Tom Hollings: If you're like a wine geek, a real power user so to speak. And Different Drop is like Disneyland if they would want to drink it themselves and it doesn't go in the pack. And they still love to call me up and have a big chat. The guys who call me a wine flirt.
[Voiceover]: Welcome to Add to Cart, Australia's leading e commerce podcast that Express delivers all you need to know in the fast moving world of online retail. Every week, Nathan Bush from E Suite and an e commerce industry expert will share the news, research and insights that you need to know to keep you at the top of your game and of course, keep your customers Adding to Cart.
Nathan Bush: Hello and welcome to Add to Cart. My name is Nathan Bush, host of Add to Cart and director at e
Nathan Bush: commerce talent agency E Suite.
Nathan Bush: Now I like a glass of vino as much as the next guy, but I don't know a great deal about wine so I always make sure I've got today's guest firmly saved in my speed dial. Today I'm talking to Tom Hollings, co founder of Different Drop, a self confessed wine flirt. I think he flirted a little bit with me, if I'm honest, whose passion has turned into an e commerce business with a focus on wines crafted by real people with a sense of adventure and authenticity. Different Drop unearths the best and most exciting drops from producers all over Australia and uses some great tech to make
Nathan Bush: them accessible to all.
Nathan Bush: In today's chat, we cover a heap of ground from how he and his co founder Brett started the business from Brett's mum's garage in 2013.
Nathan Bush: And that doesn't just mean finding Brett's mum's old wine, by the way.
Nathan Bush: We also talk about how they pivoted to doing their own delivery during COVID and what he learned from meeting the great Ricky Ponting. And we ask a very controversial question. Ice cubes in red wine. Passable or Hell no. Only tackling the big issues here at Add to Cart. Make sure you stick around until the end. Tom has a very special discount code for our Add to Cart listeners. So let's get into it. Thanks to our partners Shopify plus and Signet. Here's our conversation with Tom Hollings, co founder of Different Drop. Tom, welcome to Add to Cart.
Tom Hollings: Nathan, thanks very much for having us. I'm a long time listener, first time caller, so excited to have a chat.
Nathan Bush: First time I've heard that on this show.
Nathan Bush: Actually, I think I've made it. Where you're at at the moment is incredible.
Nathan Bush: You've got this beautiful. To set the scene for everyone else. You're in this. What looks like a beautiful dark wine cellar.
Nathan Bush: But from our pre chat, it actually
Nathan Bush: wasn't always a wine cellar.
Tom Hollings: No, no. It's pretty much the only place I could go here at ddhq where it was a bit quiet actually with the guys busy in the warehouse. But now this is what we call our situation room. And a bit of a funny name, but no, it's this building we're in. It's an amazing old building. If you ever come to Sydney, it's like 150 years old. It's one of the old W down in Ultimo near the. Near the fish markets there. It's this crazy old building with low roofs and beams and everything everywhere. Fun to run an E commerce business out of as we've grown and this particular room. So our space was like a recording studio for 30 odd years. Really iconic Sydney recording studio. And this was the old control room and we've kept it here and we use it now for sort of meetings and videos. But the lighting doesn't really work so I've got lamps everywhere trying to light it up. And yeah, some amazing bottles here in the wall. Some of the. The real artisans that we work with, people like Luke Lambert and Sammy Odie and Tara Sakoda and some other amazing producers too.
Nathan Bush: That's cool. And sharing the spirit of the bands that have come before you like Midnight Oil and Grinspoon and some other crackers. Right? That's it.
Tom Hollings: Yeah. God knows what went on here all those years ago, but I choose not to think too much about it.
Nathan Bush: I'm sure Different Drop headquarters is a lot wilder than those bands maybe a few years ago. All right, let's get into it.
Nathan Bush: Different Drop started back in 2013.
Nathan Bush: You're one of the co founders and
Nathan Bush: obviously 2013 isn't that long ago, but
Nathan Bush: in the world of online it is.
Nathan Bush: And I think the world of online
Nathan Bush: wine especially has shifted a lot since then. Can you tell us how you got into it and started Different Drop?
Tom Hollings: So basically Different Drop is a digital platform for discovering artisan wines from all around the world. We're trying to make it easier for people to access these rare and exciting wines that you can't tend to find anywhere else. And that's sort of been the way it was right back from the very beginning too. So I fell into wine somewhat accidentally in my early 20s. I got a bottle shop job and got really interested in all the different varieties and regions. And then just after I finished University. I accidentally applied for a call center position selling wine over the phone, rocking up to the interview in a suit in Surry Hills. And everyone else was wearing shorts and singlets and drinking wine at their desks with their headphones on. And I thought, this isn't for me. But the, the guy said, look, stick around, it's good fun and you learn a bit about wine. And I end up staying there for five or six years and just totally fell in love with wine. We got to meet all these amazing producers from around Australia and try some incredible wines.
Nathan Bush: And were you a wine drinker at that stage? As a fresh uni grad, I was getting into it.
