Last weekend we had a 5-day Cellar Cleaning Sale. Wines were going from $3 to $7 a bottle, plus a few odds and ends of some old vintages we got back from our distributor. The wines that were selling for $3-$7 were left over private label wines from a few clients we are no longer doing business with. Most were Clos LaChance juice under a different label. However, the retail prices were anywhere from $14.99-$19.99.
We initially brought over 300 or so cases of various items. We sold about 90% of it on Thursday from 5-8pm. Yikes! Who knew it would be that successful?? On Friday we put a truck together (all of our case goods are stored off-site at California Wine Transport in San Jose) of another 1000 cases. On Monday, another truck! It was incredible the amount of people here and the wine we went through.
It was funny on Friday. We open at 11am. I was sitting in the conference room having a meeting. From the conference room, there is a window looking out to the walkway and gardens leading into the front door. At about 10:30am, people started showing up. It was a steady stream into the tasting room right from the start.
If you were here at some point over the long weekend (especially Saturday), we apologize if our customer service was not up to par. It was an absolutely zoo on Saturday….and we were totally unprepared for it.
We have now had a few days (Dominic and Cindy have taken some time off to regroup) and we are sifting through the fallout that was our Cellar Sale. A few of the things we have learned:
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Overstaff. Especially with schleppers….people that can carry lots of 40lb boxes to and fro.
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Never underestimate the power of grassroots marketing. We did not advertise this event at all outside of our own resources. We mentioned something about it in our email newsletter in December, without a specific date. About two weeks beforehand, we sent out another email newsletter, this time being specific about the date. We put it on our Facebook pages. We Twittered about it. The week of we sent out a few update emails to our local list. And we had the biggest weekend in terms of incoming dollars and visitors we have ever had. Ever. By far!
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People are looking for a deal. The economy sucks big time…but people are still drinking, and they are drinking wine. They are looking for a deal and are willing to stock up on something that is considered value priced.
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Be a little more organized in terms of logistics. Taste and sell the wine in the Tasting Room. Physically deliver the wine to cars on the truck dock. Should make things a lot easier.
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Have a POS System that works (of all weekends, ours had to crash at the most inopportune time)
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Inventory after the Cellar Sale was so off it wasn’t even funny. And its taking a lot to time to fix. But it was worth it to move some wines that needed to be moved. Not that these were bad wines…the reds especially were very, very good.
We will do the Cellar Sale again at some point in the future. Next time, our Wine Club members will have time to go through the wines before we open it up to the public. And we will be more organized.
Were you at the cellar sale? Any thoughts to share? Here is blogger David Tong’s tasting notes of a few wines we sold at the Cellar Sale.
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As a consumer, I thought that the cellar sale went very well. The one point that I would disagree with is your recommendation to taste and sell the wine in the tasting room next time; I felt that having the sale tasting and sales separate from the tasting room worked very well. In the tasting room you need to be able to spend some time with the customer, explaining about the various wines, labels, etc. When I'm in a tasting room I want to be able to appreciate the wine and ask questions.
But in the cellar sale environment you really need to be able to pour for as many people as possible as quickly as possible. With the number of people milling around I think that the tasting room would have been impractical; in fact I skipped the tasting room this time, partly because I had the kids with me, and I've learned that kids and tasting rooms don't mix.
I only had two minor complaints about the event; one was that some of the wines were too little warm, which is hardly surprising with the weather that weekend. The other was the disconnect between ordering and inventory. I paid for a case of one wine only to find that there was none left on the stacks; people had noticed that stocks were running low and had been helping themselves. Again, under the circumstances that was entirely understandable.