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Averys – Family Fortunes
d=”standfirst”>Bristol-based Averys manages the clever trick of appealing to both serious wine enthusiasts and the city’s students. Now, Mimi Avery is out to win back the company’s on-trade clients, says Penny Boothman
That is the question, and fundamentally it’s also our ultimate goal,” says Mimi Avery. We are talking about how to attract new customers into the Avery wine shop. “There’s a lot of unused potential in here,” she adds, casting her eyes around the sizeable Bristol premises. “It’s just a question of how to release it.”
Perhaps part of the solution will come this month with the the launch of Averys’ new website, something most independent specialists have had in place for quite some time. “Well it all went a bit awry a year ago,” explains Avery, “when they found some bugs in the money-taking system. It was about the same time that Direct Wines took over from Hallgarten, and they had an in-house computer geek, so they just re-built the whole thing, and it’s now going to be much more interactive.” Presumably, that’s one of the benefits of having the expertise of a silent giant like Direct Wines, the relatively new owners of Averys, at your disposal.
The company’s mail-order operation already dominates the retail store in sales terms by a considerable margin, with the shop making up just £1 million of the company’s £3.5m turnover. However, Mimi Avery does not expect the website to take business away from the shop. “It will work as a reference tool,” she says enthusiastically. “Our entire list will be on the website, which has been a mammoth undertaking, when you think we’ve got over 1,600 wines in the list. All our customers in the shop like having some help with what to buy, and the same goes for mail-order. Most of our mail-order sales operators are trained to some degree or another in wine but, hopefully, the website will act as a spur for customers to order.”
Even though the shop and mail-order sides are run separately, there is a good deal of mutually beneficial crossover. “I would probably say that our best customers buy from both sources,” explains Avery. “They will go into the shop because they want to physically go, see, talk, chat, taste, but at the same time, if they’re just buying large quantities of wine that they’ve had before, then they’ll probably just ring up and have it delivered because it’s easier.”
Averys has built its business on using these two forms of customer contact to engender a certain amount of loyalty. “We have a cash & carry 10% discount for our customers that walk in the door,” says Avery. “It’s a gold card system that we set up probably around 10 years ago.” However, she feels the loyalty factor needs a little more of a push in the proactive direction.
“It’s fine to some extent, because it gives them the discount if they come in. The problem is the customer has no particular reason to come in, they could just as easily walk to Oddbins around the corner. So what we’re now going to do is launch a loyalty card that has them spend, say, £20, to be a gold card customer. The idea is that, because they’ve actually spent a little bit of money on getting the card, it will hopefully act as an incentive to get them to make that extra bit of effort to go to Averys to get the 10% discount, and pay themselves back.
“In general, we’ve got great loyalty from our customers, but we want to just kick-start them into remembering to drive down to us a little more often.”
This type of gold card scheme is a technique used by many competing mail-order operations, so it comes as no surprise that Averys is thinking along these lines. With a mailing list of around 85,000, the company produces two catalogues a year, with offers or updates going out to about 30,000 once a month. These can be specifically targeted, “so that people who haven’t ordered for six months get a different type of mailing”, according to Avery. However, she is quick to point out that such tactics are not merely a result of Averys’ takeover by Direct Wines.
“A lot of people think that this is all a bit Direct Wine-ish, but in fact this all happened before Direct Wines took over when Richard Davis [marketing manager] joined us. He set all this in motion.”
Averys has had a series of financial backers over the years, all of whom have allowed the company to retain a good degree of autonomy – and Avery insists it’s the same deal with Direct Wines. “In the ‘80s there was the big recession,” she explains, “and we had a major theft, all roughly at the same time and things went a bit belly-up for a while, so we had to get a financial backer. At the time it was an American individual, but unfortunately he developed an illness that meant he wasn’t allowed to drink alcohol – so owning a wine company in the UK wasn’t quite such a good thing. Hallgarten bought him out, and then Direct Wines bought Hallgarten out a year and a half ago. Hallgarten kept all the agencies, and with them the wholesale which, to some extent, I’m now trying to get back.”
This is the current focus for future growth. “We used to do a lot with the on-trade, but when Hallgarten took the wholesale with them, for the first year and a half we weren’t allowed to poach anyone back,” says Avery. “Now I’ve gone into corporate, hopefully the restaurant sector will improve for us.”
