Dean Taylor, who has founded 7 successful businesses, left his career as an architect behind just days before his 30th birthday to launch Wine Ark, an offsite climate-controlled storage solution for wine lovers. Intended as a ‘side-hustle’ 1-2 day a week job, he eventually sold this business for $8.5 million in 2007.
Driven to help struggling Australian wine producers find an alternative route to market, in 2010 he put his money where his mouth was and launched Cracka Wines, a direct-to-consumer marketplace now representing over 1,000 wineries and supports growers around the country. Building the business to 40 staff (expected to increase to 60 in the next 6-12 months) and over 250,000 subscribers, Cracka Wines has consistently been ranked within the TOP 50 & 100 Australian Online Retailers.
Tell us about Cracka Wines.
In a nutshell, Cracka Wines is ‘your ultimate wine guide,’ bringing together one of the best ranges of wine in the country with an amazing resource of expert reviews to provide a one-stop-online-shop for wine lovers.
Unlike big chains like Dan Murphy’s, our mandate is to ‘keep it real’- stocking only authentic products made by real wineries with real stories that offer real value for money.
Beyond the website, our aim is to take our customers on a journey through the world of wine, introducing them to brands, labels and varieties that they’ll simply never find at their local bottle store.
What inspired you to start Cracka Wines?
I’ve been involved in the wine industry since starting Wine Ark in 1998. It’s a great industry that has been very good to me. However, over the last 10 years I’ve watched countless wineries struggle to survive, while supermarkets have announced record profits from selling the wines they make.
I started Cracka with the aim to provide small and medium Australian and New Zealand wineries an alternative route to market, creating a marketplace where they can sell their products directly to consumers. By cutting out both the middleman and the supermarkets, there’s up to 50% additional margin available to share between the consumer and winery. Consumers save money. Wineries bank more dollars. It’s a win-win situation.
Tell us about your career and background.
My interest in wine developed at university, paying my way through my architecture degree by working in pubs, wine bars and bottle shops. After graduating I travelled the world for a couple of years then settled into Sydney, working on projects like Sydney’s King Street Wharf and the Stadium at Homebush.
Even by that stage my taste in wine had well and truly exceeded what my income as a young architect could afford, so I started Wine Ark, a ‘little’ business on the side to help fund an ever more expensive habit.
Intended to be a one or two day a week side gig, Wine Ark took off and within a few years had grown into a national business. Leveraging its success, I launched two other businesses, one that allowed customers to trade wine online like stocks and shares and the other a club for wine collectors, where we held tastings events and then offered them wine to purchase via email.
After a pretty intense 10 years, often working 7 days a week, I accepted an offer that was too good to refuse and sold all three businesses.
While having a break, I started exploring the online wine category and was shocked to discover how fragmented the market was. There were over 1000 websites selling wine in Australia and the most popular one was receiving only 4% of the traffic. Looking at them all, I realised there had to be a better mousetrap.
At that point in time the classified sites like Realestate.com, Carsales.com and Seek.com.au were all booming. Their models were disrupting the traditional media companies by using the internet, inventory and information to connect suppliers and consumers at scale. A light bulb went off and I realised that I could do the same for wine – creating the ultimate wine guide for wine lovers.
Describe a typical work day for you.
Like most entrepreneurs, my day starts pretty early with some exercise, a couple of strong coffees and then clearing my inbox and laying out the priorities for the day. By the time most people are getting to the office, I’ve already dealt with a couple of hundred communications, delegated any pressing issues, had one or two meetings and am onto my third coffee. Lunch is usually an afterthought and before I know it it’s 7pm and time to head to a function, typically an e-commerce, digital marketing, wine industry or entrepreneurial event. They typically involve plenty of great food and wine – so I really can’t complain when after 4-5 hours sleep I’m back up doing the same thing all over again.
What advice do you have for those wanting to start a business?
My first tip is that it always takes longer than you expect to build a great business, so have a vision that you can remain passionate about for at least 5-7 years.
Next, surround yourself with great people with skills and experience that you don’t have. Hire long and fire fast. Don’t be afraid to let average people go to make room for great people. Create a workplace with a great culture. It helps attract great staff, which attracts great suppliers and in turn attracts great customers.
Last but not least, make the happiness of your customers your number one priority. Always do that well and you’ll never need to spend a dollar on advertising and marketing.
What’s next for you and Cracka Wines?
While there’s been tremendous growth in online wine sales in Australia, at about $500 million, this still only represents about 8% of the overall retail wine market. However, it’s forecast to triple over the next 5 years, so I’m focused on making sure that Cracka gets its fair share of that market growth.
Beyond Australia there’s some much larger markets for wine that are growing far quicker than ours. The direct-to-consumer model that we have developed is powerful here but offers even greater potential for our suppliers in international markets. I’m currently in the process of raising capital to expand our platform and allow Australian and New Zealand producers to sell their wines directly to consumers all over the world.
Beyond that, I’ll turn my focus to taking the business public. I reckon that’s enough for the time being.