Tom Hollings: So my now wife, then girlfriend loved wine and her family as well. So I was starting to learn and I had that job in a bottle shop. But no, no, it exploded at that point because I think on our first day there, we had Bruce Tyrrell. For everyone who knows wine is a leg, Australian wine, came in to show us all his wines and, you know, wines, this amazing product because I think more than anything else, it has this ability to really tell a story in the glass, you know, where it's from. When it was from, the French had this amazing term called terroir, which refers to everything that goes into the environment that makes the wine taste as it does, you know, the wind, the soil, the sun, everything. And that's really cool. But there's this other part that I love and that's the people. I think when you visit cellar doors and you meet the winemakers or the owners of a winery and you hear their story and what they're trying to achieve, it's really inspiring. And you go down a bit of a rabbit hole. And wine's unique like that, I think. And on top of that, it's obviously a bloody delicious drink. And I just. I just totally fell in love with, with all those small producers and that was sort of what I did there at that business, was looked after all those wineries. And then I think we're in about 2012, 2013, and Woolworths came along and bought that business. And unsurprisingly, they had a slightly different worldview to me about supporting small independent producers. They were looking to do more of their own thing and the bigger brands, and that wasn't for me. So I got talking with two of my best mates at the time, so Brett Cantilby, who I'm still in business with, and another good friend, Tim Spencer, about maybe doing our own thing and looking online, but not going the discount route like Everyone else was then I think the other online guys, like Vina, Mofa, Cracker and these guys were all about, you know, deep discounts on distress stock off the back of a truck. And we thought, well, no, we can go more about storytelling, rare wines, different wines, small producers, and go that angle. So we quit our jobs. I just got married at the time and moved back in with my wife's family and Brett moved back in with his family and it was a definite slog for the first couple years.
Nathan Bush: I was about to say, you'll need a lot of wine during that period.
Tom Hollings: Did we ever. Yeah, we. We were based out of. We were working out of Brett's mum's garage. He had this really big, nice garage. And originally we thought we'd just be dropshipping. We didn't think we'd be holding stock. That was sort of my background. But I think the very first order ever placed was my dad and they sent the wrong wine to the wrong address. And we quickly realized that it's not going to work with small producers, farmers essentially, you know, in the far corners of Australia. So we started buying stock and with the kind of different wines we were selling, people wanted to mix and match and try different things. And so we started filling the garage with stock, which was a whole fun on its own.
Nathan Bush: And was that a challenge in the
Nathan Bush: early days, being that your differentiator was about rare and special wine, creating those partnerships with the wineries as a relatively new player?
Tom Hollings: Yeah, it was. Thankfully, I had a lot of contacts already going into it, so that helped. And even with wine, it's a real, like, community. And once you've got enough friends in the industry and people trust you, it's easy to start to get a roll on and you get this word of mouth on the supply side as well. So after a little while, we had wineries coming to us because they heard that we weren't trying to discount their product and they knew that, you know, I had a reputation to look after these wineries, so that helped. But even then it was. It was slow going at the beginning, for sure. We were bootstrapped. We weren't out acquiring customers, so to speak. We were just putting great products on a pretty basic website and doing all sorts of, you know, tastings and anything we could. Just to try and sell a bottle
Nathan Bush: of wine and tell us about where you are today.
Nathan Bush: We kind of hinted at the headquarters there. How big are we looking at different drop now?
Tom Hollings: Yes. So it's grown a lot since then. Covid helped us as well. Like it did for a lot of online retail. So these days we've got a team here of nearly 20 people and you know, we're shipping hundreds of orders every day all around the country. We work with some 12, 1300 suppliers in the last 12 months, last I checked. So from all around the world now as well was just Australia at the beginning. Thousands of SKUs on the site, new products every day and the business is growing, you know, quite, quite quickly. So it's exciting.
Nathan Bush: What's the most challenging part with that growth, especially from that Covid period?
Tom Hollings: Well, managing all the people is a different, different kind of beast now. We've gone from doing a lot of it ourselves to delegating and managing. But I love it actually. It's great fun and it's been probably the most rewarding part of the last few years is growing a team here. But some amazing people who are really passionate about what they do. So that's a different challenge but I really enjoy it. I think just operationally, but we haven't changed much about our philosophy of what we're doing, but just trying to handle the added volumes. When Covid started and the pandemic started and Australia Post really crumbled under the pressure, you know, we had orders to the next suburb that were taking weeks to deliver. Like we're an online retailer that couldn't deliver, which wasn't. Even though we had all these other people landing on our site, we couldn't give a good service. So we pivoted to doing our own deliveries actually at the time, which again came about sort of fortuitously. We had a lot of contacts in the industry like sommeliers and wine reps and stuff who were out of work and they were asking us if they could help us pack boxes or do deliveries or whatever. And next thing we know we had a fleet of like well known Sydney wine trade zipping around Sydney, dropping boxes of wine off everywhere. And Brett, my business partner who looks after all of the technology and operational stuff, he found some really neat software called on fleet which kind of routes all the deliveries and great live tracking and communication to the customer. And fast forward now we've got a little fleet of our own vans on the road and we've really lent into it. So we're doing our own next day deliveries all around Sydney and that's been a game changer for us.
