We recently connected with Marissa Lange and have shared our conversation below.
Marissa , thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Risking taking is a huge part of most people’s story but too often society overlooks those risks and only focuses on where you are today. Can you talk to us about a risk you’ve taken – it could be a big risk or a small one – but walk us through the backstory.
Building our winery! Our family’s viticulture business was thriving with long-tenured clients and long-term contracts with a diversified group of winegrape buyers when we determined that to cultivate a lasting impact through our family business, we needed to diversify our route to market to be able to sell our fruit by the ton, by the gallon and by the case. The wine business is extremely asset-heavy, so we pushed our chips to the center of the table and leveraged our vineyard land to secure the financing to build our generational, state-of-the-art winery in the heart of our estate vineyards while keeping it privately-held. We designed a winery to ultimately meet the capacity needs of our vineyards – and having no clients, no distributor relationships, and no history of making wine from the fruit that we grew, we plunged into the opportunity, engaged experienced winemakers to craft high quality wines and set out to make our mark as the flagbearer of quality from our appellation. It is something we continue to work at today.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
Let’s first start with an introduction to LangeTwins. We are a fifth-generation, farm-first, family-owned organization crafting estate-grown wines which are dual-certified in the practices of sustainable winegrowing. Our wines are more than just estate wines – they are single vineyard wines proudly sourced from vineyard blocks we have cultivated for decades (and in many cases, generations). The wines reflect the grounding concept of “somewhereness” (aka terroir) in a boldly vulnerable way through our desire to showcase individual vineyards and the characteristics they impart. In that way, our wines are both accessible and extremely exclusive!
My dad and uncle, Randall and Brad Lange, are the identical twins behind LangeTwins (and fourth generation winegrape growers in the Lodi region) and I’m the eldest of the fifth generation. Home is the River Ranch vineyard where I was raised with my two younger brothers, Aaron and Joseph, and next door to my two cousins, Philip and Kendra. All five of us ultimately joined the family business after college.
As the children of farmers, we grew up on the land – it was first our playground and then our life’s work but always a place of deep appreciation for the synergies between agriculture and the natural habitat. I headed east for college, earning a degree in Neuroscience from Brown University in Rhode Island and then returned to my wine roots with opportunities in marketing brand management at Robert Mondavi Winery (now Constellation Brands) followed by Beringer Blass Wine Estates (now Treasury Wine Estates). In 2005, I returned to our family business to establish our
winery operation, serving as President overseeing all aspects of the winery operation, including winemaking, production, sales, marketing, hospitality, administration and new business development.
What’s been the most effective strategy for growing your clientele?
Find your “why” – why you do what you do and its impact on how you do it – and then seek clients and customers who are values-aligned. In this way, this maximizes opportunities and solutions which mutually benefit both parties and creates space to collaborate on market obstacles and competitive opportunities. For us, this process was iterative and took a number of years to determine our core: to cultivate a lasting impact, together. This led us to rationalize our wholesale partnerships, prioritize existing client relationships and evaluate new opportunities through the lens of its capacity to support environmental stewardship and enhance the impact and extend the importance of rooted family business in culture and community.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
Having worked for two major wine corporations prior to endeavoring to launch our own family wine initiative, I had experience in marketing brand management, productprice strategy and sales support. And that – in hindsight – accounted for a very smallpercent of our business in 2005. What I did not have any exposure to was inventory and balance sheet management, cash flow forecasts and financial modeling, new business development and operational expertise. To garner the financial support of our lending partner, I needed to present a five-year business plan – and to do that, I needed to know what I did not know. Without a MBA on my resume, I scoured the internet for examples of business plans, voraciously read books on financial rigor, interviewed consultants of industry to level-set my assumptions, and endeavored to build (from scratch in excel) an economic model which tracked inventory and capitalized expenses, created a balance sheet and profit/loss statement and established a cash flow forecast with a level of conservative confidence for future success. We’ve been on a growth trajectory ever since – and I continue to add to my informal masters degree in business with every negotiation.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://langetwins.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/langetwins/?hl=en