But who to target? “Anyone and everyone – I’m starting from scratch!” says Avery. “There are a few restaurants locally who come to us for the finer wine, and buy one or two bottles of each, but if I’m looking after 30 individual hotels I’ve got no time to do anything else, and they don’t actually produce enough volume to warrant me doing that.” Consequently the emphasis is more on hotel chains and catering groups rather than smaller, individual on-trade clients.
According to Avery, this new shift in emphasis is just another adaptation the company has had to make during its 200 years and more of business. Originally founded as a Port, Sherry and Madeira importer in the boom-time of Bristol in 1793, Ronald Avery bought the company from his cousin in the 1920s, and made its name in Bordeaux and Burgundy.
Mimi’s father, John Avery MW, the current managing director, joined the company in the late ‘60s, and Mimi has been responsible for the retail side of the operation in recent years. However, she didn’t take the usual route into the family firm. Following an engineering degree she spent six years with the International Wine and Food Society, and then finally entered Averys through the side door. “Dad was actually away when I applied, he didn’t know I’d applied for the job till I’d got it – he came back and I was already working for Averys!”
About 15 years ago the company moved its bonded warehouse out to much larger temperature-controlled premises in Nailsea, southwest of the city, which is also the home of the mail-order division. However, the company still has its very well established retail presence in Bristol, and the network of vaulted brickwork cellars behind the Culver Street entrance are one of its strengths.
“We have this fantastic atmosphere within the shop,” enthuses Avery. “And staff who are very knowledgeable and approachable. We ask people if they want any help, and generally, once they get through to the main cellar, they turn round and say, ‘actually … yes’. They suddenly realise that there’s a lot more going on here than they initially thought.”
Deeper underground, the Port and Sherry cellars, where the pipes used to be brought in and the wine bottled, are now used for consumer tastings and are popular with local businesses for corporate events. “They invite their special customers, and generally speaking 50% of those people have never been here before. And of that 50%, probably 10% start coming back again. Then, once they’ve brought the customers in, we run competitions – win a bottle of Champagne at the end of the night if you leave your business card – that kind of thing. And it works well.”
As well as contributing to the store turnover, claims Avery, it plays an essential part in swelling the mailing list – which, in turn, increases the mail-order business. “It’s perfect because the person who’s not been in before walks in and has a good evening, but subconsciously they’ve also thought ‘hmmm, didn’t know this was here, might come back next week.’ Or they take away a mail-order catalogue.” Either way, says Avery, the two are inextricably linked.
“We’ve always had a good relationship with the universities,” she adds. “We do tastings for their wine club, and they actually come here and buy. Then when they finish their degree, and go off to London, some of them take trips down here once a month to buy their wine. Start them young, once you hook them in, they stay in.” And her plan is to hook more of those young people in.
The challenge for her, however, is to create the right image for a company with such a traditional reputation. “Everyone seems to think that we’re quite exclusive, which is actually quite bad for us – I mean we’ve got 60 wines under £5.50, and a lot of people don’t realise that.” says Avery. “They come in for a special occasion, to buy that special bottle for Dad’s birthday or a really nice dinner, but more are now coming in to buy their party wines as well.”
Averys also faces that quintessential problem affecting established independents of how to attract a new breed of customer, without alienating the existing clientele. “People who remember my grandfather think we’re old school, but anyone who knows Dad is willing to see us as more modern.” But this isn’t an easy balance to strike. “Although we want to tell everybody that we do nice cheap, friendly, interesting wines, and you don’t have to spend a lot of money with us, we also don’t want to lose the fact that we do this special stuff and there is an exclusiveness to us as well.”
In contrast to the intensive advertising and direct mailings used by the mail-order business, the marketing approach adopted by the shop is more subtle. “A lot of our competitors do a lot of campaigning and really talk about themselves, but we’d rather do it through sales and gaining consumer confidence,” says Richard Davis, Averys’ marketing director. “Customer recommendation and retention is key. If we win the customers and do much better than their expectations then they start spreading the word around, which has a rolling effect. If you hype yourself in the first instance, which we would be very proud to do, then the expectation is greater and the ability to exceed expectation is diminished.” And it seems to be working. “In the last four years the company has increased in size fourfold,” he says.
Life will never be easy for the independent retailer, but with a strong mail-order backing, Averys seems to have a sound offering. “Our range, our cellars, our staff – all are part of what we see as our strengths,” stresses Mimi Avery. “Ooh, and we’ve got great parking in the middle of town!”