Another pure-play--Wine.com--goes multi-channel
Another pure-play online retailer becomes multi-channel. Wine.com this month started mailing 220,000 catalogs to customers and prospects. “This is the first step by this company to make sure that online retail is only one leg of our business,” CEO Peter Ekman tells Internet Retailer. “We’d like to get a couple of vibrant sales channels going.” Ekman would not provide further details of the channels Wine.com is considering, but adds, “I would not rule out stores.”
The biggest group of catalogs is going to prospective customers, including professionals, bankers, corporate executives and corporate purchasing executives. About a third of the catalogs are going to consumers who have received gifts that someone bought at Wine.com. The remainder will go to customers and to names provided by Wine.com shareholders, board members and executives.
Ekman expects the mailing to generate as much as $700,000 in sales between the beginning of November and mid December, equal to about 10% of sales during that period. The catalog cost about $350,000 to mail. “We mailed the first 70,000 last week and orders are coming in already,” Ekman says.
Ekman was awakened to the need to develop a multi-channel strategy when he attended trade shows and got an are-you-still-in-business reaction from consumers and people in the industry. ”We want to tell a nationwide market that despite all the turmoil among dot-com businesses, we are still here; that Wine.com is the last man standing,” Ekman says.
Wine.com, formerly known as eVineyard, sells premium wine in 29 states, reaching 80% of the US population. It sells wine-related gifts and accessories in 21 more.
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