30 Minutes With: Laura Rosenberger  Co-Founder Laylo

Full Transcript:

A simple concept: we spend half an hour with one of our members, taking a deep dive into their career, listening to their advice, stories and experiences. Each interview provides valuable, personal insights and sheds light on the challenges faced for different brands & individuals across the industry.

We recently sat down with Laura Rosenberger, Co-Founder of Laylo, and asked her about her biggest challenges, how she wants to continue growing the business and her future plans for growth

But first, what is Laylo Wine?

Wine in glass bottles doesn't work for how we drink wine today.

The half empty bottles turned to vinegar in the fridge door… The guilty hangovers because you felt obliged to polish off the last drop… And (the worst!) the I-wanted-wine-but-couldn’t-justify-it G&Ts.

After working together at one of the UK’s largest wine companies, we decided to search for a better solution. The answer had been under our noses the whole time - boxed wine!

So we set out to make boxed wine better, by sourcing fantastic wine and creating beautiful boxes you’d be proud to share with friends.

Since then we’ve won awards, been featured in national newspapers, and sold our boxes at Selfridges.

You’ve just discovered the smarter way to drink wine.

So, I’ll begin with the questions… what was the tipping point for you, or when the ‘penny dropped’ for your idea to create Laylo?

So Laura [Riches] and I both used to work together at Naked Wines, and we left to do other things. During the pandemic, I had read that boxed wine sales in supermarkets had gone through the roof, and I found myself automatically assuming these must be cheap, poor quality wines.

But then when I looked into it, I realised that there's no reason that boxed wine should have that reputation. There's no reason from a technical perspective for the wine to be rubbish. There's no reason for the box to be ugly. But there are in fact two very special things about boxed wines – it stays fresh for six weeks and it produces 90% less carbon than glass bottles. It felt like boxed wine had a major image problem rather than a fundamental problem in itself.

So I started to think “Oh, what would happen if we create a cool boxed wine brand?” Something that's really high quality and something that looks great. And I had got as far as coming up with a name – it wasn't Laylo – and an Instagram, getting my sister to help do some posts.

I'd got the concept in my head and had got some notes about how we'd make it work in reality, but I didn't get as far as making anything actually happen. Then I messaged Laura to get her view, and I said, “Am I insane for thinking boxed wine could be cool?” and said, “Oh my God, I've genuinely been working on exactly the same idea…”. So, we met and, yeah, it was pretty incredible that our vision for what it could be was so similar.

We decided to do it together and, at that moment of deciding to do it together, this hypothetical idea that was in both of our heads all of a sudden dropped into place and things started happening. Getting the trademarks, getting the wine going, finding a designer, getting a website live… Like it just started to come together so much better when we started doing it together.

That's great. Do you mind me asking what was your original name for it?

It was Boxa… Haha, yes… A bit boring. We didn't really want something that was tied to boxes, either, because we thought “Oh, there’s a risk we could start this and then maybe realise that some other format is actually better.”

Well, I think you definitely picked the best name that's for sure! And as I mentioned to you before, the branding is something that really stands out. I haven't seen anything like it. I suppose it is similar to those pre-mixed gin and tonics, and like Harvey Nichols with those more floral patterns. What was the thinking behind that? And how did that come about?

Yeah, so we knew that we wanted to do something visually very different. And when we looked at what was wrong with boxed wine, it was that people had taken a wine label and blown it up so big that it's on the side of the box, so they just weren't using that space properly.

That was realisation number one, and then number two was that we're selling these products online. Therefore, the packaging doesn’t have to tell you what the product is. We don’t need any information obvious on the box, because the website has that information.

If one of the problems of boxed wine is that it looks a bit embarrassing, and when it’s on your shelf you don't really want your mates to see it because you're a bit worried about what they're going to think of you for drinking boxed wine, what would happen instead if we created something that was beautiful? So we decided we were not going to have any information visible on the front or sides of packaging, all of the information would be on the bottom of the box. Instead, we would do something with the box that was very unique to each wine inside and that, first and foremost, looks really great on your shelf.

That's obviously a very different route that the people who first started thinking about supermarkets took because they thought, “What information do I need to have on there? How do I sell the product? How do I stand out?” So, by starting D2C first, we were able to be a little bit more creative!

Completely, and I think you've gone down the better path in some ways by focusing on the visually pleasing element. What have been some of the biggest challenges that you faced along the way?

A number of challenges. So one, obviously, was Brexit. The Brexit rules only really came in on 1st of January 2021. So that made things a lot harder afterwards. And then secondly, the fact that paid digital is a lot tougher than it used to be. For D2C brands that came before us, they were growing through paid digital ads. Now, it's really hard for anyone to get a good CPA because of a number of different reasons. I think all D2C brands are having a challenge with that at the moment.