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Nathan Bush: Do you feel like that's a forever thing, as in that's just part of your business model now?
Tom Hollings: Yeah, I think we bought two vans. And then after that, when we realized we needed more, we had this pretty big conversation like, which way are we going here? You know, we either pull out now, we just have a couple vans to zip around, or we're going down this route. And we said, no, bugger it, let's do it because it's great. Customers loved it. Yeah, that was the difference. You know, that. Not just the speed, but just the quality of delivery. You know, someone in a different drop shirt and a different drop van who knows the product. With the live tracking, it was a totally different experience. And we get every single day customers write to us saying how much that love the delivery. And it's become a real competitive advantage for us. And especially around Christmas time, like usually after about the first week of December, we pretty much stop trading almost because it's just too unreliable. Whereas last year we could go right up to Christmas Eve. So that's great.
Nathan Bush: And what are your qualifiers around that? Minimum spend and geographically no minimum spend.
Tom Hollings: We have a free freight threshold at $150, so we're trying to encourage people to get up there. And our average order is about 250 bucks anyway, so. So that. That tends to work out. And then we just do our own deliveries within Sydney. So we started off kind of like an inner Sydney sort of circle. Now we go two or three times a week from Palm beach to Cronulla as well. We'd love to do it. Yeah, we'd love to do it in Melbourne. We're working with a career company in Melbourne at the moment who are great. But maybe one day we could do it ourselves there too, which would be fun.
Nathan Bush: Oh, it's fascinating. And I love this direction. We had Mike from scratch Pet Foods
Nathan Bush: on Pre Pandemic and they've done a
Nathan Bush: very similar thing with pet food is, you know, created their own fleet and they're trolling that. Which is great.
Nathan Bush: We also heard from Dean at Digital Wine Ventures.
Nathan Bush: I'm sure you're across.
Nathan Bush: Yeah. What's your take on how they're trying
Nathan Bush: to make E Commerce accessible for wine producers around Australia?
Tom Hollings: Yeah, it's a really interesting one. Wine Depot. Dean's a great entrepreneur in the wine game. He's got a lot of great, great models and ideas and Wine Depot is. It's a different side of the industry to us. It's more B2B, possibly down the track. There might be a B2C component once they have it set up, but for the moment at least, it's more around third party logistics. From wineries to venues is a big part of it. And they're trying to build an online market for sommeliers and venues to buy from, which is challenging. It's like trying to build any marketplace. It's a bit chicken in the egg. You need all the customers to get the supply, you need the suppliers get the customers. So that's going to be a challenge for them. And then they also do fulfillments for wineries to their own, like wine club members and stuff. So it's a different space to us, but it's really interesting. I guess the takeaway for us is trying to own the operations and own the logistics and investing in that is something that we've learned from what he's doing. Definitely.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, definitely. And there seems to be a range of services and partners like yourself that are helping Australian wineries at the moment. I saw a report come out this week that Australian wine exports have actually decreased 30% internationally and even to China, 97% down in volume of sales. It's just incredible what some of the wineries have been through recently. Right.
Tom Hollings: It's been shocking. So. And you can throw on top of that the bushfires two years ago, which really, really badly impacted a lot of the producers. We work with a lot of wineries last year, through floods and hail, storms and stuff, lost their crop and then the lockdowns and the impact on. On premise. So our wines are more in the premium end of things, I guess, like average bottle of wine is probably 30, 35 bucks a bottle. So we're not, our producers aren't doing the huge kind of mass exports to China, but what they are relying on is the restaurants. So a typical winery that we work with might sell as much as 80% of their volume to restaurants normally. And then a few retailers like us and a couple of these good little independent ones and that just totally fell away. So that was devastating for them and a lot of the really good importers that we work with too. So, yeah, we just tried to really double down on our mates in the industry and do what we can to keep stock moving over the time because it's pretty devastating for them and still is to Be honest, because the government support's not there anymore and the city is still a ghost town.
Nathan Bush: Do you see that government support for wineries and producers changing anytime soon?
Tom Hollings: Not if you believe the kind of sentiment that, you know, they tend to come out with more of it's every man for himself now, let's get back to normal kind of thing, which is really difficult. A lot of friends of mine in Sydney hospitality are really up against it. You know, they may be doing 20, 30% of their normal trade, you know, and you can't survive like that for long. And a lot of them were having a hard time before COVID just with skyrocketing rents and also the shift towards eating and drinking at home. I think that's been a big part of our success too. Like Covid gave it a boost, but we were seeing that change in consumer behavior before that anyway. Yep.
Nathan Bush: So we've talked a little bit about how you're supporting Australian wineries and the partnerships that you have there. You're also really well known for your customer service and about how you go above and beyond. Is there any particular different drop customer service story that stands out for you?
