We've all been there.

Let's face it; marketing takes work. We see many businesses put their valuable energy into the wrong places or even in the wrong way. Many spend time building and analyzing conversion funnels to uncover why their landing pages aren't converting. To make matters worse, their KPIs are outcome-centric, only measuring the end-of-funnel results. If this sounds like you, then stop! Change the way you think about conversions. Your customers are not an outcome or a one-way entry/exit metric. The business you've worked hard to build centers around creating customer relationships by providing consistently outstanding experiences. You need to bring your customers back again, and again, and then again with their friends. It is not linear. It is a cycle. 

This is when you set aside funnels and start using a flywheel. To understand the concept of marketing flywheels, it is essential first to understand the flywheel effect. The flywheel effect is a principle that describes how a small amount of effort can produce significant results over time. The idea is that consistent, repetitive actions can build momentum and create an autonomous system.

In marketing, the flywheel effect refers to the idea that a continuous customer engagement cycle can lead to exponential growth. By creating a positive customer experience and leveraging it to generate more business, marketers can set off a chain reaction of growth that becomes increasingly powerful over time. As customer retention increases, those loyal customers become advocates who promote your brand any chance they get. Talk about getting your business spinning!

Get your flywheel moving

Engaging content built around a strong brand story is the fuel that gets your flywheel spinning. Your content should differentiate your winery from competitors and establish an emotional connection with your target audience. What makes your business or product unique? Why should your customers care? Figure that out because it is the bedrock of your brand. 

Now that your brand story is in place and content is published let's get things moving. The momentum you can generate first depends on the speed you can spin the flywheel. The second dependency is how large you grow your flywheel. Finally, you need to take into account the amount of friction there is in the system. Friction will slow down your flywheel.

Your marketing strategies should focus on three core phases of customer development: Attract, Engage, and Delight. We're all familiar with these phases. But remember, this is a wheel. Delighted customers attract new customers. It is a virtuous cycle. 

Showcase your uniqueness and tell your story on social media. This will attract new customers. Engage them on your website, allowing them to purchase and become a member easily. If you have a tasting room, entice new customers to visit, where you'll introduce your product and quality service. After an unforgettable experience, you have a relationship with the customer, which will be supported and nurtured for years. These delighted customers will provide testimonials, social proof, and a stream of referrals. Your flywheel is now growing and moving at a faster pace.  

Building Momentum

Now that your customer's success aligns with your business's success, it is time to reduce friction and build momentum. There are many different customer touch-points, each can cause friction, and they all need to adapt to the flywheel model. Those touch-points include search advertisements, landing pages, your website's purchase flow, customer service interactions, and in-person visits. Train your team to use the Attract, Engage, and Delight cycle. When the business adopts the flywheel model, friction is reduced or eliminated, resulting in delighted customers.

To further build momentum, adopt a loyalty program and offer rewards for repeat business. Loyal customers may get exclusive access to new releases or events, personalized discounts, or special recognition for referring friends and family. Dial in your communication style so it feels personal and authentic. Focus on building strong relationships so you know the best incentives to offer and encourage customers to leave rave reviews. By implementing effective communication strategies, your customers will generate more referrals and ultimately increase the size and speed of your marketing flywheel.

Self-sustaining Cycle

With friction removed, loyal customers are making referrals, and your team is dialed in and continues to focus on delighting customers. Like a pendulum, your flywheel will now keep spinning with minimal effort. It is essential to continue with marketing efforts. That heartbeat keeps pumping energy into the flywheel. The business can now comfortably focus on what's next for the company instead of getting the business started. Now is the time to innovate and experiment. You may try new blends or varietals. Or, roll out a new label and expand your reach into new markets. Get creative with how to show appreciation to members and offer special allocation offers to your most loyal customers.

Congratulations. You've reached that place all businesses strive to achieve, where you're asking, "What is next?" and not "How do I survive?"

Marketing flywheels offer a powerful framework for achieving long-term business success. Wineries can create a self-sustaining system that generates continuous revenue and customer loyalty by attracting, engaging, and delighting customers across all customer touchpoints. Your constant focus on delivering exceptional customer experiences will pay off and allow you to stand out in the competitive wine space.

With over 25 years of professional services experience, Bloom has helped businesses define their strategies, connect customers to brands, and generate momentum. Contact us for help utilizing flywheels today!

If you want to learn more about how to improve your marketing efforts, check out our articles on strategy, automation, and tactics.

Here are a few examples of how wineries can use Shopify and Bloom Commerce to start small and go big. 

Small winery

If you are starting out or only plan to produce a limited number of cases, the software needed to run your winery doesn't need to be complicated. You are focusing more on direct-to-consumer sales, rather than distribution. Friends and family are the starting point. A simple yet effective website focusing on growing a loyal customer base is essential. Memberships or subscriptions can keep your cash flow positive since they generate recurring revenue. Offering loyalty-based incentives and following a strict but straightforward marketing strategy using an integrated digital marketing platform will slowly grow your DTC sales. Start small and keep it simple. You'll work smarter, not harder. Many of our small winery customers start with a tech stack like this:

Shopify plan: Shopify Standard
Memberships: Bloom Commerce
Digital marketing: Mailchimp
Shipping & fulfillment: Shippo
Loyalty: Joy

Growing winery

Winery size is relative. For this article, we'll define "growing" as between 10,000 and 50,000 cases annually. Once you grow to this size, operations change dramatically, and your software stack needs to keep pace. Unless your brand is DTC-only, much of your wine is sold to distributors. The attractive margins on direct sales mean your membership base has also expanded to over 1000 loyal customers. Your shipments need to be compliant and accurate reporting is critical. The website has evolved, likely split between engaging storytelling and a searchable catalog of wines—some only offered to members. An active tasting room with an integrated point-of-sale allows you to provide great in-person experiences. Automation now drives your digital marketing, and you require better loyalty tools that will enable customer reviews to be collected and presented on the website. The accounting team expects bank deposits and sales receipts to be reconciled quickly without using spreadsheets and other time-consuming workarounds. Your tech stack will likely grow to look something like this:

Shopify plan: Shopify Advanced
Memberships: Bloom Commerce
Compliance: ShipCompliant
Digital marketing: Klaviyo
Shipping & fulfillment: ShipStation
Loyalty & reviews: Yotpo
Accounting integration: Bookkeep

Enterprise winery

A small percentage of businesses fall into this category. Since you have multiple brands, we're using Shopify Plus and extension shops. Your IT staff will utilize APIs that demand high availability and Shopify's full-blown application development platform to build custom integrations with Bloom Commerce. Direct integration with the shipping warehouse with complete inventory management is required. A modern tax and compliance system that works with all sales channels is native to the platform. Kalviyo has exposed its limitations, as your sales and marketing team needs a proper CRM while still providing complex automation campaign management. Since you sell online through multiple sales channels, omnichannel reporting, and analytics will combine all your data into a single, unified dashboard. Finally, the source of truth for products, inventory, orders, and customers will live in an ERP explicitly built for the wine industry but fully integrated with Shopify and Bloom Commerce. Every enterprise customer has particular needs, but a typical enterprise stack looks something like this: 

Shopify plan: Shopify Plus
Memberships: Bloom Commerce
Shipping & fulfillment: Wineshipping
Compliance: Avalara
Digital marketing: ActiveCampaign
Reporting & analytics: SoundCommerce
ERP: Microsoft Dynamics with Vintegrate

When it comes to building a successful business, it's crucial to have technology that can keep up with your growth. As companies continue to expand and evolve, they need reliable systems like Shopify and Bloom that can adapt to their changing needs and scale up accordingly. The key is to start small and gradually increase your capacity as you grow, allowing you to avoid overspending on unnecessary resources. By implementing a solid yet flexible foundation with scalable technology solutions, businesses can ensure that they are equipped to handle whatever challenges lie ahead, and stay ahead of the competition.

This is the last in our series of "Why Shopify" articles, but if you haven't already, be sure to check out our previous articles in the series, where we discussed the benefits of unifying your sales channel, automating your systems, and how to make your software your own.

If you're a winery seeking to grow your business, Bloom can provide the tools and resources to achieve your growth objectives. Connect with us today to learn more.

Client: "Bloom! We're about to launch a new product. We've been discussing some fun ideas for a campaign involving a Photoshoot, Social Media & Email Marketing with Influencer Collaborations. Are you able to help us with the execution?" 

Bloom: "Sure. We'd love to help. Before we dive into that, can you tell us more about your overall strategy?"

Client: "Our target audience is young adults aged 21-35 interested in healthy living. Our unique selling proposition is that we use natural processes and sustainable packaging. Our goal is to increase brand awareness while at the same time ramping up sales."

Bloom: "That's great you understand your audience and have some clear business objectives, but you’re still missing an important step. Investing in tactics without a strategy could lead to wasted resources and lackluster results. We commonly see creative executions not performing as expected, money wasted on inaccurate ad targeting, and KPIs that don’t tell the full story of how the campaign has met your objectives."

Client: "We've decided to move forward as-is. We don't have much time to waste and are eager to launch this."

Results: The campaign did not perform as well as the client had hoped. The social media ads didn't resonate with their target audience, the email marketing efforts went unnoticed, and the influencer partnerships failed to generate meaningful engagement.

Why: Tactics were executed without a strategy in place first.

What’s the moral of the story? We all have great ideas on how we want to engage our customers with marketing. Creating, producing, and executing campaigns is the fun part. What needs to come first is a solid strategy that defines who your campaign will target, and plan that outlines how you will engage that audience. Before you read any further with this article, start by reviewing our previous article to determine your marketing strategy. Once you know you are 100% ready to move on to tactical marketing, check back with this article.

2023 Tactics - Amplified by Shopify

Recovery & Retargeting

Take an omnipresent approach when encouraging potential customers to complete the checkout of an abandoned cart by using targeted social media campaigns furthered by email and SMS marketing.

Shopify Apps to look for: Apart from utilizing Shopify's internal abandoned cart recovery options, AdRoll turns your multi-channel headaches into unified omnichannel marketing campaigns. Klavyio offers a suite of proven email and SMS templates to automate personalized communications like price drop alerts, friendly cart reminders, and just-in-time recommendations.

Affiliate marketing & incentives

The affiliate promotes the company's products or services to their audience through a unique affiliate link and earns a commission on any resulting sales. Likewise, customers can rack up rewards or bonuses for making purchases or referring friends, which helps brands widen their audience through their existing customers.

Shopify Apps to look for:  Yotpo and Referral Candy feature automated reward systems, referral tracking, and customizable loyalty programs, making it easier for merchants to create and manage customer incentives.

Customer Reviews

It's no secret that these can be incredibly powerful in increasing prospective customers' trust and confidence in a brand or product. The real success of Vivino - with 50 million users - is based on its customer review feature. Reviews provide social proof, help with Search Engine Optimization, provide the business with valuable feedback, and encourage repeat purchases.

Shopify apps to look for: Junip allows users to gather more reviews & display them everywhere that matters. Simple and easy to set up with mobile first review forms that lead to 4x more photo & videos alongside customer questions & attributes.

Targeted SMS Campaigns

Promote products, offer discounts, build relationships and make sales based on customer behavior and purchase history. We like to reserve this tactic for special occasions (like when you need to move the remainder of last year's Rosé). Remember to keep it hyper-personalized. Its times like these when customer data is your best friend.

Shopify Apps to look for: Klaviyo offers users SMS templates to automate targeted personalized communications to current and potential customers.  

The power of Google

Google Analytics G4 has enhanced features such as cross-platform/cross-device tracking, is now privacy-centric and contains more innovative measurements and insights. It also integrates with Google Ads for conversion tracking. Use this new data to build a data-driven ecommerce engine. 

Shopify Apps to look out for: Analyzely lets you take advantage of all the benefits of using Google Analytics 4 with seamless integration. Fueled Google Analytics (G4) helps you make better decisions and increase ROAS with accurate Google Analytics 4 data. 

Instant Messaging

This underrated communication tool provides businesses with a fast and efficient way to connect with their customers in real-time, improving customer satisfaction, increasing brand loyalty, and streamlining customer service processes.

