Warmer weather or an improved selection of world class whites? Probably both...
Vino Cammino Pty Ltd
Retail
Darlinghurst, NSW 102 followers
Your pathway to fine wine & great people
About us
We import and sell wine and liquor in Australia. The producers we exclusively represent are small, sustainable, family run operations. Our focus is on wine that we love, made by women.
- Website
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www.vinocammino.com.au
External link for Vino Cammino Pty Ltd
- Industry
- Retail
- Company size
- 1 employee
- Headquarters
- Darlinghurst, NSW
- Type
- Privately Held
- Founded
- 2023
- Specialties
- wine, cognac, barolo, barbaresco, champagne, chianti, and brunello
Locations
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Primary
Darlinghurst, NSW 2010, AU
Employees at Vino Cammino Pty Ltd
Updates
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We don’t have a business plan. Not a formal, written one at least. But the number one question we get from people outside of our startup/tech network (aside from the opening “how’s the business going?”), is “do you have a business plan?” Hello professional services friends ;). There is often an awkward moment of baffled surprise that follows when I say no. From people in startups/ tech it’s more often “what have you learned so far?” The feeling of certainty and confidence a written plan mapping a pathway to success can bring is understandable. For that reason, we’re writing one today based on what we’ve learned so far, at the request of our sole investor. Estimated life of relevance: 3-6 months. It might be a mistake thinking about this like a tech-startup. After all, we are an aspirational small business not an aspirational unicorn. Our business model is fairly traditional; there’s not a lot of innovation so far. Maybe it will all play out exactly as we have it in the plan. But the second we learn something that shifts us in a new direction, the fact it wasn’t in the plan will be given 0 weight.
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So you can't laugh, but here we were thinking that as a new small business making a serious investment in (delicious) inventory, we'd at least have the cushion of a few years of big losses to carry over and soften the eventual tax burden when we turn a profit... That is until we sat down to do Vino Cammino's taxes and, after checking 5 times and chatting with other physical product business owners, realised that changes in inventory value count as assessable income. So for year 1, that means the full value of our inventory. This leads to 4 thoughts: 1. Wow we had amazing income for a new business actively selling for only two months of FY24. Must write a post about 1 neat trick to generate massive e-commerce income. 2. It is amazing how many basic business concepts a career in professional services and digital tech doesn't teach you. 3. It will be nice when we can afford an accountant, though I can already hear my accounting friends saying 'you can't afford not to have an accountant'. 4. Who hurt you ATO? Why so mean?
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What are the most common triggers for a purchase of fine wine? In our experience so far, there are 2 clear winners and 1 clear loser. None of it surprising, and all of it supportive of the idea that consumers of fine wine want to understand the story behind the bottle. Winners 🍷 Tastings: (with wine as good as ours, we've seen a near 100% conversion to sales after various forms of tastings. If you're interested we've got a public tasting at Famelia in Newtown on September 19th. Tickets available from the Famelia website). Scalability is terrible of course... 📩 Email: The graph shows number of orders over time v. days since our last mailing list email. An oldie but a goodie, and oh so scalable. This must be why anywhere we've ever ordered wine from emails us so much. We use emails to tell the story of our producers, offer advice on all things fine wine, and alert our mailing list to events and special sales. Loser 🎬 Digital ads: Great for building the mailing list, but totally ineffective for immediate sales.
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Mind blowing how cheaply industrial producers can ship a bottle of wine, and these numbers don’t even include bulk sales (containers full of liquid)… Average export cost of an Italian bottle is $5 per 750mL bottle (AUD). Once it hits the supermarket shelves here that’s a lot of sub $20 Prosecco, Chianti and Pinot Grigio 😬 Needless to say this chart bears no resemblance to what we pay our exclusive artisan producers.
Avg Export Prices of Bottled Still Wine, 2022. Enormous range. U.S. prices exceed French prices. (Note, this does not include bulk or sparkling wine.)