Tom Hollings: Oh, good question. Yeah, it's true. We've always really put a big effort into service. We're aware that we're not being face to face with our customers. It's so important to find those little moments. When we started up, we used to do a handwritten note in every single order that went out the door in a little chocolate. We did that for years, actually. I'd love to say we still did it, but it's just. It's a bit too hard now. But we've got a lot of older customers that we met in the early days. So I used to do these tastings, like cooking schools and dinner parties, whatever, all sorts of stuff. Met a lot of these mostly elderly wine drinkers. Right. Who we were getting into, like natural wines and different stuff. And they still love to call me up and have a big chat, the guys who called me a wine flirt. But there's probably one story. We had a really good customer of ours who was up somewhere regionally, maybe Newcastle, and he had a wedding or a big function on or something and had ordered all the stock from us and hadn't turned up. Thanks. I was post and I think what we did was we organized. We bought all the wines or similar wines from a competitor of ours up there and arranged for it all to be like express shipped to this guy's function so that his night wasn't impacted at all and it cost us a fortune. We were a much smaller business then and, and then we lost all the stock on top of that as well, the original stock, but those sort of things. We've always made sure we do anything we can to keep the customers happy.
Nathan Bush: Yeah. And what is your customer service mantra or approach in creating those connections now when you're at scale rather than it's just Tom at the end of the phone being the wine flirt, how do you scale that customer service?
Tom Hollings: We put a big focus on inbound, not really good responsive service. Like, we don't. We don't do any real outbound. We don't do any kind of cold calling or anything like that. We obsess over the customer journey and the customer experience. So we're really trying to cut off problems at the, at the source and just constantly looking at like, how do we make the delivery better, how do we make the comms better, how do we make the checkout better, how do we make the follow up better? All these little things. And rather than hiring more customer service people to field complaints and then the people that we have had, have had here responding to phone calls and tickets on Gorgeous and things like that were just great people. They've worked. I think what's been really key to the success is they've worked throughout other parts of the business too. Whether it's like doing deliveries or in our warehouse or helping with content or whatever. So they really understand the business as a whole. They know wine and yeah, they just give a great. A great experience whenever someone gets in touch with us. But to be honest, considering the volume, now that we have very few problems, really.
Nathan Bush: Yeah. You mentioned Gorgeous there as your customer service platform. Why are you working with Gorgias?
Tom Hollings: So Brett looks after all of that tech stack here and we've tried a few different things. We used Zendesk before we used a few other ones, but I think it was just gorgeous. It was very clean, very simple. For a smaller business, I think it's super easy to use, very easy to track tickets, very easy to a few different people plugged in. I think in general, our focus has been very much around simplicity with operations and particularly with our tech stack. We moved back to Shopify Plus a few years ago after a failed attempt at Magento and just made the call to just really simplify everything as much as possible.
Nathan Bush: And did you go straight onto Shopify plus or did you go standard Shopify first?
Tom Hollings: So we started our business on standard Shopify and then we had all these ideas about customizing it. So this is back when Shopify was probably a little less customizable and we really wanted to have this super customized, unique experience. And we had our mate Tim who was coding it and everything, but it just took so much work and then he moved overseas and left the business and then we were stuck with this website that fell apart. We had a disastrous period there around 2017, 2016 where the website was just crumbling. Our conversion rate was down below 1. We were literally sending emails to our customers with like a footer at the bottom saying, you know, if you can't order on our website, please give us a call and you know, we'll do it that way. It was just a disaster. And then we made the call to totally re platform back onto Shopify plus and spend a bit of money, do it properly. But then once it was set up, like we don't have any in house developers now it's just us and it's just so easy to use and plug different apps in and tweak the, you know, the theme and stuff.
Nathan Bush: And you talked about that desire to customize. Obviously Shopify have done a lot of work since then. Since you've come back onto the platform to allow people to do more customization. Is there any kind of feature or app that you're just loving at the moment?
Tom Hollings: It's just how they all, how everything plugs in. It's gorgeous. So we use Klaviyo for our marketing and our emails and stuff and how that all just plugs in so seamlessly and with data flowing back and forth. Some like Shopify Flow is great. We use another app called Arigato which does some, some really cool automations on the site as well.
Nathan Bush: Yeah.
Tom Hollings: Which is really good for us. There's a few new apps we're playing around with, around like customer communication as well. Like, you know, send thank you videos to people and doing different things like that. But for me it's not one little thing, it's just how it all just kind of connects.
Nathan Bush: Yeah.
Tom Hollings: So, so seamlessly because that's been so empowering for us. It means we can have content guys who know nothing about coding or anything and they can just get in there themselves and change the site and play around different things.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, absolutely. And speaking of content, you mentioned at the start about wine being a storytelling game.
Nathan Bush: Your product pages are pretty amazing considering
Nathan Bush: the range you've got there. You've got over 5,000 unique wines and your product pages are full of detail and inspiration. Tell us about what you've Got on your product page so we can set the scene for our listeners.