Shopify Apps to look out for: Shopify Inbox is easy to set up and natively integrates with customer orders, memberships, and discounts. 

Loyalty Points

Helping to build customer loyalty and encouraging repeat purchases. Fast-growing DTC brands employ this tactic to increase customer lifetime value. Naked Wines is an Australian DTC wine brand with a loyalty program called an “Angel Membership.” Customers become "Angels" by subscribing to monthly wine deliveries and receiving perks.

Shopify Apps to look out for: Smile powers loyalty, referrals, and VIP rewards programs that help increase sales and repeat purchases, save on acquisition costs, and boost brand loyalty.

Checkout Utilization

Upselling and cross-selling are effective ways to increase revenue and customer loyalty at alcohol DTC checkouts. You can do this by offering package deals, recommending products that pair with wine, selling wine accessories, highlighting limited releases, or providing personalized recommendations by leveraging customer data.

Shopify Apps to look out for: Nosto empowers retailers to build, launch, and optimize personalized ecommerce experiences. This app showcases product discovery, a personalize customer experience, and event shopper insights.

User-Generated Content

A time-saving tactic for ecommerce alcohol brands is leveraging the content created by consumers. Corona has a solid social media presence and encourages fans to share photos of themselves enjoying their products using the hashtag #ThisIsLiving. UGC is a powerful way to increase engagement, build brand awareness, and drive sales with minimal effort.

Shopify apps to look out for: Cevoid UGC and UGC Video Testimonials let you effortlessly collect user-generated content (like photos and videos) and showcase it on your website, product pages, social media, emails, or other marketing channels in a matter of clicks.

It takes strategies and tactics working together for brands to grow their businesses over time with effective results. With the DTC landscape changing rapidly, employing tactics that satisfy consumers' expectations is where we, as an industry, need to focus. Shopify is paving the way for ecommerce growth. Bloom extends the power of Shopify - reach out to us to learn how we are leading brands toward sustainable growth - well into the future.

More often than not, we find our customers aren’t using the tools they have at their disposal. But why? It is likely because they haven’t tried or maybe they feel like they don’t have time to learn.

In this third article, of four part Why Shopify series, we’re going to cover how to get started with marketing automations, and maintain meaningful relationships with your customers.

Why is automation important?

Automation allows businesses to respond rapidly to customers' needs, track their interactions, and automatically send the right communication at the right time, in an organized fashion. Automation also helps businesses to identify trends in customer behavior, anticipate customer needs, and personalize customer experiences. By automating processes, businesses can save time, money, and resources while gaining insights into customer preferences.

The fun doesn’t stop there. Automation also helps businesses to stay connected with customers via automated emails and notifications, helping to build customer loyalty and gain customer trust. Ultimately, automation provides a valuable tool to help businesses create meaningful, ongoing relationships with their customers

First, map it out.

If you haven’t read our article on the importance of creating your marketing plan by first defining a solid strategy, we recommend you give it a read before diving into automations. After your strategy is in place, you can start with user journey map. This helps to visualize the automation flow and see where important decisions, or conditions exist that will likely trigger an event. You’ll likely find the full customer journey is more complex than you initially thought, allowing you to plan much more effectively.

That said, don’t over do it. You should be able to create your mapping fairly quickly. The tool we use is Lucid Chart. There are many others including Figma’s FigJam, Miro, Creatly, or SmartDraw. Here are the steps you need to map out:

Start and end points: These are the bookends to your map. It is important to know what dependencies might exist for the flow to start. For example, the customer needs to first be part of a certain segment.

Events and triggers: Automations work when certain events get triggered. These are typically actions the customer might take, or inputs/outputs from the system. An example would be when the customer creates an order.

Conditions: When your customer, or the system has to decide on the next step in the process, a condition has to be met. Imagine if the customer had already received the first email in a drip campaign, we wouldn’t want to send them the same email again. So the condition met was that the first email was received, therefore send the second email. Normally conditions are yes/no answers, or if/else statements.

Views: These are what your customers see and interact with. Views can be the actual email, social media post, landing page, lead generation forms, confirmation views, or redirects.

Systems: With complex automations, you might have multiple systems talking to each other. A social post might lead to a landing page on your website with an embedded lead generation form managed by your digital marketing platform. We recommend trying to organize your journey map by these systems so it is easy to see when the customer hops from one to another.

Segment, segment, segment.

Without segments, there is little-to-no personalization. Segments allow merchants to understand their customers better and target them with more relevant communications and offers. With numerous manual and dynamic tags, queries, and Shopify Flow capabilities, our customer’s use Shopify’s Customer Segmentation tools to define audience cohorts and discover valuable insights. Customers are grouped according to factors such as location, purchase frequency, or lifetime value. With Shopify Flow, merchants can set up automated triggers based on customer attributes and behaviors, such as order amount or time since the last purchase. Dynamic queries can also be used to uncover valuable customer insights, such as customers who have purchased a particular product or shoppers who have viewed a particular page. This data can then be used to create targeted campaigns and offers.

In addition, merchants can also export customer lists to other marketing platforms for further analysis. With Shopify Segments, merchants have the ability to create highly personalized and targeted campaigns for their customers. For example, merchants can create a segment for customers who have not purchased in the last month and target them with an automated SMS offer or discount using Klaviyo. Additionally, manual and dynamic tags can be used to segment customers based on their lifetime value or purchase frequency. By leveraging the power of Shopify Customer Segments, merchants can gain a deeper understanding of their customers and strategize accordingly.

Ready, set, automate!

Let’s start with Shopify’s native workflow automation app called Flow. It is designed to help you streamline processes, improve customer service, and automate customer relations. Automate business processes that better manage customer interactions and data. This can help you save time and money while improving customer relations. Shopify Flow integrates with popular customer service and marketing tools, allowing businesses to manage customer relations from a single platform. It also provides an intuitive drag-and-drop interface to help businesses quickly set up and customize automated processes.

Use your customer journey map as your foundation for creating rules and tasks that are triggered when customers take certain actions. For example, create a flow that sends and automated email when customers make a purchase, when a customer returns an item, or when a customer subscribes to a newsletter. Or, use Flow to automate customer service tasks, such as responding to customer inquiries or providing customer support. Shopify Flow integrates with customer service and marketing tools, allowing businesses to easily track customer data and provide timely and personalized customer service. With Shopify Flow, businesses can improve customer relations and automate customer interactions, creating a more efficient and cost-effective customer experience.

Now, let’s talk about emails. Likely your primary method of communicating with your customers, there are several different types of email automations that businesses can use to best communicate with their customers and prospects. Some common types include:

Welcome Emails: These are sent to new subscribers or customers as soon as they sign up for your list or make a purchase. They are a great way to introduce your brand and set expectations for future communications.

Abandoned Cart Emails: These are sent to customers who have added items to their online shopping cart but have not completed the purchase. The goal is to remind them of the items they left behind and encourage them to complete their purchase.

Win-back Emails: These are sent to customers who haven't engaged with your brand in a while, with the goal of re-engaging them and bringing them back as a customer.

Order Confirmation and Shipping Emails: These emails confirm that an order has been placed and provide tracking information for the shipment.

Post-purchase Follow-up Emails: These emails are sent after a customer has made a purchase and may include a survey to gather feedback, upsell or cross-sell recommendations or a thank you note.

Re-engagement Emails: These emails are sent to people who haven't opened or clicked on any of your recent emails, with the goal of re-engaging them and keeping them on your list.

Each of these types of automations serve a different purpose and can help you to achieve different goals. It's important to evaluate your business objectives and segment your email list accordingly before setting up an email automation campaign.

Define a Campaign Type

The are many different campaign types. The two we most regularly automate are Drip and Nurture Drip campaigns. These campaign types are often confused, but have few key differences.

A drip campaign is a series of pre-written and pre-scheduled emails that are sent to a specific group of people over a certain period of time. The goal of a drip campaign is usually to educate the recipient or guide them through a specific process, such as converting a visitor to a customer, or promoting a new product to an existing segment. Drip automations are typically triggered by a specific action, such as signing up for a newsletter or making a purchase.

On the other hand, a nurture campaign is a series of emails that are sent to a specific customer segment over a certain period of time with the goal of building a relationship with a potential customer. Nurture campaigns focus on providing valuable content and building trust, with the ultimate goal of converting them into a customer. Nurture campaign automations can be triggered by a variety of actions, like detecting a repeat visitor viewing the same product across multiple visits, or a recipient who hasn't responded to a previous campaign email.

To recap, Drip campaigns are more focused on guiding the recipient through a specific process or educating them, whereas nurture campaigns focus on building a relationship and trust with the recipient. We often use both types of campaigns as part of a larger marketing strategy.

Apps you should check out

If you follow us you probably already know that Shopify can integrate with many different apps to give merchants the best possible options for their business. Here are some popular ones that we see used by our Bloom Commerce customers:

Klaviyo
Mailchimp
ActiveCampaign
GetResponse
ConvertFlow
Omnisend
Recart
SmartrMail
Privy

With these apps, you can access even more features and tools to help run your business. Klaviyo, for example, allows you to send automated emails and SMS messages to your customers based on their buying habits. MailChimp provides a way for you to define your customer journey and map the journey to automations, and ActiveCampaign blends proper CRM features, content marketing, and email automation all in one package.

In Summary...

Marketing automation with Shopify enables you to be proactive and dynamic in your strategies. Automation allows businesses to use the collected data to create personalized email campaigns tailored to their customers’ needs. Not only is this approach more efficient, but it also helps to ensure that businesses are always delivering the best customer experience possible. Additionally, the ability to track customer behavior and segment customers as their habits and preferences change allows you to personalize your messages to each customer.

We encourage you to explore the Shopify apps listed above, or reach out if you want to discuss how you can confidentially start using marketing automation for your business.

Elements of an effective strategy

The terms "marketing strategy," "marketing tactics," and "marketing plan" are often used interchangeably and incorrectly. Before attempting to develop your strategy, make sure you understand the difference.

Marketing Strategy: Before defining your strategy, you must know your ideal customer and have clear business objectives in place. Your marketing strategy will conceptualize and identify how you will reach, engage, and activate your target audience to achieve your objectives.

Marketing Tactics: While marketing strategy looks at the company's objectives, tactical marketing looks at the specific actions you will take to execute the strategy. Examples include social media posts, SEO optimization tasks, email marketing campaigns, trade show exhibits, etc. Typically a creative team is involved in executing your tactics.

Marketing Plan: This is your game plan. It outlines what you will do, where you will do it, when you implement it and how you will track success. The plan document guides the direction and clarifies all the teams and business stakeholders involved.

A common mistake we see is that businesses dive into tactical marketing without clearly defining the strategy or documenting it in a plan. This will lead to problems like:

• Sending out emails that result in low engagement and high unsubscribes.
• Increasing ad spend without experiencing an increase in sales or other critical conversions.
• Publishing regular blog content that fails to generate website traffic, social sharing, or even brand awareness.

Without a solid strategy, marketing results can be mediocre, or efforts can lead to a direction far from your business goals or needs.

Start with the “four Ps”:

Commonly referred to as the marketing mix, the four Ps (product, price, place, and promotion) can be used as a tool when developing your strategy. Let's take this concept and use the example of the Australian wine producer, Barokes - pioneers of the canned wine movement.

Product - Start with an understanding of the product itself. Who needs it, and why? Barokes success is derived from its product innovation strategy. They solved the problem of wine in a can and patented the product and a process, appealing to consumers who want fresh, ready-to-drink, easily portable, and sustainable products.

Price - The amount that consumers are willing to pay for a product. Consider the product’s perceived value plus production costs. Barokes is coherent with its marketing mix, representing a wine of its category with a value of less than $5. It satisfies a new generation of consumers craving budget wines in convenient, small-format packaging.

Place - Understands where the product should be available—in brick-and-mortar stores and online—in what markets—and how it will be presented. Barokes focused on Asian markets due to their familiarity with premium beverages in aluminum cans, such as coffee.

Promotion - The goal of promotion is to communicate to consumers why they need this product. Barokes capitalized on its new packaging technology, initially focusing on Asian markets where canned wine products were embraced due to their lack of preconceived ideas on how wine should be packaged.

