We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Emily Mack a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Emily thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. What was it like going from idea to execution? Can you share some of the backstory and some of the major steps or milestones?

Vinat was started from a mixture of pain points we, as consumers, had with the wine industry and extensive customer research.

When my sister and business partner, Sarah, moved to Barcelona for her MBA, we started going on a lot of wine tours and tastings which sparked the idea of creating a business in the wine space. We did extensive research on wine drinkers and ultimately the research guided us to create Vinat.

Honing in on who our customers were, understanding their holistic experience with wine, and testing everything from our brand colors to our wines on our target customers helped us to shape our offerings.

One of the things that completely blew my mind was how many people are intimidated by wine. Every person I talked to would apologize to me for not having enough knowledge on wine. I’ve never met a beer drinker who felt the need to know the origin story of the hops to be comfortable drinking a beer. Why should wine be any different?

Choosing wines in stores can be tough, and online is worse. Most people choose a wine based on the label, but often times the wine with the cutest label isn’t the best wine. Once we honed in on our direction we knew we wanted to combine great wine and cheeky, fun, and approachable labels to help take the guesswork out of picking out a wine. Once customers have tried a wine from our collection, they can reach for the next knowing it’ll taste great and pair well with whatever food or activity they’ve got going on.

Emily, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

My name is Emily Mack, and I’m the co-founder and COO of Vinat. Vinat is a sister-founded wine company that sources and rebrands exclusive European wines with cheeky, fun labels and no unwanted additives.

My background is in user experience design and research. Throughout my career, I’ve been focused on new products across Fortune 500 companies and startups. When we started Vinat, we applied the same model I’ve used for startups and Fortune 500 companies to wine. We built our company from the ground up around our customers. Having them as our north star to guide our decision-making has helped us to keep a pulse on what really matters.

We’re non-snob wine people – we love good food, great company, and phenomenal European wines. We wanted to create a product that would appeal to a range of taste buds and be easy to pull off the shelf for any occasion.

We research every aspect of our customer experience – especially the wines. I can honestly say this is the most fun I’ve had creating any product. Everyone loves to talk about wine and we’ve been lucky to find many volunteers for our blind taste tests and food pairing focus groups.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

This is a question I get asked a lot! As with everything, it really comes down to knowing your customers and the types of content they want to see. We built our social media based off what we knew about our customers and the types of content they engage with. Understanding our target customers’ preferences with social media was integral not just in growing our social media presence, but also with our email marketing strategy and website content.

My advice to those starting out would be to talk to your customers and ask them about their experience with brands on social media. Look at the brands they follow and analyze the types of content they share and what works well for them.

Any thoughts, advice, or strategies you can share for fostering brand loyalty?

We’re always conducting research with our customers and looking for new ways to gather feedback. In addition to that, we love connecting with our customers at events, on our socials, and via email. It’s always fun to hear when people share our brand with friends. We realized we were getting a lot of new customers that way and decided to create our loyalty program, Wine Rack Rewards, through which people receive $10 to spend on our website when they refer friends to Vinat and, in turn, their friends get a discount on their first order.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.drinkvinat.com
• Instagram: @drinkvinat
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emily-r-mack-67a98a81/
• Other: Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/user/1218304040?si=2fe6ec82da28421a

Image Credits

For all attached headshots please credit Charlotte Bergan Cioli. Photos of wine bottles without faces in them do not need to be credited. Thank you!