In 2019, Brice Baillie strode onto the Shark Tank stage with a weird mime and a clever wine start-up: Obvious Wines. Awkwardness of the pitch aside, the business idea was interesting. He asked for 150,000 dollars in exchange for 5% equity in his "snob-free" wine label. The premise is that the average drinker is intimidated by extraneous information on wine bottles and "you shouldn't need a PhD to drink wine."
A typical wine label tells you (at minimum) brand name, region, vintage, and grape variety. Obvious Wines do have these elements, in a slightly different arrangement. They are named by number, matched to a flavor profile (e.g."No 1, Dark and Bold" and "No 2, Bright and Crisp") and #hashtags (e.g. "#snobfree" and "#cheers"). At the bottom, the year, wine type, and region are listed in smaller font. The labels eschew logos, colors, and script in favor of something you might see on a poster (or a beer can).
I find this approach appealing and refreshing. However, a couple summers ago I visited Chateau Mouton Rothschild in Bordeaux and saw their museum of wine labels, each commissioned by a famous artist (think Picasso and Andy Warhol). Maybe you don't need fine art on the label of a wine bottle, but I think there's an opportunity missed when you shy away from it altogether.
The real innovation is on the back of the bottle, where the #bestfriends section is there for food pairing (think meat, tacos, etc). The fruitiness, dryness, acidity, body, tannins, and alcohol are rated on a scale of 1-4.
I think Obvious Wines will appeal to the Millennial strolling the aisles of Trader Joes, not sure what wines are going to work for their dinner party. I also think it could improve the general knowledge base among wine drinkers, teaching them about pairing and characteristics of varietals. As we have been talking about in this course, Millennials are the biggest population of wine consumers for now, so they will likely have the say on whether Obvious Wines succeeds.
I am left with the question: how do other people in our age bracket feel about this approach? Is the transparency helpful? Does it take some of the romance out of it?
Lori Greiner, Queen of QVC, ended up with 12.5% of the company for 160,000. Look forward to seeing where it goes!
I support what Obvious Wines is doing for accessibility, particularly for its target millennial demographic. I appreciate the brand's dedication to educating the consumer with labels that are information-heavy without ever becoming burdensome. The categories on the labels are easy to understand, with their uniformity allowing every consumer to get an equally educational experience without the need to speak with a sommelier, conduct an online search, or visit a vineyard. The company’s emphasis on “vegan” and “sustainably farmed” labels directly appeals to the modern health-conscious zeitgeist, and the links to their website and social handles directly on the bottle add to the product’s millennial appeal. Furthermore, I think the simple numbering system they have developed for their collection of wines successfully simplifies the wine consumption process without compromising the quality and appreciation of the wine. Consumers will no longer have to worry about butchered wine name pronunciations or remembering which wine was light or bold.
ReplyDeleteI agree with your point about an opportunity being missed by failing to implement more creative bottle and label designs, but I also believe that Obvious Wines has the ability to collaborate with artists down the line to bring limited edition bottles with labels that will be more aesthetically pleasing without compromising their simple, informative layout.
In my blogpost about Vinebox, I worried about the trivialization of the wine consumption experience that may result from a heightened focus on accessibility and simplification (https://rappwinter2020.blogspot.com/2020/01/vinebox-positive-innovation-or-long.html). Furthermore, I worried that Vinebox’s abandoning of traditional bottles and tasting formats would severely disrupt the existing norms of the wine industry (i.e. visiting wineries, ordering wines off a restaurant’s wine list). While Obvious Wines has its weaknesses— hashtags throughout the bottle take the millennial pandering to an extreme—I appreciate that the product aims to modernize wine consumption without compromising the traditional experiences of buying and enjoying a wine bottle. I still wonder, however, whether wine enthusiasts, especially those of older demographics, will ever want to adopt Obvious Wines and compromise discovering a wine’s flavor profile themselves.