The company has won over 400 medals. The technology is patented worldwide and is strategically positioned through this marketing mix.

Advanced strategic planning 

While there are many different approaches to defining your marketing strategy, Ansoff’s matrix is a tool you can use to grow your business after establishing your place in the market. We consider these strategies more advanced but work well for businesses wanting to expand their reach. 

Market penetration: This involves selling existing products to existing markets. The strategy is considered most beneficial if the market is growing. It is typically considered the least risky.

Product development: This involves the development of a new product for an existing market. It is considered riskier than market penetration because it involves a new product.

Market development: This strategy takes an existing product into a new market. Considered riskier than a market penetration strategy because it involves introducing a familiar product into an unfamiliar marketplace.

Diversification: This strategy involves the development of a new product for a new market. Diversification strategies require full attention on all four Ps, but the biggest risks can also lead to the biggest rewards.

How to get started

Step 1 - Establish goals and objectives. Before you dive into any strategic thinking, you must clarify your overall business goals and objectives. A few examples of business goals could be: 

1. Expand distribution in the Eastern States
2. Launch a new low-alcohol product range
3. Improve customer retention in our top-tier wine range

Once you have these business goals, you'll want to break them down into clear individual objectives. Learn more in this article here, setting goals and objectives that fuel your business.

Step 2 - Market Research.Only once you have defined your objectives can you think about how you will achieve them. You'll want to have a comprehensive understanding of:

1. The current marketplace 
2. Your target customers/segments
3. The competition 

As you deepen your research, you will better understand how you fit in and where you can grow. Learn more in these articles here, know your customers, beat the competition, and why does your business exist.

Step 3 - Synthesize and strategize. Take your goals, objectives, and research and determine your marketing strategies. Answer this question: how will you align with your target market to meet your overall objectives in the current climate? Each objective will likely align with multiple strategies. Let’s look at some examples from the goals listed above: 

EXAMPLE #1

Goal: Expand distribution in the Eastern States

Objective: Sell $200,000 through our Northeastern distribution channels in the next six months

Marketing Strategies: 

1. Adjust pricing for the market to open up other opportunities 
2. Conduct a regional marketing tour 
3. Targeted social media and digital advertisements 

EXAMPLE #2

Goal: Launch our new low-alcohol product range

Objective: Increase brand awareness by 50% on our three new low-alcohol cocktails over the next 12 months

Marketing Strategies: 

1. Engage the target audience using a multichannel digital campaign
2. Attend events and tradeshows where you can introduce your new product to the trade and distribution partners.
3. Creative promotions at the point-of-purchase or in retail stores.

EXAMPLE #3

Goal: Improve customer retention in our top-tier wine range

Objective: Increase VIP wine club membership retention from 18 months to 24 months by the end of the year. 

Marketing Strategies: 

1. Create an incentive program that kicks in after 12 months. 
2. Re-define the wine club's positioning, and allow full package customization
3. Provide dedicated training for your staff, so they accurately promote the benefits of the club

Once you have your strategies in place, you can dive into the specific marketing tactics you'll employ to execute the strategy. Stay tuned for our next article, which will explore this topic. 

Your marketing strategy is your game plan; it conceptualizes how your business and marketing goals could be achieved. It is the approach you will take to engage your ideal customer while considering the threats and opportunities posed by the industry and should be used (but not confused) with your marketing plan and tactics. Consider the four Ps and the Ansoff Model when doing your thinking, then follow the three steps for determining your strategy. Oh, and don't walk across the country without a map. Use a proven strategy and take a plane!

Not familiar with the term API? It is short for Application Programming Interface. It is a fancy term that means two web applications defined to do a specific task can securely pass information back and forth to each other. Most web applications and mobile apps you use today are API-driven. 

If your winery software feels outdated, it probably isn’t built using APIs. 

This is important because Shopify has made the strategic decision to focus more on tools for developers. Yes, Shopify empowers merchants to quickly create a scaleable ecommerce shop, market their products, fulfill orders, and generate detailed reports. But more importantly, the platform allows software designers to extend that core functionality in infinite ways. Shopify provides us with endless documentation libraries, software development kits, design components, and APIs. Shopify is modular and open. 

If your winery software feels outdated, it is probably monolithic and closed. 

Every business has different needs

Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all software. We like choice. We require options. Our business tools should evolve and grow with our business needs. The software stack that a small start-up winery uses is very different from that of a large enterprise with a global presence, yet both businesses need many similar types of tools. They both need digital marketing tools, customer relationship management tools, reporting tools, compliance tools, and more. But the feature scope and scale of those tools are drastically different. 

This is where legacy software hits a wall. 

Think about it. If the software is closed and not API-driven, then the software has to do everything. And if you expect software to do everything well, then your expectations are probably not being met. How can closed software with a “built-in” email marketing tool compete with the robustness of Klaviyo? How can closed software provide shipping and fulfillment features that compete with ShipStation or Shippo? What about ERP integrations? Without public APIs, you can’t connect with Microsoft Dynamics, Netsuite, or Salesforce.

If your winery software feels outdated, your business is bound by limited features. 

Enter Shopify apps

Are you saying I'll need to add MORE apps to my core software to achieve all the functionality I want?

Yes, we are.

If you’ve read this far, you understand times have changed. Software is now modular and open. This is all by design and intentional. You should embrace it and stack your software with the best tools for your business. Focus on the value your investment can return, and not the investment's cost. The options are endless with Shopify.

If your winery software feels outdated, we bet you can’t extend the software with best-in-class apps.  

There is a vast selection of apps built for Shopify. We've categorized, described and provided examples of the apps our customers use every to run their businesses.

LOOKING FOR SPECIFIC APP RECOMMENDATIONS?

Avalara for taxes and compliance
ShipStation for label printing and order fulfillment
Klaviyo for digital marketing
Experiences app for reservations and events
A2X for accounting integration
Shopify Flow for business automation

ASK YOURSELF…

In a world where the ecommerce landscape is ever-changing, and your customer is constantly evolving, does your business feel limited or limitless? The ability to grow, adjust, and pivot are must-haves for success and longevity. Thankfully the power of Bloom and Shopify makes customizing software practically painless. Quickly the question becomes, where do we go now that we have no limits?

P.S. Would you like to harness the power of Shopify and Bloom Commerce? We'd like to help. Get in touch with our team at Bloom.

IDENTIFYING YOUR COMPETITION

Knowing who your true competitors are is more complex in a digitally global economy. There are three types of competitors to watch out for: 

1. Direct competitors are businesses that offer similar (or identical) products or services to the same market with similar distribution models. For example, two natural wine producers targeting millennials through ecommerce sales channels.
   
   
2. Indirect competitors are businesses in the same category that sell different products or services OR offer the same products but have a different business strategy. For example, one beer brand is strong in social media, and the other capitalizes on national distribution.
   
   
3. Replacement competitors are businesses that offer an alternative to your product or service. In this case, customers use the same resources to purchase the replacement they could've used to buy your offerings. For example, distilled spirits could appeal to the same wine target market. 

There are many ways to understand your competitors. We prefer to use tools like MOZ's True Competitor to identify our customer's competitors and the websites that compete in the same Search Engine Results.

COLLECTING THE DATA

Once you've identified your competitors, it's time to get your detective hat on and do some research. You'll want to take inventory of as much information as possible around their: 

• Products (What are they making, how much they are producing, and the quality)
• Customers (To whom they are selling it)
• Pricing (How does their pricing compare to yours)
• Sales (Primary sales channels: direct to consumer, distribution, a mix)
• Customer Service (How well do they treat their customers)
• Promotion/Advertising (How are they promoting their products)

How do you access this information? There are many methods to track a business' footprint. Some key avenues are through their website, social media, Google search, and online reviews by utilizing tools such as:  

• Ahrefs - Analyze a website's link profile, keyword rankings, and SEO health. You can also find keywords your customers are searching on Google, YouTube, and Amazon.

• SimilarWeb - See competitors' top traffic sources, broken down into six major categories: referring sites, social traffic, and top search keywords.

• SEMRush - Discover how competitors generate traffic, reveal your competitions' top products & offers, examine market shares, and assess organic and advertising tactics. 

After you have collected all the information you can, compare your competitors to your own business to see how you stack up. We recommend conducting the tried-and-true SWOT analysis. 

USING A SWOT ANALYSIS

A SWOT analysis is a versatile business tool that determines performance, competition, risk, and potential for an industry, company, or product line. Using external and internal data that has been collected will carve out strategies likely to be more successful than others, or it could advise on if a new product line might be strong or weak and why. 

A SWOT analysis will consist of four categories: 

Strengths - describe what a business excels at: a strong brand, loyal customers, cutting-edge technology. For example, a competitor might have been founded by a celebrity with a prior existing large following.

Weaknesses - inhibit a business from performing at its optimum. These are areas where there is room for improvement to gain a competitive advantage: a weak brand, poor customer service, or no social media presence.

Opportunities - refer to favorable external factors that could give a business a competitive advantage. For example, if a state dismantles a liquor control board and opens up private sales, it's an avenue for a company to open a new or more advantageous sales channel. 

Threats - warn on factors that have the potential to harm the business. For example, weather threats to a region during vintage could reduce crop yield. Other common threats include rising costs for materials, increasing competition, or a tight labor supply.

Not all businesses will be known for, or are good at everything - and that's ok. Not knowing where those strengths and weaknesses lie - is not ok. A proper competitive analysis brings to the surface external and internal factors that can prevent you from reaching your business goals. It can also help you see what resources you have to execute an opportunity or forecast what might prevent you from seizing that opportunity. 

P.S. Would you like Bloom to do the research for you and assess how you stand out in a crowded marketplace? We're here to help. Get in touch with our team of seasoned creatives at Bloom Studio.

A question we commonly get asked is, "Why Shopify?" There is a lot of misinformation in the alcohol industry about Shopify and other similar e-commerce platforms. We often hear, "You need a wine-specific platform." or "Shopify is for e-commerce, but not clubs or memberships." After designing, developing, and implementing hundreds of Shopify storefronts for wineries, we can say—for sure—that is NOT the case. 

To better understand the power of Shopify, and the alcohol-specific features that apps like Bloom Commerce can provide to you and your customers, we've put together a series of four articles, starting with the importance of unifying your sales channels onto a single platform. 

In case you aren't familiar with what we mean by sales channel, they are the different properties that generate revenue. Typically, your sales channels are your online store, membership manager, point of sale, and possibly even your marketing & social media properties. Other revenue generators such as; corporate orders, marketplaces, and events or experiences can also be sales channels.

Imagine this… your cart & checkout, orders, products, inventory, customers, emails, memberships, allocations, subscriptions, website content, digital files, taxes, reporting, compliance, point-of-sale, marketing & workflow automations… all behind a single login, managed by one platform. When you add the Bloom Commerce app and the appropriate third-party native applications, you then have everything you need to run your alcohol business, all in one place. 

Does your DTC software truly unify all of your data and different sales channels? Let's find out.

WEBSITE

Businesses that rely on direct-to-consumer sales know their website is a vital piece to the revenue puzzle. Can you easily display critical product, customer, and membership data on your website? When you can, the customer experience becomes very rich. Shopify's powerful content management system (CMS) allows merchants to drag and drop content components that use core data on practically any page. Here are some examples of those content components:

Recommendation engines: On your product detail pages, display products recommended for you based on products you've already viewed, products you've purchased in the past, or products related to your preferences. 

Featured product collections: Surface your shop's most popular products to ensure customers can experience them. Since Shopify is a commerce-focused platform, content components like featured products are designed to make it easy to purchase and drive sales. 

Customer accounts: Account pages should get more notice and are more important than you think. It is common for customers to log in to update their address, check order history, or may even be required to purchase certain products. There is the opportunity to present them with data from multiple sources. Consider offering access to upcoming shipments for memberships, special offers for products they love, or remind them of events they should attend. 

On-sale and member pricing: Incentives can drive sales for many brands. Those incentives can come from many different places, including memberships, purchase history, or even interaction with marketing campaigns. Display price reductions, member-only discounts, or free shipping reminders based on your engagement strategy. 

