Hi everyone,
I'm posting this in hopes that this may be interesting to a few of you and maybe I can answer some questions along the way!
My wife and I are in the middle process of opening our own wine shop in the downtown area of our little beach town in Michigan.
A little background on us and why we are doing this:
Neither of us are somms, though, pre-pandemic, my wife was studying to take the first few tests. That all got derailed due to the pandemic and now we are in the midst of long days of building/planning and it's kind of on the back-burner for now. I'm not super concerned about either of us being a certified somm, since our approach to the shop is going to be a little different than most (at least around my area... more on that later).
I've worked in the entertainment industry for the last decade and my wife has worked in the service/hospitality industry and worked at a winery for the last several years. One of my passions is starting new businesses and developing businesses and her passion is introducing people to new wines.
Our shop is a little different than most, which is why we decided to pull the trigger and dive into it. We will be based inside of a larger market with around 12 other food-related small business' in the same area. Knowing this and including the idea that we would have additional foot traffic outside of the norm really helped us make the decision to go forward with the business. Being that we aren't a standalone business in our own building, we felt more confident because our overhead would be lower and therefore margins would be higher and the potential for the shop to be profitable is greater (at least we hope!). We did a lot of our own market research and developed a pretty in-depth business plan.
We are currently in the middle of building out our space - I work full-time, so I jump in and help in the early mornings and in the evenings. My wife is a very handy builder and wood-worker, so she has been spending her entire days in the shop building walls, shelves, etc. based on her designs she created during the pandemic.
We also have just finished paperwork for the retail licenses and food establishment licenses and will be going through inspections within the next month (hopefully!).
The overall idea of the shop is that we want to fill a void in our area. We do have several liquor stores that sell wine (along with grocery stores) - but most of them are all the same wines. The "mass market" wines, as I like to say. We do have 1 other local shop that is strictly wine, but, based on our research, we believe that our target markets will be completely different.
As people who love wine, we have noticed several things in our area:
- no shops/stores had staff that were knowledgeable (except for the one standalone shop - whose owner is extremely knowledgeable!) And none of them have shelf-talkers that explain what the wine is and what kind of tasting notes you might get from it.
- none of the shops/stores carried unique, interesting wine that were trendy at the moment - sure, they had a lot of big fancy wines, but no fun, unique and (what I would consider) "interesting" wines. Let's just say there was a lack of diversity in the wines sold locally.
Therefore, we want to fill those voids. Our plan is to work with small distributors that work with small wineries (focusing on women winemakers, minority winemakers, etc.) and we will taste every wine that we stock. We want to be able to write out detailed (but brief) shelf talkers so you know what you're going to be tasting when you buy a wine - and the story behind that wine/winery/maker.
Edit: I forgot to add - based on our location, which is a prime spot in our downtown beach town. - our target market is locals and tourists / grab-and-go beach goers, along with people coming into the market to grab some items for dinner (cheese, produce, bottle of wine). Because of this market, we have a lot of opportunity to pair items with the other vendors in the market (cheese and a bottle of wine, right??) and during the summer months we will be catering to the tourist crowd on their way to the beach and/or their hotel - with some good canned wines (gasp!), lots of rose' and chilled wines to quickly grab for the beach/boat.
I'm not really sure what else to write here and what you are interested in, so please ask away. I'm an open book and love to help other people!
For 15 years, Athan Zafirov has traveled the vineyards around the world and worked with some of the greatest chefs including Francois Duc and Alan Brown.
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