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"But I can buy it in Italy for half that!" is a thought we had many times looking for a nice Italian red in Australia before becoming wine importers. It can't cost that much to bring it over can it? 💡 If you've ever wondered where your money goes when you are buying premium imported wine, we're here to shed a little light on it today. The example in the diagram is a rough breakdown of one of our entry level wines (though still premium compared to most wine consumed in Australia), if it were sold during one of our popular pre-arrival sales (join our mailing list to access the next one in September). 🏛 It's a sad fact that the federal government takes about as much as the producer will receive for these wonderful wines. The biggest hit is the Wine Equalisation Tax, which is calculated at 29% on the wholesale value of the wine, not the alcohol content (like it is for beer or spirits). If someone can enlighten us as to the rationale that would be great... That means it's $$$ for fine wine, but barely noticed by the supermarkets bringing in 1 Euro per litre "wine". I suppose if we ever make a taxable profit, the government will add to their already substantial winnings from your purchase. ⛴ The logistics / operations segment is where we'll aim to drive some savings as we scale, but available savings are in the single digit dollars at most. You might be surprised that the boat journey is one of the less expensive parts of our logistics, compared to trucking the wine to and from port (refrigerated), and delivering (for free) to your door. Most of this segment of the breakdown doesn't increase with the value of the wine, so the % reduces with more expensive wine. 🛒 Of course, it's helpful for our margin when people buy at full RRP, but most of our sales are either at 15% off during pre-arrival sales, or 10% off for our mailing list members at any other time. 💳 From the gross margin, we carve out things like payment fees, forex margins, marketing expenses and software platforms that keep the business running (e.g. Shopify, google, etc), as well as the fun but expensive bits like sourcing wine we love and maintaining relationships with our producers. 😅 So with such slim margins, how do we manage wholesale sales? Well.... we're not sure we actually make money on those - but it does build our reputation, let more people try our range when they're not at home, and increases our volumes which is a great way to keep our wonderful suppliers happy. (note from Josh: It's times like this I'm glad my co-founder and chief provider of capital doesn't have a LinkedIn account... Do you think I can ask for a salary yet?)
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A few times a day we’re asked “how’s the business going?” It’s easy to answer “great!” because it’s fun and challenging and we’re learning so much about so many things we didn’t realise would be part of supplying our customers with delicious wine. But if the question was more precise: “are you on track to building a viable business?” Then it’s a much harder question to answer because it is definitely too early to tell and will be for quite some time! But the bow-tie shaped chart shows a couple of key metrics we are monitoring to give us a sense of whether we are on the right trajectory. The blue line is monthly sales, proving the wisdom of an industry veteran who told us to “expect a bump at the start from friends keen to support you, but it’s what happens after that that counts.” We got a strong start thanks to the support of our wonderful friends, families and colleagues, but we’re pretty happy with where things have settled since then. The question now is can we deliver steady growth towards 10x that level within the next few years? That’s about the level where we think a viable business exists. We’ll need two important things to happen to get us there. Existing customers reordering (a sign that they are finding value in our range) and new customers joining (a sign that we can build our customer base beyond people we know). The red line is % of sales from returning customers and 0% or 100% would be a disaster at this stage. We like the feel of the current balance but a prolonged turn in either direction will be an early sign of a problem. For now, we’ll probably still just answer the question with “great!”
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Ever found yourself in a Coles or Woolies (now Endeavour) bottle shop and marvelled at the massive range of wine under $30? At Vino Cammino, precisely 0 bottles from our range retail under $30. We think much of the difference is driven by ownership. Thanks to an excellent resource maintained by The Real Review (link in comments), we know that that there are over 400 wine brands owned by supermarkets and other large corporate groups in Australia. Endeavour alone own 227. Coles have 84. And each of those brands have their own range of bottles, so it’s likely that thousands of bottles on big brand Australian bottle shop shelves are owned by a small handful of companies (but of course, you won’t read about it on the labels). So, how do you think those companies encourage (or make) decisions in the production of those wines? How would they prioritise cost, durability, and volume against sustainability, quality and complexity of flavour? Are they crafting a wine to offer the best expression of grape and place or something calculated at the last quarterly meeting of the finance, analytics and marketing teams? Of course, some nice wines are made at low price points. It's just hard to find them in a tidal wave of blandness disguised by clever labels. All of the wines at Vino Cammino have one owner: it’s the winemaker and their family. The pride they take in their vineyards and the wine they send into the world, their role as custodians for future generations, and honouring the memory of generations before them mean every decision they make is designed to create the finest product possible. We’re proud to support their efforts and reckon they are worth every dollar. Life’s too short to drink boring supermarket wine. #whoownsyourwine #therealreview #duopoly #artisanwine
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We've seen the #Pareto Principle (80% of outcomes come from 20% of causes) play out in all kinds of ways over our careers, but wanted to see if it held true for an early stage #wine merchant like Vino Cammino. After having a good giggle at Chat GPT's pictorial interpretation of the principle, which is wrong in all sorts of ways, we crunched the numbers on our first 3 months of sales... And gosh, if we count all of our mailing list members as customers (whether they've purchased or not), the revenue from our top 20% of customers comes in at 82% of revenue 😲 Vilfredo was really onto something hey? Now excuse us for a moment while we figure out what to do with this information. Thoughts welcome.
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We love this perspective from Eric Asimov in the NY Times on the role of wine. It resonates with the first in a series of pieces on the joy of wine that we published a few weeks back in our blog. Link in comments https://lnkd.in/dkgRGAMU