Buy once or subscribe-and-save: Related to incentives, can your products be subscribed to based on a shipping frequency and quantity? Subscriptions are a great way to generate recurring revenue. When your customers consider purchasing a product, present them with the option to subscribe to one or more at a discounted price. Subscriptions may be challenging to offer without unifying your product and membership systems. 

Cart and checkout: So much data needs to be unified for a smooth checkout experience. If that experience is sloppy, your customers will bail and never return. For alcohol sales, you need to capture the customer's birthdate. Can your system use the date entered in your site age gate as the pre-populated date during checkout? Today, customers expect to be able to use multiple payment methods, including digital wallets like Apple and Google, or other popular payment platforms like PayPal, Amazon, or Facebook. Integrating these payment methods makes it easy for your customers to purchase. 

MEMBERSHIPS

Flexibility is the key to the success of any membership system. Traditional clubs…check. Allocation with wish lists… check. And as mentioned above, product subscriptions… check. 

Most of our customers generate most of their revenue through memberships, which requires the data used for memberships to spread across multiple platform areas. First, your memberships' configuration and management must integrate with your product and customer data directly. When a new customer joins a membership tier, the options and preferences they select should come directly from your membership configuration. Products that are member-only or discounted for members require advanced logic that will use data spread across customers, products, and discount rules. Finally, sales and financial reports related to memberships will pull data from various sources. 

Advanced reporting tools will aggregate data from multiple sales channels, including memberships and subscriptions.  

POINT-OF-SALE

Shopify's powerful order and inventory management system is the backbone of the POS. The interface is customized and built to be workflow-centric, putting the most critical products, discounts, apps, and actions at your fingertips. The Shopify POS is the epitome of unified. 

When a customer creates a pick-up order through the web checkout, it enters a dedicated pick-up workflow on the POS, making the sales team's experience of managing the order and the customer's experience equally smooth. 

Your product team transfers inventory into the system from the winery, which can be split across multiple locations. The POS instantly updates with just the inventory dedicated to its location. In-person orders deduct inventory from the POS location, and those orders are related to the POS sales channel. 

Exchanges and returns couldn't be simpler. If customers place an order online, they can bring the product into a tasting room and exchange or return it in person. 

Consider where all the data related to memberships, discounts, pick-ups, inventory, exchanges, and locations are stored and used. Does your system allow all of this data to work together in concert?

MARKETING

Experienced marketing professionals know that advertising platforms and social properties drive sales. We consider them as sales channels. 

When you use Shopify's marketing tools to promote your brand and drive product awareness, your customers are taken on a journey toward conversion. Does your website hook into analytics, email marketing, and social tracking tools to provide the insights needed to ensure your campaigns are effective?

One obvious opportunity is when you can use features like buy-buttons or enticing CTAs to engage customers directly with selling features. Out-of-the-box, Shopify provides reporting for social referrals and attribution. 

ASK YOURSELF...

Can your system genuinely understand your ideal customer, attribute sales to their chain-of-engagement events, and meet them where they are, at the right time? When you can, the dots are connected in ways that will accelerate your marketing flywheel.  

P.S. Would you like to harness the power of Shopify and Bloom Commerce? We'd like to help. Get in touch with our team at Bloom.

Understanding who your business is selling to is vital in figuring out your brand identity. Which specific customer types are you trying to reach? How are you going to reach them? What is the value you intend to provide them? What incentives will they respond to positively? While you might personally know some of your customers, it's unlikely you've sat down and made a conscious effort to visualize what’s in their heads. In this article, we will share tools that help you to understand the consumers' pain points, motivations, goals, and challenges, helping you get more of your products and services into their hands. 

CREATE AN EMPATHY MAP

An empathy map is a team exercise that illustrates customer behaviors, mindsets, and expectations, helping you know what your customers want in relation to your brand or experience. Creating a map helps you synthesize a lot of data into an easy-to-digest visual diagram. It will also help communicate a common understanding of your customers’ wants throughout your organization, removing the effects of any personal biases.

Empathy maps are divided into four quadrants. Each quadrant represents a different moment and reaction that the customer may have about their experience. The four standard labels that comprise each quadrant are: 

• Says. The "Says" quadrant references phrases consumers might say about their experiences. Example: "I’d purchase more wine online if shipping wasn’t so expensive.” 

• Thinks. The "Thinks" quadrant conveys typical thoughts consumers have when going through an experience. Example: "Wine clubs are for older people who have extra money to spend.”

• Does. The "Does" quadrant surveys what consumers do and how they behave. Example: "Compares wine prices on different winery websites."

• Feels. The "Feels" quadrant is about the consumer's emotional state, which you often determine after completing the "Thinks" and "Does" quadrants. Example: "I feel like I don’t have enough  wine knowledge to make the right selection."

CRAFT YOUR IDEAL CUSTOMER PROFILES

Ideal Customer Profiles take the information surfaced in the Empathy Map and go deeper, effectively creating a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer. The more energy you put towards crafting these profiles, the more personalized your marketing messages and campaigns can be. Usually, a customer profile will have a fake name attached to them to represent a customer segment: like Wine Collector William or Millennial Mary - however, the attributes collected are from qualitative data like: 

• Demographics – age, gender, income level, education
• Psychographics – attitudes, beliefs, personality
• Why they bought your product – what was the primary driver
• Where they found your product – in a retail store, online, in the tasting room
• How your product is used – what attributes are important to them
• What solutions it provides – how does it enhance their life 
• How often and  how much of it do they buy - a case every quarter or two bottles a month
• Objections – why would they consider not buying it
• Communication preferences – do they prefer email, text or phone calls
• Social media preferences - where do they spend their time online

Once collected, this information paints a clear picture of your ideal customer so you can speak directly to them about their wants and lifestyle needs. When customers feel like marketing messaging is speaking directly to them and connecting with their behaviors, personality, ambitions, and concerns - they're more likely to buy what is being offered. Dig deep into who your buyer is. Make a conscious effort to visualize what’s in their heads. Consider using Empathy Maps, Profiles, and other tools to understand them better. Once you know their pains and where you can make gains, marketing strategies are easy to identify.

Would you like Bloom to do the research for you and help you get to know your customers? We can do that. Get in touch with our team of seasoned creatives at Bloom Studio.

Let's say there are two wineries positioned side by side; they make the same wine, from the same vineyard, under the same winemaker - one sells their Syrah for $20 and the other for $35. Why would someone buy what is essentially the same product and pay more for it? Let's take a look at an example outside of our industry. 

Why do people love Nike products? It's because Nike isn't just a sports brand. They inspire, innovate, and create a lifestyle around their products—Nike knows their "why"—they empower anyone to reach their maximum athletic potential. Nike's consumers have an emotional connection to the brand, and that matters. 

Understanding your "why" boils down to crafting a Unique Value Proposition (UVP). It will be one of the most defining aspects of your positioning for DtC sales. Your UVP makes a promise to consumers. It differentiates you from your competitors and inspires the consumer to take action. In the case of Nike and the winery with the $35 Syrah, it can even compel consumers to pay a premium for your products. Customers aren't buying the product; they are buying into the company's purpose and what makes them unique

What are the elements of a successful UVP? 

A UVP goes beyond a slogan. It is a complete statement of what your business will represent in your market and what makes you stand out, yet it should be clear and concise and create instant understanding for your customers. It should:

• Tell your audience what, how and why. What you do or make, how you do it that sets you apart from the competition and the purpose or belief behind why you do it. 
• Identify your ideal customer. Consider who you are speaking to, and craft your UVP towards this persona. 
• Be specific. Don't use industry jargon or slang however do use the language of your ideal customer. 
• Be kept current. Your ideal customer, products or services may change over time, so regularly review your UVP to keep it fresh. 

Once defined, your UVP should integrate into the ethos of your brand, influencing your marketing, customer experience and selling propositions. In the example of Nike above: 

• The Nike value proposition focuses on "...satisfying its customers with a superior product made out of the best available materials and latest technologies, which is also fashionable, worn by supreme athletes and accessible to anyone."

Examples within the alcohol industry include:

1. Avaline Wines One would think Avaline would focus on its celebrity ownership. While an important marketing tool, this is not their UVP. Avaline crafts quality wines using only 100% organic grapes with complete transparency on what goes into every bottle.
   
   
2. Empathy Wines The Empathy ethos differentiates itself by stating its value and why they exist. "Empathy for everyone. Our mission is to make the highest-quality wine for the most affordable price."
   
   
3. Penfolds Defined by both its age and innovation, they tell the consumer, "we've been at this a while, so we know what we're doing. But, we constantly strive to learn more and be better." They keep their UVP fresh and relevant.
   
   
4. Wine for The People Their UVP establishes who they are and allows consumers to form an instant connection. "Producing traditional wines in a new frontier. Connecting community, culture, and a sense of place from grape to glass."

Everyone knows what they sell—alcoholic beverages. They also know how they sell it - through great customer experiences, storytelling, and relaying the brand's history. The why is a little more challenging to figure out. Why do you get out of bed each morning, and why should your consumer care? Once you have defined your specific UVP, it should become the basis of how you market yourself. It should become apparent in every aspect of your business, from your label design to your tasting room experience. 

P.S Do you need help with defining your Unique Value Proposition? We'd like to help. Get in touch with our team of seasoned creatives at Bloom Studio. 

THINK ABOUT THE BIG PICTURE

Before getting started on understanding your business objectives, it's important to know your vision statement. This statement sets the entire foundation for your company. While your business may evolve in the long run to suit the consumer environment, your underlying beliefs should remain consistent. The vision is the long-term plan - at least a decade or two and will drive the remainder of your business plan. An example of this is Empathy Wines, "Whoever has the most empathy for the consumers and the farmer will win the wine game," says co-founder Gary Vaynerchuk. "That's why I'm calling it Empathy." Their vision is to "connect everyone with wine they'll love at the right price".

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN GOALS AND OBJECTIVES

Once you have a clear vision, it's time to focus on your business goals and objectives. Business goals are typically broad aims you establish to start the business planning process. For example, "Expand our distribution in the Eastern states” could be considered a goal. Once you've established your company's business goals, you can break them down into individual business objectives. An objective is a specific, actionable milestone that you reach on the way to achieving your goal. "Sell $200,000 through our Northeastern distribution channels in the next six months" is an example of one objective to the expansion goal above. 

HAVE A CLEAR SENSE OF PURPOSE AND DIRECTION 

Use your goals and objectives to keep your leadership teams motivated and focused. If your employees have a thorough understanding of what the company is trying to achieve, it will help them know what is expected of them to support the mission. Employees that feel they are part of a team, and contribute to a bigger purpose, are more likely to be an ambassador for the brand outside of their work schedule. It will also help to minimize employee turnover, creating longer-term knowledge and experience within your team, which continues to build employee buy-in to the dream. 

OBJECTIVES SHOULD FOLLOW THE SMART FORMULA

The SMART formula provides a framework for achieving business objectives. By bringing clarity and direction to your objectives, quantifying success is easier and it allows your employees to more actively engage with and contribute to the company's success.

SPECIFIC Objectives should be clear and easily defined. Opening a new shipping market, adding a new product line, or reaching certain production levels are all examples. These are all quantifiable, simple for your employees to understand, and make for an easy roadmap to achieve the objective.

MEASURABLE Specific objectives also include metrics to define success. "Increase Sales" does not provide a measure of success for a team to strive toward. "Increase wine club membership by 10%" or "Roll out a new product with new label design by Q4 bottling" are all easily measured objectives that employees can utilize to ensure their individual tasks are completed on time to meet the larger goal.

ACHIEVABLE Objectives should be achievable for the team involved and for the desired metric. Achievable metrics intertwine with those of other teams and consider larger goals and team capabilities. For instance, one cannot expect the membership group to achieve the desired increase in club sales if the production team doesn't have a metric to increase production to meet the new demand. Achievable doesn't mean easy. Setting difficult objectives and pushing a team to larger than needed levels of success results in higher levels of pride within a team upon completion, directly improving team morale and engagement. Keep objectives reasonable, but push for a higher level of success.