Okay, What has been the most fruitful channel for you?

I would say that vouchers have been working pretty well. We knew from Naked Wines, that vouchers, although unsexy, do work really well. And we found that it's been working well for us. That’s our top channel.

I actually remember now that you say that,  when you were at Naked Wines,  I think we were having a conversation and in my flat we had just had a protein order arrive and there was a Naked Wine voucher there and we were like… “We might as well get some wine!” Who have you collaborated with in that way? Which other D2C brands?

The Craft Gin Club, Butternut Box, Bloom & Wild. Those kinds of companies.

What would you say would be your biggest piece of advice for somebody who's on their journey and trying to release a new concept but maybe hasn't gotten it to market yet?

The game changer was starting to do it with someone else. I have got so much respect for people who are solo founders because everything just became so much easier when there was someone else there. Finding the right team to be with you right from the start is really important.

And secondly, it would be to be prepared for… A lot. I won’t say “the highs and the lows” because that's a cliche, but there's going to be times where it feels easy and you're growing fast and it feels effortless. And then there's going to be times where everything feels like really hard work. And it's knowing that neither of those things is going to last forever. But, you know, just because it started getting easy doesn't mean it's going to continue feeling easy and just be prepared for when it feels hard.

At least you've got wine to drink. I was having a look on the website as well and it seems like you've got 14 boxes at the moment. Is that right?

We've done 14 in total. But when we sell out of a wine, we sometimes bring it back and we sometimes don't. So we've got six available on the website at the moment and one more to come for Christmas.

What are your future plans? So let's say in three years’ time, how many would you like to have? What's the goal?

We definitely don't want to have hundreds of wines. It’s intentionally a small range. I think wine can be very overwhelming. Even though people like what they like, you don't need a range of 100 in order to have five wines that someone's going to like. So instead, we focus on crowd-pleasing wines.

We focus on trying to have a range where there's sufficient variety in terms of style and price without it being too large, and instead guide people towards what we think they're going to like the most. I guess for a company like Naked Wines or Majestic Wine, their goal is to be 100% of the wine that someone drinks at home.

That's not really our goal. I still open a bottle on a Friday night when I want to drink half a bottle, but those times outside of that, maybe on a Sunday night when you want a glass of wine, but you don't want a whole bottle. Or when I want to drink white wine, but my husband wants red. Those are the moments that we're looking to get into people's homes for. So our range doesn't need to be so big that someone can have all the variety that they, but we see ourselves fitting in alongside bottles.

In terms of Christmas prepping, what are some of your thoughts ahead of what's going to be quite a hectic period?

Obviously from an operational perspective, we started thinking about Christmas very early in the year, making sure we've got all of the stock that we need and all of the shipping boxes that we need. The warehouses are sufficiently prepped, but the risk is that stuff happens outside of your control, such as heavy snow, so the delivery drivers just literally can't deliver the parcels. I think you can do as much as you can, but then you need to let go a little bit. From a marketing perspective, we've made sure that the website is looking good, we are continuing to optimise it. We've got a bunch of marketing activity going out with partners that we know work for us. We've done all of the planning that we need to do, and it's now a case of doing it!

How many couriers do you have in place? Is it multiple?

We work with a third party that plugs in with the Yodel network, but if there was a problem with Yodel, they can reroute us. So we don't have a contract with Yodel, we have a contract with a third party, which gives us flexibility.

Great. So, final question. Over the next 12 months., what are some of the big plans or activities that you think will support where you want to be?

We are building out our on-trade side of the business, by which I mean bars and restaurants. A lot of the  problems that boxed wine solves for customers at home are also shared by on-trade. If you're offering wine by the glass, if you don’t finish that bottle a couple of days, the rest of the bottle goes straight down the sink, whereas that's eliminated with boxed wine. It's also way more sustainable in terms of carbon footprint. I think sustainability is a big factor in decision making for businesses than it is for consumers. It's something that comes from board level, from shareholder level, so they're really incentivized to start making sustainable swaps, more so than people are in their own homes. We're continuing  to expand out sales team, so we are hoping that this will be in a materially different place next year to this year.

It’s doubly exciting because it then feeds back into the D2C business. If you're at your local restaurant, and the white wine by the glass is Laylo Sauvignon, that's nice. And the next time you see the word, Laylo, you'll think, “Oh yeah, I had that wine at my favourite restaurant” and they come to the website to buy the wine. And hopefully there's this growth loop of everything working together, which will be cool if it all works.

Brilliant. Thank you very much, Laura. Have a lovely rest of your day and I look forward to speaking to you soon.

We look forward to sharing even more relevant stories, interviews, insights and experiences from our Tech Hubble members.

To stay connected visit: https://www.techhubble.io/contact

If you're looking for some beautifully designed box wine then make sure to check out https://drinklaylo.com/