Tom Hollings: Yes, sure. So we take all of our own original bottle shots for a start, which is unusual in the industry as it is usually just hodgepodge, you know, either from a winery or some competing website. We wanted a uniform look across the site, so we take all of our own images. We have a lot of the imagery of the producers that's really important to us. We're trying to show that these are made by real people. That's always the story with wine, but it's not always the reality. A lot of wine sold is made in a big factory somewhere. These are made by real farmers. And we really. The best way for us to get that across is visually where we can. We have product videos there from the producers as well, where they're talking about either that wine or just their story in general. We have customer reviews using a kendo, which it works really well. We have a big series of different expert reviews, so we subscribe to every wine publication in the universe and have all these different expert reviews there, which is a big part of selling premium wine. We have all of the wineries technical info which work with them. They provide for us, you know, winemaking details and how it's grown and everything. And then probably the biggest part of it, and the hardest part is we write our own original copy on each wine too, and each winery. So, and that's like a longer form, anywhere from three to five paragraphs of copy, proper wine copy. And we did that at the beginning. It was just me in the beginning, but I'm a rubbish writer.
Nathan Bush: And is that in addition to kind of features and benefits?
Tom Hollings: Totally. So the features and benefits are more kind of copied and pasted, saying, here's the alcohol, here's the sellering potential, here's the oak it was aged in, et cetera, for all the geeks. And then this is us then telling the story, because we really believe all these wines have a story and where they've come from. So that was just me. And then we've got Wade here, who's been with us since the beginning. He did a lot of the copywriting, but quickly outgrew him. So these days we've actually got like a team of external writers we've put together, so people that write for other publications, wine rep, sommeliers, a couple of winemakers that just love wine can write a bit. And we've got them all plugged into this system. We're using some software called Airtable, which is like a database Management software that's, that's really cool. And again it plugs into Shopify. Again, this is what Brett built. He loves this stuff. I'm just the product guy. But don't say that.
Nathan Bush: Take the credit. Take the credit. He's not here.
Tom Hollings: He's not here. He's not here. He can't hear. Well done, Brett. It's really smart and basically it's got an entire database of all products we've ever had. And whenever we load a new product onto our website, it flows down here. And if we've had that product before, it'll automatically populate it with all of the previous content that might be relevant, like the non vintage specific content or if you've had that producer before in the store, it'll populate all that producer's content, the images, the descriptions and cuts out heaps of the publishing time. And then our external writers can actually log directly into this software and it's very point and clicky and they just fill in the gaps. And it's been a total game changer for us. So we've just about doubled our range in the last six months using this system. And then we're running out of space now warehouse though, so we're starting to do a little bit more just in time as well, using some of the stock that's sitting in other warehouses around Sydney, but using all this system to produce the content. And I think that's giving us a really dynamic store with lots of great content.
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Nathan Bush: And those external writers, do you send them a pack of a whole bunch of new wines that you want to put up on the site? Get them to taste test and then write or how does that sometimes.
Tom Hollings: Sometimes I'd love to be able to do that. But just the velocity that we're doing now, like we're sending these guys batches of 30 or 40 at a time and we're hoping they can pump them out in like half an hour each. So if we sent them 30 bottles of wine, I reckon their productivity would slow somewhat.
Nathan Bush: And just a question for a friend. How many glasses of wine is best for. For writing great content? You know, you know the pool rule, where it's like the two beer rule, you play the best pool after that?
Tom Hollings: Yeah, yeah. I think it goes up exponentially with your experience in doing it. So for me personally, like I've had three or four already today and you know, it's going really well.
Nathan Bush: No, just.
Nathan Bush: And this is a nine o' clock podcast.
Tom Hollings: No, no, no, no. It is important to taste the products with certain things. There's. These guys are professional writers, they know, they know how to write about wine and there's enough background. But there's some of these really obscure wines from, you know, other parts of the world that might be a grunewelt enough from, you know, Austria that's, you know, fermented in clay Amphora for a producer they've never heard of. And you know, they might need to taste that so they know what they're talking about. So those will try and send samples where we can.
Nathan Bush: Your producers must love it when they log onto your website. You've obviously done the transactional deal and the commercials and then they log onto the website to see their wine brought to life in a way that they've never seen before.
Tom Hollings: That's really the idea. Yeah, we've always treated it, yes, we're an online retailer, but we, we do think of ourselves more of a platform or a marketplace, like, that's more double sided. We really look after our suppliers. We want to make sure they're getting 51% of every transaction, if you know what I mean. And we know if we keep them happy, they're going to keep coming back to us, giving us rare products, giving us first access to things. And we really, that's our mission is to help these guys grow. And if they can grow, then it's going to make it easier for people to try their wines. So now we want to keep going with the content, not slow down. We want to really make it a destination for not just buying the wines, but learning about the product as well. More content, more interaction, more experiences.
Nathan Bush: And do you Find customers, spend a long dwell time on those product pages.