RELEVANT Objectives should be relevant to the main goals. If your winery has a goal of increasing DtC sales this year, your team’s objectives should be directly applicable to meeting that goal. In this case, the marketing team’s objective may be to post to social media channels more frequently with content geared to tasting room visits, cellar door special pricing or events. Meanwhile, the production team may have an objective to develop a small bottling of a special barrel/blend/etc. meant for tasting room-only sales. Making sure that team objectives are relevant helps focus all efforts on the bigger goal while also ensuring individual team participation and success.

TIME-BASED Give your objectives a due date. Just as your big-picture goals should be a 5-10 year plan, your metrics to achieve must have clearly defined schedules as well. These can be both long and short term, and both big and small. If your objective is to increase Syrah production 20% by year X, then timely strategies may include planting new vines by a specific date or sourcing fruit on a certain schedule. Increasing club membership in one year may have quarterly or monthly objectives. Similarly, increasing mailing list communications by a certain amount to drive more engagement are examples of timely objectives to achieve the bigger picture.

Think about the big picture and where you see your company in 5-10 years. Having a clear sense of purpose and direction maintains laser focus in an environment full of distractions. It will also help your employees understand what the company is trying to achieve and what is required of them to support this mission. Objectives should follow the SMART formula, being specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-based.

Does your business need help with creating a strategic marketing plan that is directly linked to the company's goals and objectives? Learn more about our new services with Bloom Studio.

Bloom is kicking off 2022 with a new office! Over the last sixteen years we have grown to love the neighborhood and other tenants in the building. So, instead of moving out, we've decided to rebuild. After months of tearing out the old and putting in the new, we're excited to show everyone our new workspace. A private meeting room is located right off the entrance to the office.

We designed the office to not only allow for maximum productivity, but also be a place were we can relax and hang out. Our "Living room" has a homey feel, decked out with modern furniture and a great view of Elliott Bay.

The star of the new space is the kitchen. Our old kitchen was functional, set up for making a quick lunch or pouring a cup of coffee. The new kitchen, located in the center of the space, is now a central hub that can also be used for tasting wine, or just taking a break from our digital devices.

With an eight foot long conference table, a sixty inch LCD panel connected to the web, and sixteen feet of white board space, the new conference area allows up to eight people to work together. Customers who come to Seattle for UX workshops or planning meetings will collaborate in this space.

Details matter and our new space is filled with them in the places where they are needed. The kitchen is highly organized and designed to be easy to use, and even easier to keep clean. A fifty bottle, under-counter wine fridge is stocked with some of our customers' tastiest products. Around every turn you'll find art, books and fun, hand-crafted objects that reflect Bloom's unique personality.

Next time you're in Seattle stop by and and we'll give you a tour!

Cyber Monday, on the other hand, was shown to be more successful than Black Friday. The online sales event brought in $7.9 billion US in sales—even higher than the record-setting Black Friday in 2018 that generated $6.2 billion US.

Is your website ready for the holiday boost in traffic & transactions?
If not - Bloom has your back.

Here are 5 sales tips you can implement to take your piece of the pie this week - pumpkin pie that is.

1. Make your offer compelling & build relationships. It's these rare opportunities during the year where you can lower your prices without losing your brand integrity. Offer to take care of the shipping or add a free wine tasting with purchase to make that lasting connection.
   
   
2. Give extra value to your VIP customers. An opportunity to go big with special prices on your library wines. Curate holiday packs that are tailored specifically to their VIP taste buds.
   
   
3. Build up the hype on Social - but don't miss out on the power of email. Use segmentation to personalize your emails for club members. You'll see higher open rates, and higher click through rates—helping you build and maintain a strong customer relationship. Bloom is connected with Mailchimp to target club members by level to help you do that. Don't forget about Mailchimp's email automation where you can build campaigns like “New club members that sign up today get 15% off their next purchase.”
   
   
4. Go one step further & customize by purchase history, location and much more. Here are 9 email segments you can use to collect sales now & during the aftermath of these couple of days:

• Recent Openers
• Product Browsers
• Email Ignorers
• Hasn't Purchased (but is engaged)
• Almost Purchasers
• VIP Customers
• Category Buyers
• Geographic Targets
• Gift Givers

For Recent Openers, Browsers, Ignorers, Hasn't Purchase or Almost Purchased segments, create final offers to push them to checkout or re-target with a follow-up series the following days & weeks.

For e-mail ignorers, re-target the same offer with a different subject headline.

For VIP Customers, Category Buyers, Geographic Targets & Gift Givers tailor messaging that mirrors their buyer behavior.

1. Connect with customers in real-time to convert potential sales into life long customers. Drift & Facebook Messenger can plug into your store to help customers with any questions just like you're with them in the Tasting Room!

There you have it folks, your last minute, Black Friday/Thanksgiving/Cyber Monday campaign. And don't forget to have a deliciously-stuffed holiday!

-Tim Martin, Guage Branding

Tim makes it sound so obvious...because it is. When a customer connects with your brand, it happens through an experience. Experiences can be events customers pay for, just like they pay for your wine, or planned moments of serendipity that make you stand out. Wineries that can't make the jump from selling commodities to selling experiences will have a hard time making meaningful connections with their customers. Businesses sell products. Brands sell experiences.

If you've flown Southwest airlines, you may have experienced one of their hilarious pre-flight announcements. It is a great example of taking information that is typically ignored by customers and turning it into an entertaining (and educational) experience that is worth remembering. Customers will talk about it and remember it next time they need to purchase a plane ticket. The experiences you offer don't have to be complicated. They can be integrated into the winery or provided as an add-on.

Take some time to look outside the wine industry for examples of effective brand experiences. Below is a shortlist of popular ideas wineries are using -- you have likely heard of some of them. Think about the benefits to the customer and the winery, then ask yourself how you can use these ideas and create your own experiences that work for your business.

Digital serendipity: Live-stream a wine tasting

Today, it is easy and inexpensive to live-stream a wine tasting event. Facebook, Vimeo, and YouTube have live stream services. Invite customers through your communication channels to watch and participate. Set up in a quiet area with indirect natural light. Use a mobile device with a built-in, high-quality camera, and you're ready to go. The nice thing about a live-stream is that you can make them entertaining and educational just by being yourself. Provide the ability for customers to ask questions, it then becomes interactive. No professional actors are required. This allows your customers to have a better understanding of the wine so they can talk about it to their friends. You also have the opportunity to upsell to attendees of the live stream with real-time offers. Check out this Ridge Vineyards 2019 Spring Release live stream as a good example.

Creative pairings: from web to table

Jeremy Carter at Tarpon cellars is extending the concept of wine pairings beyond food recommendations. Not only from food to music, but also from the vineyard, to the web, and then to the dinner table. He is pairing music with wine. Music is a big part of their lives. While picking grapes, racking barrels, or bottling, there is always music threading it all together. Jeremy wants to extend the winemaking experience to their customers by having them listen to playlists while the wine is consumed. Additionally, every summer Tarpon Cellars has an event where music, food, and wine are all collectively balanced over five courses. Customers taste unreleased wines while building a relationship with Jermey, the host and winemaker for $150 per person. Even super-small producers can get creative and deliver memorable experiences.

The gift of wine: unboxing

Providing opportunities for your customers to connect with your brand doesn't stop after you've made a sale. Your experiences should extend to every customer touchpoint. What happens when your customers open the box of wine you shipped to them? If you're a winery only focused on your products, then the only thing your customer will experience is holding the wine bottles. If you're focused on your brand, the wine is only one piece of a larger experience. Our friends at Empathy Wines have invested in upgrading their packaging to improve their unboxing experience. Empathy Wine's logo and brand statements are on the outside of the box, so customers know what is in the box before they open it, immediately standing out and building anticipation. After opening, the customer is hit with color and more messaging that brings everything together. Thanks to Amazon, your customers open bland boxes full of products all the time. Make your wine unboxing experience memorable.

Pairing every interest: wine yoga

There's goat yoga, baby yoga, and karaoke yoga. Why not wine yoga? Our friends at Elsom Cellars here, in Seattle, want to send a message that drinking wine can not only be fun, but also healthy. Over the course of two hours, the winery clears out their tasting room and invites customers to release some stress by mixing yoga with wine tasting. Elsom is building a small community around something the winery cares about -- staying healthy. When wine tasting is added to the experience, it is hard to forget, and at $20 a session, the cost-of-entry is low. Customers are making lasting connections with the brand that they will talk about with their friends. FYI, they also have paint night!

Crafting & teaching: wine blending

Immerse yourself in the art of craft blending at Northstar's wine blending experience located in Walla Walla, WA. Yes, another Washington winery, but hey, there's some awesome stuff happening up here. At Northstar, the customer starts with tasting a flight of Northstar’s world-class Merlots, while learning about where the fruit is grown. Using beakers to measure the wines, customers mix the Merlot with Cabernet Sauvignon and Petit Verdot to create a blend that matches their preferences. Customers even design a label and leave with, not only with a bottle of wine they created, but also leave with a unique memory they won’t soon forget. Northstar charges $85 per person, and club members get a $20 discount. There is a saying, "You are what you charge for", and Northstar is known for their exceptional Merlot blends.

Teaming up with the community: photography sessions

Almost every city and town has a community college with photography classes. Ask if they'd want to take photos at the winery as part of their curriculum. Don't ask just one college, but all photography classrooms in the area. We know based on experience that wineries pose a lot of challenges for photographers. Glass and the shape of bottles and wine glasses are hard to photograph, yet allow a student to get very creative with light. Once the photos are complete, have a gallery night, where the photographers can show and sell their art at your tasting room. Get permission to use the photos for your website, social media, and other marketing. The photographers, who may have never heard of your winery, are now intimately connected with your wine, and their work can be used to promote your brand.

Authentic brand connections

If you're ready to transition from selling bottles to selling experiences, first look inward. Besides winemaking, what is important to you and your employees? What does your brand stand for? Take those core values and interests, and consider how to simply share them with your customers through creative experiences. You'll be surprised at the new growth of your customer base, and how loyal your customers will become.

Photography by Mara Dillinger. Wine blending by our friends at Eye of the Needle in Woodinville, WA.

First, the box was heavier than I imagined it would be, which was a good sign. I sensed what was inside was high quality. To my surprise, there was a LOT of packaging. Each component had a box, and the stand (the heaviest component) had styrofoam corner protectors. By the time I unpacked everything there was a small mountain of crumpled up craft paper, used as packing material, and cardboard that had to go to recycling - which was unfortunate. I wished Shopify had thought through the packaging a bit more. They should look at IKEA for some tips on how to reduce waste by packing the components more efficiently!

Shopify has always been a design-focused company, though they tend to borrow from other successful businesses versus generate original ideas. The component boxes took obvious inspiration from Apple's pro-line packaging; black box, white sans-serif type, and minimalistic style. Remember, Shopify is just getting serious about their hardware game, so I wasn't expecting Apple-level packaging. It didn't blow me away, but a great first attempt. I did notice that cardboard used for the boxes was fairly thin, and tore easily. A higher quality paper would level up the unboxing experience.

When I unboxed the iPad case I noticed the simple, all-visual instructions; perhaps Shopify did take a few tips from Ikea. The iPad case (which allows the iPad be quickly attached and detach from the stand) requires you to take off one of the case sides to slide your iPad in it. My iPad fit snuggly. The plastic is high-quality, and even with the cover on, the sleep/wake button is still easily accessible. The charging port, however, isn't, but the base charges the iPad. If you do need to access the port, just slip off the side and plug it in. The case is impressive, and the way it attaches to the stand was well designed.

Shopify's new, gloss-black Tap & Chip reader appears to be a significant improvement from the old white Swipe & Chip reader. It feels sturdy, with 4 blue LED indicator lights that let you know if it's paired, the battery is low, or if a transaction succeeded. It also comes with a heavy base, allowing you to securely set it within your customer's reach, so they can access the unit on their own. Both the iPad base and reader base come with bolts if you want to drill through your countertop and screw each unit in for extra security.

Shopify is clearly shifting focus towards contactless payments with the Tap feature. If a customer wants to use Apple Pay or Google Pay, hold your phone over the reader, pick the card from your wallet, and purchase. It doesn't get much easier. You can tap contactless cards from Visa or Mastercard as well. Of course, if a customer wants to use the standard chip card, just insert as usual.

