Cave to Cellar
Retained Rigel Consulting LLC for 2 years.
Result: an 800% increase in monthly online sales.
Cave to Cellar hired us for a long-term brand launch project including full brand strategy, site design, content creation, and analysis.
The team: Rigel Cable, Bryan Alston, Cameron Lee
The Outcome
Before:
After:
Brand Strategy
Cave to Cellar is a new company that imports French wines to sell to U.S. customers at a fair price. The brand challenge was to carefully balance the upscale french wine market with a brand promise of providing great value. As a new company, they wanted to completely re-conceptualize their existing site and create a cohesive brand and customer experience.
Services conducted: Sampled survey of French wine drinkers, focus groups, competitive research.
Findings: We found that French wine drinkers enjoy the journey of finding a great producer and region and learning about the wine. Great wines are always associated with good company and shared experience. The wine shopping experience is guided by experts – the wine shop owner, the sommelier, the trusted friend. The main competitors had outdated and traditional branding; we wanted to be different.
Brand Platform: To bring indescribable moments of comfort and sophistication from France to your home.
Tone: Sophisticated but current, knowledgeable, approachable, enriching.
Targets: 3 Gen X targets, 1 Gen Y target
Brand pillars: A sophisticated personal experience, a connection to a rich heritage, discovery and enrichment.
Site Design
Moving from the brand work into site design, we bridged the brand pillars into a key set of features: shopping, discovery, and expert reviews.
Services conducted: Feature planning, wireframes, visual design management, development management
Shopping experience research: Wines have lots of attributes that make them hard to buy online (flavor, year, region, appellation, etc.). Customers buy wines for special occasions. An expert opinion is important in informing a purchase decision. Customer knowledge level varies greatly, so the site needs to cater to the novice and the connoisseur.
Features: Shop, elaborate filters, discovery section (complete with French Wine 101 and region-specific information), expert wine reviews, occasions and gifts, wine taste survey.
Content Creation
The new site required rich written and visual content for storytelling and influencing the purchase. We also noticed that the competition was lacking in this arena, so we developed a unique product photography style and created a large volume of written information to allow customers to learn while they shop.
Services conducted: Content strategy, written content for discovery section of site, artistic and aspirational product photos, lifestyle photography assets.
Marketing & Analytics
After launch, the client saw an increase in sales of up to 800%, and exceeded monthly goals for the first time.
We developed an inbound marketing plan that included paid search, Amazon storefront, wine search syndication, French expat publication ads, influencer outreach, and street teams.
We regularly analyzed performance of key pages and overall site eCommerce KPIs to determine which marketing channels were driving the most revenue.
Services conducted: performance and brand marketing plan, analytics reporting.