Tom Hollings: Yeah, yeah. We were using hotjar tracking software and. Yeah. Which is fun to geek out of it and just watch creepily watch people on the website. Not literally them but their browsing behavior. Yeah, people, you can see them read, read, read, read, read, click next Wine or got another product from that producer and spend a lot of time on the site. The kind of orders we get too are just crazy. It's not like here's a six pack on special. I think there's seven different products is the average per order for us. Yeah. And you see these orders with like dozens of individual different wines, you know, from all over the world. And it scares me to think how long they must have spent putting that order together over dinner.
Nathan Bush: And like you pointed out at the start, you're very different to the vino mofos of the world who are keen to sell cases on bulk and get
Nathan Bush: them out the door in helping people
Nathan Bush: bundle those choices together.
Nathan Bush: Because I can guess it would be
Nathan Bush: overwhelming if you're on the site and there's 5,000 different choices and you're a wine lover. Could be overwhelming. Any tips on how to help people bundle them together?
Tom Hollings: For sure. I think it's been a challenge for us. We've always been pretty. If you're like a wine geek, a real power user so to speak. And different drop is like Disneyland. You know, there's so much stuff there and you know, do it yourself. But we don't want to be too exclusive or elitist or intimidating for just an emerging drinker. I think that kind of, you know, 30 to 45 year old young professional is, is the category that we really want to go after a bit more aggressively. And they're interested in wine, they're happy to spend good money on wine, but they don't necessarily know all the ins and outs of the different sub regions of Barolo, you know, in Italy. So for them, yeah, look, we put a big focus on navigation around the site and probably the biggest thing for us has been our mix packs. So we've, we've dabbled with different subscription offerings over, over the years and they've actually never really taken for us. We tend to find our customers want to buy what they want when they want it. But the mixed packs are an easy way for them to just go, you know what? I want to try natural wine. You know, I'm hearing all the cool kids are doing it and I don't know where to start. I don't know which one's Good. Which one's not? I mean, so we've got, you know, it's only natural mix pack or the it's all Greek to me mix pack or we've got all these, you know, silly names we come up with. And there's probably 50 or 60 different packs on the site at the moment with every different kind of style and lots of different regions. And they're just aimed to be the introduction starting point if you're not sure. So I definitely recommend that kind of bundling. We use a lot of data to look at what people. We look at popular search terms on the site, right? So the brands that are popular, for example, Pinot is our most popular variety. We can see that very easily. So we always make sure we've got three or four different Pinot packs available on the site at different price points and with popular products.
Nathan Bush: And I suppose too you've built up that reputation market now where people, when you put packs together, people almost treat you like their personal dealer, for lack
Tom Hollings: of a better word.
Nathan Bush: And then they trust the packs you put together. Not just that you're trying to sell the cheap shit that's lying around.
Tom Hollings: That's been really important because that's traditionally what happened in the wine industry. You had these subscription offerings where it was just again, distress stock pallets and pallets of last year's vintage that isn't drinking very well anymore. Old rose, you know, nothing better. And so now we've always had to avoid that temptation. You know, it's probably come at our own expense at times, you know, you know, when you're looking to try and get your margins up, you know, it's easy to try and almost deceive your customer and slip something in. But that's just not what we do. The guys here know that all the buyers and the content people and the people that put the packs together, customer obsessed. And if they wouldn't want to drink it themselves, then it doesn't go in the package. Yeah, that's great.
Nathan Bush: Now talking about community, because you've built a great community there around different drop. I saw that you're doing some Instagram lives with a link to purchase wine direct through Instagram. How's that going for you?
Tom Hollings: Yeah, it's a bit of fun. We were a bit late to the virtual wine tasting party in our space, but we didn't want to do anything kind of half assed. So no, we've been doing DD live, which is me a little break at the moment. But before Christmas is me on a Thursday night chatting to different winemakers, very chilled out, talking about just what's going on. Not getting too technical or anything. We had a couple of wines open. We encouraged people to buy the wines before the tastings, to drink along with us and get to kind of meet the winemakers. It was great fun. Yeah, I think it went really well. I mean, such a high roi because they're so easy to do. I was just sitting at home in my lounge room. I'm not sure my wife is too thrilled, but I was about to say
Nathan Bush: the best ROI is being left alone for a couple hours to drink wine under the disguise of work.
Tom Hollings: That's it. That's it. And I was just praying the kids would stay asleep in the other room while we. While we're chatting to these incredible winemakers. But I think people know anything goes on these things these days. But no, it was great. It was really good. We'd have, you know, hundreds of people tuning in each time and a couple of them were a fair bit bigger. We sold a lot of the packs and it wasn't a sales event. It was more about brand building and trying to put these winemakers forward and just keeping in touch with our customers. But now we'll come back with something similar this year. I haven't quite settled on the concept yet and what I want to commit to, but that's good fun and sales.
Nathan Bush: And I know you said it wasn't a sales event, but obviously there would be people who want to taste along with you or taste after seeing you on those. Did you have the buy direct via Instagram or did you direct people back to the site?