The on-screen setup process is well designed, as I expected. This is Shopify's bread and butter. They walk you through each step on the iPad with clear, friendly instructions. It was super-seamless to get everything up and running.

Shopify continues to offer Customer View. This is a secondary mobile device (Android only at this point) which faces the customer so they can see the transaction build, select how they want to pay, and if they want a receipt via email or SMS. To set up the customer view I used a newer Android phone I purchased off Amazon for $150. Simple to set up: download the app, make sure your phone is connected to wifi, then scan the QR code the POS app provides, which syncs the Android device to the POS. Recently, Shopify announced that you can use a larger tablet device for the Customer View if you'd like. Sweet!

Here is the welcome screen for the Customer View, alongside the new Tap & Chip reader in its base. Everything looks so slick!

There are many innovative features of the new Retail Kit. My favorite being the tilting iPad. When you're ready for the customer to sign, tilt the screen towards the customer. The interface automatically flips around so they can sign with their finger. Then flip it back to finalize the transaction. Nice.

If you need to remove the iPad from the base, give it a slight tug and it pops right off. Secured by magnets, the base holds it in place while you're using it, but easily detaches when you need it elsewhere. Again, very nice.

The new Retail Kit is a step forward in the hardware space for Shopify. It is clear they care about the overall customer and merchant experience. Almost everything is well thought out, and all the hardware using high-quality materials. I particularly enjoyed how conveniently my iPad popped from the base to go mobile. However, I would order a second Tap & Chip card reader to use for when I am mobile, because when the reader is secured in its base it's a bit difficult to get out and put back in. The only other thing I'm hoping to see improved is the amount of packaging used to ship the kit.

Do note: this new POS hardware is only available in the US for now, and demand for this new hardware makes the current shipment around six weeks or more, as of writing this article.

Learn more about the new Retail Kit on Shopify's website.

If you are curious about the wine in our photos, it is a delicious 2017 Columbia Valley Viognier/Roussanne, called Gloss from our friends at Foundation Cellars here in Seattle, WA. Photography by Mara Dillinger

As buy habits evolve, it is becoming increasingly difficult to get those bottles into the hands of consumers, directly. Here are a few reasons why:

1. Too much choice: Wine is a commodity and the market is saturated with good options. Getting your wine in front of new customers is a real challenge.
2. Tasting room visits are down: In California especially, the opportunity to create lasting relationships is dwindling.
3. The Amazon effect: consumers expect free, next-day delivery when buying online. Wine isn't cheap or easy to ship.
4. Competition: It isn't just other wineries stealing market share. Craft spirits, beer, and now cannabis is attracting younger buyers.

Wineries need to understand that economies change and if you don't change with them, you'll be left behind. One popular example that illustrates this point is the birthday cake. My grandmother would make a cake from scratch, purchasing the ingredients for about 50 cents. The economy evolved into packaged goods and my mother made cake-from-a-box for a couple of bucks. Pre-made cakes could then be ordered from any grocery store setting us back $20 or so. Today, we completely out-source the entire party by renting an experience, one that comes cake, balloons, prizes, bouncy houses, and more. For this memorable experience, we'll drop $200 or more.

Why would do we do this?

Welcome to The Experience Economy, a term coined by B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore. Although their book is now 20 years old, it is as relevant today as ever, especially for wineries. I highly recommend everyone give it a read.

This is the first part of a three-part series. I'd like to start a conversation about selling memories vs. selling bottles. A memorable experience is worth much more to us than just selling bottles, am I right? Experiences stick with us. We talk about them. They create meaningful connections to a brand.

What memorable experiences do you offer at your winery?

Stay tuned for the next article where we'll look at some case studies of how wineries are succeeding with first making memorable connections with their customers.

1. Easy-to-use website builder and content management system
2. Intuitive tools to manage wine clubs and automate shipments
3. A reliable Point of Sale with access to customer and member data
4. Best-in-class e-commerce for selling online
5. Integration with digital marketing tools like MailChimp, Drip, or AdRoll
6. Insightful, actionable reporting
7. Flexible shipping options that work with ShipComplaint

Is Shopify the answer? Yep.

With other 800,000 merchants using the platform, racking up over 1 billion orders since Shopify launched, they are leading the world in e-commerce for small business.

Out of the box, wineries can manage their wines, inventory, customers, orders, shipping, and fulfillments. Additionally, wineries can sell on multiple sales channels including online, POS, Facebook, Instagram and eBay. With Shopify's mobile-first approach, over two-thirds of all orders now come from a mobile device. Wineries can even manage every aspect of their store, on their phone, using the Shopify mobile app. Extensive analytics and reporting for sales, profits, and customer engagement are at your fingertips. The Shopify app store provides endless ways to extend a winery's store. For example, they can integrate with MailChimp to fully automate email marketing. Need to create shipping labels in a few clicks? Then sync orders to ShipStation and print labels using your FedEx or UPS rates. Personalize customer experience by upselling related products on the shopping cart, or give loyal customers access to member-only products, and much more.

That is freakin' incredible.

But what about all the complexities that come with selling wine?

It is true, that even though Shopify provides a ton of features out-of-the-box, there are a few missing critical components. That is where Bloom comes in.

Not yet listed in the Shopify app store, the Bloom app fills in all the remaining pieces needed to sell wine, or any alcohol, successfully on Shopify.

WINE CLUBS

Chances are that a small winery generates the majority of its revenue from its wine club. The question is, how do wineries get new members to sign up? Customer expectations have changed due to several factors including mobile commerce, social media, the new subscription economy, and a change in demographics. Building a large membership list, and keeping members in that list requires a different approach.

Consider lowering the barrier to entry. A case club is likely going to turn away many potential members or overserve existing members. Instead, let members join with only a three bottle selection. With proper nurturing, that new paying customer can turn into a loyal customer, who will stay around longer, resulting in a higher lifetime value.

Members expect personalization, so give them a choice. Let them pick the wines and the quantity that satisfies precisely what they want. Your club should let them update their selections for each shipment.

Bloom adds very flexible club options to a Shopify store.

MEMBERSHIPS

Wine clubs create members who have memberships. As a winery's membership listing grows it becomes more and more difficult to manage. Bloom extends Shopify customers with new properties that make maintaining memberships a breeze. Quickly search across thousands of records, move members between membership levels, place a membership on hold for a specific period of time, and add a note with a single click.

Using a secure payment gateway, allow members to save their credit cards to use for automated shipments and order creation. Members are automatically emailed if their payment fails and can update billing in just a few clicks.

Memberships are then available through the Shopify Point of Sale. See a member's lifetime value and apply an accurate club discount to the order.

BATCH SHIPMENTS

With hundreds or even thousands of memberships, batching orders is a critical feature. Customized selections can make this a messy job. Luckily Bloom takes care of a lot of this complexity by keeping track of the selections behind the scenes.

As part of the batch process, the club administrator can select what wines the shipments will contain. For memberships where wines were selected by the member, the admin doesn't have to do anything except click a Process button. It doesn't get simpler.

Orders are automatically created in Shopify with the correct membership discounts, and members are emailed an order confirmation.

Sweet!

REPORTING AND COMPLIANCE

The size of the winery doesn't affect the reporting or compliance burden. Even if a single bottle of wine is shipped, the winery still needs to be licensed, calculate/remit sales tax, and report on the amount of wine that was fulfilled. Shopify does offer amazing reporting across all sales channels but doesn't provide wineries with the full set of reports they need to run their business.

Bloom extends Shopify products with wine product specifications. Some examples are bottle volume, vintage, alcohol percentage, and wine type. These specifications are used to generate reports used for federal excise tax, state sales tax, and more.

Wineries that use ShipCompliant are covered with Bloom's built-in integration. Just add the web service user name and password and orders are checked for compliance as they are created. If connected to a fulfillment center that syncs back to ShipCompliant, Bloom will update orders with a fulfillment status and shipment tracking information.

PERSONALIZATION AND CUSTOMIZATION

Shopify lets software developers fully customize the theme used for a winery's website. This opens endless possibilities for wineries to create very personalized experiences for all customer types. Of course, members should be treated differently than a first-time customer.

When a member logs in, special offers and products can be offered. Each visit to the wineries website can be personalized, resulting in more upsells and loyal customers.

The beauty of theme customizations is that they are tailored to each winery. The Bloom app is fully integrated into the website theme using Shopify's app proxy feature, which delivers the features all wineries use. Combining theme customizations with core Bloom features allows wineries to create any customer experience they can dream up.

Yes you can!

Wineries looking to leverage the power of Shopify now have all the tools they need to fully run their DtC business on the world's best e-commerce platform. Wineries no longer need a separate website and online store. The addition of the Bloom app will provide club management, memberships, batch shipments, reporting, and customizations.

The holy grail has been found.

Many wineries are unhappy with their website or wine club software. “Help us, please!” was the first thing I heard when I started interviewing wineries about the problems they faced building their Direct to Consumer (DtC) business. Initially, the fix seemed straightforward. What could be so hard about engaging customers and driving them down the purchase funnel?

Then I heard this during an interview with a respected winery owner:

"We don't need a new website. Our website is not what sells wine. We need tools that help us target and incentivize our loyal customers. Then an ecommerce solution that provides an amazing checkout experience."

It became evident that just a great-looking website wasn't going to move the needle much. The problem lived somewhere deep in software behind the website. The software that managed the marketing, customers, club management, Point-of-Sale, website, ecommerce and event management. All the important features that customers interface with. We took a hard look at the solutions wineries were using. Some serious problems were discovered.

The impossible task of building a winery ecommerce platform with a small team.

The team I manage has designed and built countless ecommerce stores, websites, mobile apps, and fully-custom software system for businesses small and large. Through years of experience, I can promise you that developing and maintaining complex winery software that includes solid ecommerce features, which your customers love, is almost impossible for a small company with a small team.

Why impossible? There are at least 20 core features that a winery needs to have in their DtC software:

1. Website builder
2. Web content management system
3. Shopping cart and store checkout
4. Products manager
5. Inventory manager
6. Customer manager with CRM
7. Order, returns and exchanges manager
8. Discounts and loyalty programs
9. Fully integrated Point of Sale (POS)
10. Wine sales and tax reporting
11. Wine club manager
12. Memberships and saved member payments
13. Club orders and batch management
14. Shipping rates and carrier integrations
15. Order fulfillment and shipping management
16. Marketing email manager
17. Blogs, articles, social media, and content marketing
18. Club sign-up and tasting room kiosks
19. Analytics and machine learning
20. Integrations for tax calculations, accounting, and compliance

Pick any one of these features and think about its complexities. Let's consider what it might take to design, build and support that single feature in a way that makes every customer happy. Think MailChimp for email marketing, which is a great example of well-done software that users love (that's #16 above). MailChimp has over 800 employees and sends over 1 Billion emails a day. Your winery software provider doesn't have the resources to even come close to building what MailChimp as built. If they offer an email marketing solution, I'm going to guess it feels a bit lackluster.

So how are winery software providers succeeding? Or are they?

A Peek Behind the Curtain

There are roughly 15 companies that attempt to offer DtC solutions for wineries. See Paul Mabray's DTC Vendor Matrix for an excellent overview. Only a handful have attempted to offer all of the core features listed above. They are called "full-stack" providers.

Many of the well-established winery software providers (we call them "legacy solution providers") have been in business for over a decade and have sizeable client lists. Some boast they service over 1000 customers. This is great for credibility, but a large percentage of these customers aren't happy. We know because we've talked to a lot of them.

Unlike a fine wine, your software is likely getting worse with age. Most legacy solutions are built on top of old, outdated code -- the foundation of the solution. The older the code gets, the harder the software is it to maintain. As time goes by, the software becomes buggy, brittle, and difficult for developers to update or re-engineer. Unhappy customers are complaining and reporting issues, requiring resources to focus on fixing bugs instead of innovating. Word starts to spread and the software provider's reputation begins to dissolve. This can put a company into a tailspin that is hard to pull out of.

My team understands this situation well. We've been there before.

