We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Christine Meredith and Daisy Kwoh. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Christine and Daisy below.
Christine and Daisy, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. How did you come up with the idea for your business?
Christine: The way the wine is sold has never made sense to me – the shopping experience is both overwhelming and underwhelming – huge selections without many great options. Whether it’s at a restaurant or retail store, there are so many wines to pick from and so little information is provided to help with the decision.
The wine industry has always been flooded with mass-produced wines. The family-owned, small-batch wines have limited outlets and are getting harder and harder to find.
I wanted to create a place for people to discover wines from a trusted source. Wines that are not only delicious, but made honestly and harmoniously with the earth. I wanted to use descriptions that were relatable – making wines accessible without oversimplifying or inundating customers with technical information.
Growing up, my family and I spent many summers in Guildford and it’s a very special place for me. I also loved that many places still have a ‘village green’ where people gather and connect. I loved the name Guildford Green because it represents a shop that has this sense of community – where we know our customers and they trust us. It’s a place that brings family-owned wineries together and we help customers discover them.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
Daisy: Guildford Green is a farmer’s market for wine. For each season – fall, winter, spring and summer – our shop offers a curated collection of 20-30 wines that pair with the season’s freshest produce, seasonal recipes and special occasions.
Often, people have to travel through wine country to find new wines to try. We work closely with wineries and our wine partners to find wines, understand how they are made and then we share our favorites with our customers.
Christine: Our customers also love the way we describe our wines. Daisy and I are both certified sommeliers and we describe wine the way we experience it. We forego classic tasting notes for descriptions that elicit a relatable experience. For example, we would describe a rosé as “tastes like a dark cherry pie just exploded in your mouth – but without the sugar” instead of something like “vinified dry with medium acidity, grippy tannins and cherry notes.”
We use our descriptions and suggested pairings to create a shopping experience that feels like a recommendation from a trusted friend instead of an overwhelming grocery aisle.
How’d you meet your business partner?
Christine: I have spent all of my career working in the wine industry – from restaurants, to retails stores, to wineries. I was working for a few California wineries and overseeing their marketing efforts when Daisy joined our team.
Daisy: I think we were destined to work together, lol. Christine and I were always having a good time. It became immediately obvious that we were opposites in the way we worked, but that really helped us collaborate and get projects done pretty efficiently.
Christine: Yep – I then left the wineries to focus on designing Guildford Green. When it was ready, I remember calling Daisy up and she was very enthusiastic in helping me launch the business.
Do you have any stories of times when you almost missed payroll or any other near death experiences for your business?
It was October 2020 and we had just launched. At the time, we were deep in the pandemic and consumers were heavily shopping online across every category – thankfully for us, they were spending a lot on alcohol too. But as we entered November, we got some bad news from our packaging manufacturer.
With the supply chain issues and intense demand for cardboard boxes, everything was delayed. Our shipping boxes for the holidays (which were expected to arrive any day) would not arrive until the new year. We were starting to receive a lot of corporate gifting orders, and it became very clear we didn’t have enough boxes to make it through the rest of the year.
Our entire business was dependent on shipping direct to consumer, and with the energy and momentum from our launch, we couldn’t afford to pause the whole business a month after launching.
We spent hours on the phone calling every cardboard manufacturer across Southern California. Every day we would count the boxes in our warehouse and mentally forecast when we would run out. We tried various off-the-shelf boxes but given how fragile wine bottles are – it all felt too risky. We couldn’t afford to have wine bottles break on their way to our customers in something we hadn’t properly tested.
A large portion of our sales were local, within Los Angeles. We were using a network of drivers to deliver our orders. In a bit of desperation, we started a recycling program. We included a note with every local order, inviting customers to leave their empty boxes outside for pickup. They texted us and we coordinated drivers to pick up the boxes. For us, it was a pretty chaotic 6 weeks, especially while trying to navigate holiday sales. We were answering texts at all hours of the day and scrambling every morning to efficiently schedule drivers to concurrently handle deliveries and pickups. We were constantly online and kept this going through the holidays and thankfully made it to the end the year.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://guildfordgreen.com/
- Instagram: @guildfordgreenwine
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/guildfordgreenwine/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/guildfordgreen/