Long day at the office? Now U.K. shoppers can order a nice vintage bottle of wine to help them unwind on their commute home. All they need is a mobile phone.
Wine retailer Naked Wines this month launched a service in the U.K. that enables shoppers on the go to text to order a bottle of bubbly, merlot or whatever their tipple of choice may be. Less than one month after launch, shoppers have ordered more than 1,000 bottles via the service, the retailer says.
The U.K. based retailer, which was purchased by Majestic Wine Plc. in April for $103 million, operates a membership model where members it calls “Angels” pay 20 pounds a month into an account that they can use to purchase discounted wine. Naked Wines has 150,000 U.K. registered members.
To use the text ordering service, a member sends a text to a Naked Wine Wine Advisor who looks at the member profile connected to that mobile number. The advisor then puts the order together based on what the text asks for and fills in the gaps with customized recommendations based on wines that customer has ordered and rated in the past. The text can be as specific or vague as the customer wants, Naked Wines says.
The idea for the Text for Wine program came from an internal company contest based off the popular TV show Shark Tank where contestants aim to get investors to fund their business ideas, says Kate Keogh, marketing manager.
“We have a really cool internal competition where our co-workers all get to pitch new ideas and the benefit they’d bring to the business, “Keogh says. “Text for Wine appealed to a lot of people and created a brand new channel for folks who are in a rush and want to order their wine conveniently on their own terms. Once we thought about it, it seemed crazy not to let people order via text.”
The project was completed in-house by the Naked Wines development team. “The person who pitched this idea is one of our amazing developers so there was actually a very quick turnaround,” Keogh says. “The pitch happened in April and we launched by August.”
Any U.K. Angel who verifies his mobile number can order via text. If the U.K. pilot goes well the retailer says it will roll out the program in the U.S. and Australia.
“Access to Naked’s digital marketing skills was a clear benefit for Majestic following the acquisition, and the launch of Text for Wine is a fantastic demonstration of these skills in action,” says Rowan Gormley, CEO of Majestic Wine.The fact that the idea came from an employee is testament to Naked’s strong entrepreneurial culture, which we are working on bringing across to Majestic.”
Naked Wine’s 2014 web sales totaled 74 million pounds ($101.62 million), up 40% year over year.
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