Tom Hollings: A bit of both. A bit of both. So we would send out these little twin packs or three packs of wine with the wines we would taste on the night and we do them really cheaply to encourage people to join in and then give them the option then to repurchase. We send an email to those people saying, hey, I hope you enjoyed the night. You can repurchase the wines here at a good rate. And then we would do a follow up post, say this is what we did with the buy now button. I think we could only do the Instagram buy now once we got to a certain size in our account, which was a year or so ago, but that's been really effective since we've been able to do that.
Nathan Bush: Yeah. Cool.
Nathan Bush: And is it right that you had Ricky Ponting, the great punter on there with you?
Tom Hollings: That was so exciting. I'm a massive cricket. Tragic. So just pretending to talk wine to Ricky he was trying to talk to me about wine. I was trying to talk to him about Cricket the whole time, I think.
Nathan Bush: Did you get anything good out of him?
Tom Hollings: It was great. It was great fun, actually. He's a really nice guy. I've met him a few times. So Ricky's launched with his wife Rihanna and a really good winemaker in McLarenville called Ben Riggs have launched a little wine project and the wines are really smart. Like it's not a half assed sort of celebrity thing. He's a really passionate wine guy. He wants to build a cellar door and he's really investing a lot in it. And so we've been selling some of his wines, which has been good fun. And yeah, as I said, the wines, the wines are really tidy. They're not like, you know, profound, but they're, they're really nice, good value wines and anyone that loves Cricket's gonna get a bit of joy out of it. So now he was great. It was really funny actually because wherever Ricky pontine goes, about 100,000 subcontinental mad cricket lovers go with. So it was hard to get a word in between everyone just asking Ricky to say their name and asking me to be quiet so they could talk Cricket. But no, he was great fun. I think I was asking about who some of the big wine drinkers were on the tour and he's pretty forthcoming. Ricky.
Nathan Bush: Yeah. Nice. Oh, great stuff. All right. And also what I saw on the website is that you mentioned there are some events that you've had in the past with your community, a wide range of events. How do you see them evolving and kind of the in person connection to your customers evolving now post Covid.
Tom Hollings: Yeah, really good question. It's been, we sort of put that all on pause with COVID and just concentrate on the online side of things, which we obviously had to because it was taking off but before that we were doing like regular tastings in our warehouse here. Pop up things and they, they're not great in terms of selling wine, to be honest. I think compared to sending another email or getting some more product on the site, but just keeping in touch with our community. So I think we want to come at it fresh but not so much. I think we want to focus more on our, on our best customers. So our big focus for this year is to launch a bit of a VIP kind of membership for our, for our top customers. And part of that will definitely be experiential component around whether it's tastings here in our warehouse or pop ups or even like Wine tourism, you know, heading out to cellar doors and thinking about what kind of experiences we can give people with our network of suppliers.
Nathan Bush: Look, all I can see is a common theme coming through here, Tom, is that you're just creating more things to get away from the family and drink wine.
Tom Hollings: No, not true, not true, not true. Don't say that.
Nathan Bush: Maybe I'm projecting. All right, So I can't actually, I can't let you leave without asking you. You mentioned pinot is really popular at the moment. What's your favorite wine and varietal right now?
Tom Hollings: Oh, I'm a total geek, so I'm always trying different things here. That's to the frustration of people I drink wine with. It's always a different bottle open. But I love light reds, especially this time of year. So Pinot Gamay from Beaujolais in France. Just things you can put a bit of a chill on. And then I love textural white wines. So richer white wines like Chardonnay and orange wines. Are you getting into the orange wines? Skin contact wines. So it's an ancient technique of making a white wine a bit like a red wine. So using the skins of the grapes and what you're left with is a more obviously orange colored or amber colored wine with a lot more kind of texture and complexity and different flavors. Very popular amongst all the trendy wine bars in Melbourne. But yeah, anyway, really interesting category and growing very quickly. So I like that and just trying different things. How about you? What do you like? I'm a Pinot man.
Nathan Bush: I'm boring.
Tom Hollings: I'm straight down the line.
Nathan Bush: But I've actually, like.
Nathan Bush: I think.
Nathan Bush: I don't know if it's just me getting old, but I can't drink too much wine at the moment because I'm a red guy. And I just. It gives me a cracking headache at the moment.
Tom Hollings: Getting old.
Nathan Bush: I just don't know what's going on. It could be summer in Queensland.
Tom Hollings: I was just up in Brisbane a few weeks ago visiting family and I was told it was a really cool time. And I could not handle the humidity movie. It's not for me.
Nathan Bush: Controversial question for you then. An ice cube in a glass of red.
Nathan Bush: Sacrilege.
Tom Hollings: I would have. I would have said sacrilege a few years ago, I reckon. And now, you know, you just got to do whatever you need to do to enjoy wine. It's just a drink at the end of the day. And I love all of the intricacies of it and all of the techniques and viticulture and this Side of the hill, that type of yeast, it's really fun, but at the end of the day it's just a drink. Should be fun, it should be approachable. And if a little ice cube on a hot day makes a red wine go down a bit more easily, then that's fine by me. Yeah, beautiful.
