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Like other alcohol purveyors, Winc has seen a "significant increase" in direct online sales since March 2020, according to an SEC filing published last week. As the pandemic shuttered bars and restaurants, more people splurged on bottles of wine and spirits to drink at home. Excessive drinking spiked during lockdowns, too.
Winc's executives say the online frenzy reflects a "permanent shift in consumer behavior," away from buying bottles at brick-and-mortar stores.
Winc produces its own wines in collaboration with vineyards and other wine brands, such as Yes Way Rosé. And in a sense, Winc can be thought of as a wine-brand factory. It aims to pop out as many as ten new brands per year based on the data it gathers on customers and their ordering habits. To that point, Winc says its mission is to "become the leading brand builder within the alcoholic beverages industry."
The majority of Winc's revenue today comes from its subscribers, who pay monthly for bottles tailored to their palates, but the company also sells its brands through wholesalers. In all, Winc says it sold more than 430,000 cases of wine in 2020, up 80% from the prior year.
While the pandemic has been a boon for Winc's sales, another global emergency poses a threat to its bottom line.
Photo by Klara Kulikova on Unsplash
Climate Change and Wildfires
Winc warned in its filing that destructive events linked to climate change, such as wildfires and extreme weather, "could negatively impact the quality and quantity of grapes available to us and our producers for wine production."
The wine industry at large has already suffered from fires and extreme weather. For example, smoke taint has ruined harvests and rising temperatures have disrupted growing regions.
"We are already beginning to see the effects of climate change on wine in many regions of the world," Columbia University climate scientist Dr. Benjamin Cook told dot.LA. For example, droughts and wildfires in the West are "linked in part to climate change, and these events are having impacts on grape growers and harvests in California and elsewhere in the region," said Cook in a comment on the wider industry.
But Winc sells a ton of California wine. All five of the company's "core brands" — which each bring in between "$1 million and $10 million in annualized revenues" — feature California grapes, though not always exclusively. Winc's "Wonderful Wine Company," for example, sources grapes from California as well as Spain, Argentina, and Chile. For its part, Winc says it is "not reliant on any one vineyard or geographic" because it outsources production.
As the impacts of climate change nevertheless grow clearer, climate-related disclosures such as Winc's have also "grown dramatically" in the U.S., the Securities and Exchange Commission said earlier this year.
And wine is one among countless industries affected by the climate crisis.
Google, for example, has cautioned that hotter temperatures could drive up the cost of cooling its data centers, while drugmaker Eli Lilly has said the warming Earth may boost demand for some of its medicines.
Winc's Footprint
While noting the threat of climate change, Winc also laid out in some detail how it limits its carbon footprint. The company said in the filing that it uses "flexi-tanks" to pack more wine into shipping containers and it plans to embrace corks that are "100% plant based, 100% sustainable and made from discarded materials."
Winc also says it strives to produce 75% of its wines "from sustainably farmed grapes by the end of 2021." The wineseller advertises many of its bottles under a sustainability banner, but it offers little information on how it determines whether a bottle of wine was produced sustainably.
Winc did not respond to requests for comment on its coming IPO.
The annual boost in holiday help comes as the tech giant has already been looking to fill tens of thousands of hourly positions across the fulfillment side of its business, including 125,000 announced in September. Additionally, Amazon said last month that it was looking to hire for 40,000 corporate and tech jobs across more than 220 locations in the U.S.
Amazon now employs more than 1.3 million people in full- and part-time jobs worldwide. The company has hired over 450,000 people in the U.S. since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Last year's seasonal hiring of 100,000 was down from 2019's 200,000, but Amazon had already brought on 175,000 seasonal workers in March and April of 2020 to meet online shopping demand as the first stage of the pandemic confined many people to their homes.
The push for operations workers in stowing, picking, packing, shipping and more comes as disruptions to global supply chains have struck fear into shoppers worried about whether holiday presents will arrive on time. Amazon has already announced "Black Friday" style deals across its website.
Average starting pay for the new roles is $18 per hour, with sign-on bonuses of up to $3,000 and an additional $3 per hour depending on shifts in many locations. Amazon announced in April that it planned to invest more than $1 billion in wage increases for its operations workers, promising raises of between 50 cents and $3 an hour to more than 500,000 employees.
The company listed 20 states with the greatest number of seasonal openings, including: Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia.
The company opened more than 250 new fulfillment centers, sortation centers, regional air hubs, and delivery stations in the U.S. in 2021.
This story originally appeared on GeekWire.
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