Open up or risk toppling over

These legacy solutions are mostly proprietary, meaning the software is owned by the provider. They are fully responsible for updates and maintenance of the software. Another term for this type of software is "closed source", and was a common approach ten or so years ago. We're way past that now.

Today's modern solution provider needs to build as little proprietary software as possible. Instead, they need to use existing, best-in-class, open technologies that are maintained by large communities of developers. This type of software is called "open source". Many great options exist, and when used effectively it can save providers a tremendous amount of time and effort. A great example is Active Merchant, which provides an easy way to connect software to payment gateways for credit card processing. It would take weeks for a small team to develop a similar solution, and potentially months to keep the software updated and bug-free.

My team understands this approach. We're doing it now.

After more than a year of research, we concluded that building our solution on the Shopify platform made a ton of sense. Yes, there are some limitations and challenges, but the advantages far outweigh the downsides.

There are 13 core, full-stack features that Shopify provides:

1. Website builder
2. Content management system
3. Shopping cart and store checkout
4. Product manager
5. Inventory manager
6. Customer manager (CRM)
7. Order manager (OMS)
8. Discounts and loyalty programs
9. Fully integrated Point of Sale (POS)
10. Shipping rates and carrier integrations
11. Order fulfillment and shipping management
12. Blog articles and events
13. Analytics and machine learning

Getting these features for free provides my team with a competitive advantage. These 13 core features will advance as Shopify grows. Plus, they add new major features every year, like Shopify AR, a new augmented reality shopping experience. Plus, the open-source community is building hundreds of free additions (like Active Merchant mentioned above). If my team needs to extend the functionality of Shopify we either install one of the 2000 apps available to merchants, or we simply build our own using their amazing app development library Polaris.

There are still 7 core features that Shopify doesn't provide:

1. Wine sales and tax reporting
2. Wine club manager
3. Membership and saved payments
4. Batch order/shipment manager
5. Marketing email manager
6. Club sign-up and tasting room kiosks
7. Integrations for taxes, accounting, and compliance

When you examine this short list, they are winery-specific features except for the marketing email manager. Luckily, MailChimp, SendGrid, Campaign Monitor, and others make it very easy to integrate third-party solutions. That only leaves six core features for a team to develop and support. And remember, these are winery-specific features, which is where a team should focus their attention. Winery software developers really shouldn't be building inventory management systems in 2019.

Translation: by using Shopify and open-source add-ons, my software development team has the time and resources to innovate. Less time is spent building & supporting ecommerce and marketing features that already exist.

The truth is, a great DtC software provider is hard to find. The complexities of a full-stack solution will overwhelm a small team. Many proprietary solutions aren't working for today's modern winery. Until the industry accepts the fact that open systems are required to effectively scale, great options will be limited.

Photos by Samantha Hurley from Burst

Now, meet one of our co-founders, Patrick, the President & Design Director

What is your role at Bloom?
President and Design Director

Where did the idea of Bloom, bloom?
When I was in a meeting at the Washington State Wine Commission, someone said I should check out Vin65 (now WineDirect). Then I told myself, “We can do that, but better.”

When you were little, what did you want to be when you grew up?
I can remember when I was seven I wanted to be an architect. I spent the next 15 years of my life working towards that goal, and getting a degree from an accredited university. Then I discovered the internet, and the rest is history.

Whom in the world would you most like to share a meal with?
I love simple, back-yard meals with friends and family.

What is your biggest vice?
Work. I love my job and the people I work with, so I'm hooked.

Who has inspired you most in your career?
My first boss. I was an office assistant, and I learned how to talk to customers, managing the cash register, the importance of accurate accounting… the basics of running a business. I still use those skills today. Thanks Dave!

What would people be surprised to know about you?
I'm a gearhead. If I'm not working on Bloom's products and services, you'll probably find me in my garage working on my vintage Toyota. 

How do you define success?
Knowing that you're providing something of value to someone else.

It's the middle of winter here in Seattle, what is your favorite drink for these grey skies?
Woodinville Rye Whisky, neat.

Do you have a motto or personal mantra?
"There's nothing to it but to do it."

Where were you born and raised?
Virginia Beach, Virginia

What do you love most about Virginia Beach?
I grew up on the beach and love/miss the ocean.

OK quick answer!

Coffee or wine? Wine

Podcast or book? Book

Texting or talking? Talking

Invisibility or super strength? Invisibility

Cake or pie? Pie

Star Wars or Lord of the Rings? Star Wars

Ocean or mountains? Ocean

Climb a mountain or jump from a plane? Climb a mountain

Ninjas or pirates? Ninja

Would you rather be a tiny elephant or a giant hamster? Tiny elephant.

Photo by Mara Dillinger

Now, meet one of our co-founders, Josh, our Co-founder & VP of Engineering:

Where were you born and raised, Josh?
Born in Los Angeles, raised in Western Washington and British Columbia.

What's your role at Bloom?
As co-founder and lead engineer, I oversee all software development work for the Bloom platform. My focus is to ensure that the products and services we create are meeting our high standards for quality and technical sophistication.

What do you want to improve most about the DtC wine industry?
I want to dispel the idea that wineries need industry-specific versions of existing top-tier software in order to operate effectively. At Bloom, we believe that highly scalable, cloud-based products with a proven track record are the best solution for the DTC industry. My goal is to build simple and intuitive tools that leverage those best-in-class solutions to transform winery operations.

Outside of “Bloom hours,” what's your favorite way to spend time?
Spending time with family and friends. All forms of traveling, especially motorcycle road trips, and extended stays in cities I've never been to before.

What's your favorite ride at Disneyland & why?
The Haunted Mansion. It's one of the least altered attractions from the 1960s era, and among the few remaining which Walt Disney worked on personally.

What's your favorite winter drink?
Sun Liquor Distillery's holiday spirit blend (with or without egg nog)

What was your very first job?
Making deliveries for a tv/film production equipment rental company in Hollywood.

If it was safe to travel and you had a plane ticket, leaving anywhere tomorrow, where would you go?
Either Hong Kong or Central Mexico (Mexico City and León)

OK quick answer!

Podcast or book? Podcast for entertainment; book for knowledge

Texting or talking? Texting

Invisibility or super strength? Invisibility

Cake or pie? Pie

Star Wars or Lord of the Rings? Yes

Tea or coffee? Coffee

Ocean or mountains? Places where you don't have to choose

Climb a mountain or jump from a plane? Climb a mountain

Ninjas or pirates? Pirates

Would you rather be a tiny elephant or a giant hamster? It would depend on my environment. If unknown, then giant hamster.

Photo by Mara Dillinger

Now, meet one of our oldest team members, Mara, our party planner, bottle photographer and Director of Web Design:

Where were you born and raised, Mara?
The Pacific Northwest

What is your position at Bloom?
I have the pleasure of working with a variety of unique winery owners and alcohol brands in order to extend their vision to their online customers. I work with a great team to build the sites and design the Bloom software.

What inspired you to get into this line of work?
It's like agency life, varied and fast, but with more humanity, and a higher ABV.

After a hard day of work, what's your drink of choice?
In the winter, any Washington red wine I haven't tried yet, as their are infinite. In the warm months, a cold Cloudburst IPA.

What inspired your haircut and color?
The ephemeral nature of hair inspires me to do whatever I want with it. Variety is the spice of life.

What's the most interesting thing that's happened to you lately?
I had the honor to photograph a yet released, canned beer for one of my favorite breweries! I love/hate secrets!

What would people be surprised to know about you?
I only own one cat.

Outside of “Bloom hours,” what's your favorite way to spend time?
Photographing nature or eating and drinking something new.

How do you define success?
By how much I can give back to my community.

OK quick answer!

Big party or small gathering? The smallest gathering! (especially now days)

Game of Throne vs Lord of the Rings? Evie and I are in the middle of reading all of Tolkien... soooo LotR

Podcast or book? Both!

Texting or talking? Texting

Cake or pie? Pie

Tea or coffee? Coffee

Ocean or mountains? The Cascades

Ninjas or pirates? Pirates

Would you rather be a tiny elephant or a giant hamster? Elephants have good memories, and I'd like to know what that's like.

Photo by Mara Dillinger with help from Evie

Now, meet Julian, our meticulous Web Application developer (and data Migration Specialist):

Where were you born and raised?
That question has two answers in my case. I was born in Santa Cruz, CA and then raised in Lompoc, CA, which is a great town if you're a fan of absolutely nothing.

What do you love most about Lompoc?
That I'm not there anymore… But to answer fairly, I liked how quiet it was sometimes. Anytime I went to a big city like Seattle, NYC, etc. I always felt grateful for the silence of living in a small town once I got back.

What is your role at Bloom?
Everybody knows me as the Data Migration Specialist, but my daily work mostly revolves around solving complex data challenges. One of the biggest obstacles to switching ecommerce platforms is migrating years of history to the new platform, so I handle the task of migrating our clients' data from their old platforms.

I've noticed that the wineries most highly motivated to switch platforms tend to be on the most difficult ones to switch from. It can be an ugly process, and the essence of my role is to be the person who worries about this stuff so nobody else has to. My general goal is to make the process of becoming a Bloom customer as seamless as possible.

When I'm not working on migrations, I also contribute to building the Bloom Commerce software, helping develop new features and platform integrations.

Whom in the world would you most like to share a meal with?
Sometimes I wonder what Gordon Ramsay would think about how I make scrambled eggs. Are they amazing? Are they terrible? I can handle the criticism, I just really want to know.

Who has inspired you most in your career?
It's really hard to answer this question. To some extent, I've been inspired by everybody I work with now. Working with other people (especially other developers) who are more advanced in their careers than me reminds me that I always have more to learn but learning more is always within reach.

What's the best piece of advice you've ever received?
Hard question, but in 10th grade I wasn't doing well in my English class. I was a procrastinator and a perfectionist, and I wouldn't turn in assignments because I didn't want to unless I felt like I had done my best possible work. My teacher took me aside and lectured me something along the lines of “It's better to turn in something half-finished for half credit than nothing at all for no credit.” It sounds obvious, but being 15 it had never occurred to me before. That really stuck with me, and it started to sink in that the risk of failure is always the price of success. Once I started applying that, I also realized that the biggest obstacle to my success was most often myself. I think my teacher just wanted me to do my homework, but the impact of her advice went way beyond that.

How do you define success?
I think success is being able to accomplish your vision for the world. Whether your vision is just to have the home and the daily routine that makes you happy or to accomplish something really huge, I think success is finding out what your vision is and then making it happen.

If you could intervene during any historic event, changing history, what would it be?
I would go back in time 20 years and tell my five-year-old self to buy as many Lego sets as I could and never open them. One storage unit full of Bionicles and I could have been ready to retire at 30.

OK quick answer!

Podcast or book? Podcast.

Texting or talking? Texting.

Invisibility or super strength? Invisibility.

Cake or pie? Depends on the pie… but, cake.

Star Wars or Lord of the Rings? Lord of the Rings.

Tea or coffee? Coffee.

Ocean or mountains? Mountains.

Climb a mountain or jump from a plane? Climb a mountain.

Ninjas or pirates? Ninjas.

Would you rather be a tiny elephant or a giant hamster? Definitely giant hamster.

Photo by Mara Dillinger

You have most likely met this member of our team member already, but now it's time to get to really know our Director of Customer Success, Graham Whye:

Where were you born and raised?
Council Bluffs, Iowa and now I reside in Portland, OR. 

What do you love most about Portland?
It has a great food and beverage scene, it’s small enough to get around easily, and still cheap enough to keep it weird. The outdoors are so close, from the mountains to the ocean it’s all within easy reach. 

It’s the middle of winter where you are in Portland, what is your favorite drink for these gray skies?
English Breakfast tea in the morning and a nice Oregon Pinot in the evening.

What is your role at Bloom (please describe)?
I’m Bloom’s Director of Customer Success. My role at Bloom is to help our clients better use Bloom. Whether that is through providing training, troubleshooting problems or suggesting best practices. 

When you were little, what did you want to be when you grew up?
Growing up I was really interested in architecture (still am). 

Whom in the world would you most like to share a meal with?
Maybe it’s recency bias, but I think Tyler Cowen would be an extremely interesting person to share a meal with. 