Nathan Bush: Love that approach. All right, Tom, what is next for yourself and the team at Different Drop? What exciting things you got coming up?
Tom Hollings: Yep. Well, we're sort of taking a breath at the beginning of this year. It's been a hectic couple of years, so we're just consolidating a bit at the moment, just trying to get our ducks in a row, do some planning for the next year or two. But now we're really, really excited to, to take the foundation we've built now of Different Drop and really try and accelerate things a bit. So we're going to keep growing the range pretty aggressively. We really want to make DD the one stop shop for artisan wine, really. Like I was speaking about before, we want to invest a lot more in content, making it an even richer on site experience. We'll probably look to do a bit of a tech revamp, maybe new skin to the site, maybe look at a couple other things like that. As I said, a VIP membership sort of situation. Experiences. Yeah, we just want to keep really just improving the whole experience of buying wine from different drops. So we're not huge marketers, really. Like we do a bit of Google advertising, but we don't do any PR or anything. We just really want to just make an incredible product, an incredible experience and then the rest will kind of take care of itself, we think so. Good.
Nathan Bush: And it's incredible that you guys have just stuck to your mission from day one and have staged that in All Star. So congratulations.
Tom Hollings: Thanks, mate.
Nathan Bush: Tom, if people have heard this and gone, I need to get in touch with Tom. What's the best way?
Tom Hollings: Yep, so you can reach me on LinkedIn, you can send me an email just tomifferent drop.com always happy to chat the team here for any wine questions or anything to do with DD. Just hello@differentdrop.com and yeah, just on the old social media. Beautiful.
Nathan Bush: And you've given our listeners a very
Nathan Bush: kind discount there if they want to
Nathan Bush: go on and get their own Different Drop. And we'll put that into the email as well. So thank you very much for that.
Tom Hollings: Absolutely, yeah. Love to send some wines around to your tribe.
Nathan Bush: Tom, thanks so much for joining us on Add to Cart. It's been brilliant hearing about Different Drop
Nathan Bush: and look forward to seeing what's next.
Tom Hollings: Thanks Nathan. Really loved it. All the best.
Nathan Bush: I really feel like Tom is living all of our best lives. But if you want to live like Tom, he's given Add to Cart listeners a special code. Head on over to different drop that's differentdrop.com and purchase with the code add to cart or one word that's add to cart and you'll get 10% off any wines or packs in the store. It's your chance to be like Tom the Wine Float. All right, here are the three takeaways I took from today's chat with Tom Hollings, co founder of Different Drop. Number one look after your suppliers. Sure, customers are important, very important, hugely important. But so are your partners and suppliers. Tom established Different Drop off the back of his winery relationships and has maintained them ever since by not ripping the guts out of prices of the product and creating content that shows shows it in the best light. Pretty simple, but it opens up long term opportunities that he mightn't get if he just took the shortcuts for the short term. Number two Simplifying technology Tom talked about how they had grand visions for a customized tech stack, but they've paired it back with off the shelf products like Shopify plus Gorgeous and Klaviyo. It doesn't mean that they can't deliver great experiences. In fact, for Tom and the crew it's been the opposite because they aren't spending so much time building and maintaining tech, they spend all their time on improvements that benefit the customer. So I think it's a really important lesson about thinking hard around how much and whether you really need customized tech. Number three Group Content Sourcing I love Tom's approach of engaging a rogue band of outcast whining experts, my words not his, and asking them to tell a story about the whiny stocks. Even better, he's created a process using Airtable and Shopify to automate and streamline the creation of publishing this content. It's definitely a gang I would like to join to get the highlights of today's episode. Head on over to add to cart.com and sign up for our free newsletter each Tuesday we will send Monday's episode summary links and discount codes for you to go next level on. And if you're looking to explore your next E commerce opportunity, come and visit us at E Suite. We're a dedicated e commerce talent agency connecting the best e commerce talent with the fastest growing brands in Australia. Head on over to esweettalent.com where you can download the free e2ecommerce salary guide and sign up to our weekly e Commerce job emails. Thanks for listening and until next time, keep those customers adding to card it's finally happening. Registrations for E Suite's E Commerce Accelerator program are now open. If you're looking to get into e commerce upskill in e commerce or just want a refresher, we've got you covered. I've taken the lessons from my e commerce career and the insight from all the e commerce leaders I've been lucky enough to speak with here and distilled it into 10 weeks of e Commerce learning. We cover the foundations of e commerce including strategy, marketing, technology, finance, analytics and supply chain. You'll even leave with an official Shopify certification. Every week I will host a two hour live lesson which will be supported by templates, case studies and resources to accelerate your e ecommerce career. And because you guys lend me your ears, I'll lend you a discount code. Use the code Add to cart all one word to get $200 off your sign up. That's add to cart as the discount code, so don't wait. Class commences on the 14th of March and registration is now open. Head over to learn.esweettalent.com that's learn.esweettalent dot com to secure your place today. See you in there.
