experience what questions would you advise wine companies ask of themselves before investing in DTC subscription services like Marzipan?
Key to developing a succesfful wine club is creating a natural sense of community and a true membership rather than trying to force it on people, says Justin Howard-Sneyd MW
The first question should be “Do you want a recurring subscription Wine Club?” And the answer from any wine producer should be “Yes!”. The next question is “Have you identified a person who will invest their time in building the understanding of what needs to be done, and in how to use the tools available to best effect”.
If you have those two things in place, then I can’t think of many one-stop-shop services that get anywhere close to Marzipan’s functionality.
You say integrating the platform with bonded warehouse LCB has been a game changer - in what way?
Until the integration, every order had to be copied over manually to an old fashioned interface with LCB’s system, which is really designed for trade customers to key in their orders. So a human brain had to look at every order, decide the delivery channel, and then spend several minutes raising the order manually, and quite possibly raising a parallel order with the appropriate carrier.
Now the order comes in, Marzipan decides which delivery service we should use, and automates the orders to LCB and the carrier. We don’t have to do anything. In theory, I can send out witty sales emails from the beach in the Caribbean, and everything else happens without anyone having to touch it.
How do you hope to develop the DTC side of your business in the coming years - and what do you need to get right to achieve that?
Members of Domaine of the Bee's wine club taking part in the annual harvest
Our focus for last year and this year has been to automate more of what we do, so I can spend more time focusing on what I am best at, and while we still have a few more refinements to make, we are nearly there with the automation, so I can start to focus on improving our farming, replanting one of our vineyards, and slowly growing the business in the UK and Europe to reach a level that is sustainable for the next 15-20 years.
We can do that if we refine our knowledge of Marzipan to optimise what it can do for us.
What are the key things you think you need to get right when running your own wine club?
The most important thing is actually to love your customers. And to enjoy communicating with them. That’s what makes communication feel properly personal. Getting facts like their birthdays right is mechanical, and AI is very good at it. But being warmly hospitable and creating great memories needs to be done by humans. People buy from people.
What are members looking for most - the club, community aspect or the chance to get access to wines? Or something else/?
Honestly, I think people sign up for the discount (all members save 20% on shop prices, which is quite chunky, and worth having), but then they stay for the tastings (great fun), occasional outings and dinners (edutainment), and they really love the chance to come and help harvest.
No-one sets out to join a ‘community’, but a sense of community seems to happen by itself if you connect nice people together. With booze.
* You can find out more about Domaine of the Bee at its website here.
* To find out about the bespoke drinks DTC and subscription services that Marzipan proves click here.