Who has inspired you most in your career? 
The manager at my first job was great. I learned a lot working with him and he showed me that when you’re interested in others, you can almost always learn something new and interesting.  

Outside of “Bloom hours”, what’s your favorite way to spend time?
Depending on the weather I enjoy getting outside, could be running or hiking. There is such a variety of outdoor spaces in and around Portland that there’s always someplace new to explore. My girlfriend and I also enjoy exploring the Portland neighborhoods and coffee shops.

How do you define success?
For me being successful is having the ability to both pursue personal goals while also working on interesting problems with others.   

How do you stay up to date on the world of wine?
I look at the Terriorist almost daily, it’s a great way to keep up on the wine world. Along with that I like to stay in touch with the wine industry friends I’ve made from my time working in Washington and Oregon. 

What are three things still left on your bucket list?
Own a manual car (not getting easier!), restore an old house and visit Japan! 

OK quick answer!

Podcast or book? Book

Texting or talking? Talking

Invisibility or super strength? Super Strength

Cake or pie? Cake 

Star Wars or Lord of the Rings? Star Wars 

Tea or coffee? Tea

Ocean or mountains? Ocean 

Climb a mountain or jump from a plane? Climb a mountain

Ninjas or pirates? Ninjas

Would you rather be a tiny elephant or a giant hamster? Tiny Elephant

Photo by Mara Dillinger

Now it's time to meet, Evie, our beloved baker and Project Manager turned Front-end Software Developer:

Where were you born and raised, Evie?
I was born in Seattle, WA, and have been here ever since!

What do you love most about Seattle?
I love the surrounding nature here - being able to travel for only an hour and be in the mountains, or on an island, is pretty great.

If you could move to any wine region which would it be and why?
Marlborough, New Zealand. I think wine from New Zealand is surprisingly underrated, and the scenery is absolutely gorgeous. One of my goals in life is to move down there and become a shepherd who makes small batch wines on the side.

Favorite part about working at Bloom?
Definitely the people. The ones in the office, and our clients.

What wine region is currently at the top of your bucket list?
The Rhone region of France!

Favorite wine & food pairing?
I love a Lambrusco, on the sweeter side, paired with a really spicy vindaloo curry. In the summer months though, I think there's nothing better than a Mourvèdre Rosé with grilled peaches and mascarpone.

What books are you currently reading?
Well Mara and I have a Lord of the Rings book club in the office, so we're currently reading through Appendix A of Book 3. On the side, I just picked up the Wheel of Time series and I'm really excited to start!

What, or who, are you a “closet” fan of?
Really cheesy, low budget sci fi movies. They're never not entertaining.

What are three things still left on your bucket list?

1. Learn how to sail and go on a solo sailing trip through the Greek islands
2. Hike to the Tiger's Nest monastery in Bhutan
3. Write an epic fantasy novel and publish it

OK quick answer!

Podcast or book? Book all the way

Texting or talking? Talking since I'm terrible at texting

Invisibility or super strength? Invisibility

Cake or pie? Tarts

Star Wars or Lord of the Rings? LOTR

Tea or coffee? Tea

Ocean or mountains? Both, together.

Climb a mountain or jump from a plane? Jump from a plane!

Ninjas or pirates? Pirates

Would you rather be a tiny elephant or a giant hamster? Tiny elephant! So cute.

And...

Who is the best pupper in the whole world?

Photos by Mara Dillinger

We hired two new employees! Aidan Fleischer, who is not only a software developer, but also has a degree in enology! And Josh Jacobson (yes, we now have two team members named Josh) who is our Director of Business Development. They are both making a huge impact on Bloom’s ability to grow while continuing to provide a quality service.

2019 was our year to gather feedback from our customers, reset our sights, and plan for the future. Bloom 1.0 is currently being designed and developed and we’re very excited about where it’s headed. The big news is that Bloom has been approved to be a Sales Channel on Shopify. This means Bloom 1.0 won’t be your standard app, but will be located on Shopify’s left navigation, right under your Online Store. There are too many benefits to list here so keep reading to learn more.

Our growth was very steady. Now, more than 70 Shopify stores have Bloom installed. We've experienced consistent growth in California and an exciting and unexpected amount in British Columbia, Canada. Our hope is to enter the European market this year.

We say that we can't do great work without great customers, so we thank all of them for our incredible year.

The Bloom team wishes everyone a healthy and prosperous 2020!

- Patrick, Josh, Mara, Evie, Aidan, and JJ (the other Josh)

2019 GROWTH RECAP

BLOOM WELCOMED OVER 40 NEW WINERIES

Word is spreading fast that the Shopify & Bloom make a legit team, and that our customer support is second-to-none. Surprisingly, the Okanogan region of British Columbia has become a Bloom hotspot. Wineries like Volcanic Hills, Mt. Boucherie, and Kitsch were on-boarded in 2019. As expected, California wineries showed steady growth. Check out Piedrasassi, McKinney Family Vineyards, and our bottle photography for Banjo Wines. We're planning to bring on more Washington wineries in 2020, as well as expanding into Europe.

Our team grew a lot in the past year! Help us welcome to the team Josh and Aidan!

JOSH (JJ)
Josh, or as we call him JJ, is our new Director of Business development. He'll be leading the way on multiple fronts here at Bloom: educating and onboarding new clients and developing partnerships with other business to improve our platform. Read more about Josh

AIDAN
Aidan is the newest part of our Bloom software development team and is hard at work on the newest Bloom redesign & features. Read more about Aidan

Club member-only wines
Wines can be set so only logged-in club members can purchase them. It also provides another place to promote the club.

Integrated carrier calculated shipping for Fedex and UPS
If you want to integrate your store and Bloom with FedEx or UPS, and use the shipping rates provided directly from the carrier, you can!

205 order/shipping report
These reports are used by many fulfillment warehouses and are organized so the entire order is on a single row in the spreadsheet.

Batches report
View memberships by batch! See their payment status, gateway message, and fulfillment type.

Additional wine options report
On the Selections report, Bloom will now display any additional options members have added in order to provide a more accurate count of committed inventory.

Send tags to Mailchimp
When you add or edit a member, they will be tagged with their club level and status. Groups and segments are still being used, so tags are just an addition to what was already there.

Club member information is now displayed in the POS checkout
The Shopify POS will now display membership information in the cart, without needing to use the three-dot icon. This will be a big time-saver for POS users. Just tap the "+" icon to add their discount to the cart.

Set a min and max for additional wine options
This has been a heavily requested feature from some of our wineries. Now when you add a collection to additional wines, each product will have a minimum and maximum field, giving you more control over your inventory.

Improved tax overrides
Bloom now provides more granular tax overrides for club orders, allowing you to target alcohol and no-alcohol products with different rates.

Archive batches
Batches can now be archived instead of just deleted. This allows the historical data to still be available in reports, while cleaning up your batches list.

Downloads can be added to wine specifications.
If you have tech sheets, tasting notes, bottle shots, or any other file type you want to provide as a download on your wine detail pages, you can now add them as part of your product specs. Give us a shout if you want to try out this new feature.

After completing extensive upgrades, Bloom was awarded Platinum Certification from Shipcompliant. This puts us in the top partner tier, where only a handful of vendors live.

GRAND PLANS FOR 2020

EXCITING REDESIGN

Bloom has been a grand experiment gone right! Initially, we weren't sure it would take off, or if the compliance hurdles would be too hard to overcome. Clearly, Bloom is a hit. We have learned a ton from our customers, from industry leaders, and from friends in the industry. Last week we launched version 0.42.0. We're actively working on version 1.0, which will be a complete overhaul of Bloom. What will change? Here is a short list:

1. Bloom will become a Sales Channel instead of a standard app. This means it will appear under your Online Store in Shopify's left navigation.
2. We're building a dedicated checkout, adding features like “pay with saved credit card” and “pick up” vs. “ship” addresses.
3. True allocation style clubs, driven by complex business rules.
4. Massive overhaul of how members can customize upcoming shipments.
5. Bloom will improve the batching process, providing ways to preview orders, set shipping dates, and manage email automation as part of batching.
6. Avalara partnership, providing an alternative to Shipcompliant for compliance.

SHOPIFY UPDATES

Shopify will also be launching major updates in the coming weeks and months:

1. All new POS where the Bloom app will be in the forefront.
2. "Sections Everywhere" feature that will allow us to better integrate Bloom into content sections, provide the ability to use existing sections on any page.
3. Better fulfillment & delivery APIs so we can develop better shipping & tracking features.

We're looking forward to building more great relationships in 2020!

A NEW GROWTH PLATFORM FOR MODERN WINERIES

Bloom is the latest and greatest direct-to-consumer (DtC) online platform for small to medium-sized wineries. Powered by Shopify, the world's leading ecommerce solution, Bloom is a game-changer. Described as a growth platform, Bloom provides a full range of services, from website design and development to digital marketing strategy. Hence the company tagline "IT'S NOT SOFTWARE. IT'S BLOOM." which reinforces the massive benefit wineries get when all services are provided by one team, under one roof.

Wineries around the world are quickly gaining interest in using Shopify for their websites and online stores, but realize that there are a few missing pieces that are critical to selling wine online. Those missing features include the ability to manage clubs and memberships, ShipCompliant integration, and proper reporting. Bloom was created to fill in those gaps, making Shopify one of the top choices by wineries of all sizes.

"We didn't want to reinvent ecommerce." said Patrick Stroud, Bloom's President and co-Founder. "My team has been building web-based software and ecommerce stores for over 20 years. Based on experience I can tell you that building software that can manage customers, inventory, orders, plus wine club memberships, is nearly impossible with a small team. We want to focus on what's important to wineries: selling more wine. Not building inventory management systems."

Stroud has made a smart move to let Shopify do the heavy lifting, providing all the core ecommerce features, which allows his team to focus on just the missing winery components. This means Bloom's software is much less complex than their competitors, allowing them to innovate faster, using fewer resources and capital. The big upside is that more investment goes into customer service, something sorely needed by today's busy winery.

The software part of Bloom is a Shopify app designed to fully integrate clubs memberships into Shopify. Wine club members belong to a unique Shopify customer record. This allows club memberships to seamlessly integrate with customer and sales reports in Shopfiy. Wine products created in Shopify are used when creating wine club shipments keeping your inventory levels up-to-date. Discounts for club members are used for club orders, or when a member purchases wine directly from your website. Taxes are calculated automatically based on where the wine is shipped, and compliance reports can be generated by a combination of customer, shipping, and wine product information. Behind the scenes it's complex, but the Bloom app has been designed to make managing your clubs and members easy.

In addition to the Bloom app, Shopify's app store offers over 2000 other apps which can extend the features and functionality of a winery's online store. From integrations with email marketing tools like MailChimp to connecting orders to accounting systems, you can find an app for it.

"Every winery has different needs." says Stroud. "When you try to be all things for all people, you'll end up building a lot of software that only a few customers may use. Shopify apps allow our team to recommend, test, and deploy something different for each of our clients. Some larger wineries need integrations with their ERP system, yet a smaller winery might simply need a smart wine recommendation engine. Shopify allows us to provide the right solution for each customer."

If you need a Point of Sale system for your tasting room, the Shopify POS can be downloaded, configured, and ready-to-use in under five minutes. It's beautifully simple interface allows tasting room managers to sell wine to visitors, give discounts to club members, and provides access to wine club sign-ups without needing to use a separate application. Learn more about Shopify's advanced Retail Kit.

Bloom's innovative approach is quickly gaining attention around the world. They are growing fast not only in the US, but in Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Starting at only $99 a month, wineries can switch to Bloom with minimal effort and downtime. It appears Bloom has created something unique, and the wine industry is excited to see what they will announce next.

BLOOM is a growth platform for modern wineries. Based in Seattle, WA, they specialize in all things direct-to-consumer for small and mid-sized wineries. Bloom is not only software, but a suite of services for wineries, including website design and development, photography, social media management, digital marketing strategy, and more. Learn more at https://www.bloom.wine

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If you'd like to learn more about Bloom, contact Patrick Stroud at sales@bloom.wine, or give him a call at 206-595-8185.