An Interview With Martita Mestey
Successful brands don’t just have customers, they know them. Know who your target market is. Conduct research to deeply understand their wants, needs, goals, and pain points in relation to your product space. Create your product for them. Market your product to them, based on what you know about them.
As a part of our series called “5 Things You Need To Create a Successful Food or Beverage Brand”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Sarah and Emily Mack.
Sarah and Emily Mack are co-founders of Vinat, a sister-founded wine company that sources and rebrands exclusive European wines with fabulously cheeky labels and no unwanted additives. Sarah has 10+ years of experience, primarily focused on Finance, operations, and pricing. She recently completed her MBA at IESE Business School. Emily has 7+ years of experience in product design, innovation, and brand strategy for Fortune 500 companies and startups.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your “childhood backstory”?
We’re two sisters from Wisconsin. Growing up, our family always encouraged us to try new things. We were very involved in 4-H in school, which was our first introduction to agriculture and the food industry. We would show plants, crafts, and baked goods at the county fair. One year, Sarah decided to show our cat (spoiler alert: cats don’t enjoy walking on a leash in front of large crowds).
We also both participated in a lot of sports. Sarah was a runner, and Emily was on a ski racing team and played tennis. Growing up, being involved with many different sports and clubs taught us to be curious and how to prioritize competing priorities.
Can you share with us the story of the “ah ha” moment that led to the creation of the food or beverage brand you are leading?
When we began doing user research on the wine industry one very interesting theme kept popping up. Every single person we spoke with apologized for not having enough knowledge of wine. This blew our minds! People who drink beer don’t feel the need to know where the hops come from — why should wine be any different? This mindset is something we’ve become really determined to change.
Anyone can enjoy good wine, you don’t have to be an expert.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
When we were first vetting suppliers for our wine glass baby tees, we encountered many lopsided glasses which may have resulted in some problems for the wearers of the tees. We communicated with potential suppliers on the issues we saw to understand possible resolutions and ways forward. This reinforced the importance of getting samples made by potential suppliers and quality-checking inventory.
What are the most common mistakes you have seen people make when they start a food or beverage line? What can be done to avoid those errors?
I think a lot of brands don’t do proper research to determine if there is a product-market fit. This applies broadly beyond just food and beverage companies and is a mistake well-established companies make as well.
The best way to avoid this error is by doing research. When you’re initially market research to make sure there is monetary value in pursuing the market and user research to understand where the gaps are for the consumers is essential.
In the early stages of product creation, a mistake a lot of people make when conducting research is biasing participants. If you’re speaking with a close friend or family member, they’re likely to be mindful of your feelings rather than focused on giving you fully honest feedback. Another way to bias participants is by telling them you’re the founder or creator of a product. No one is going to want to tell you your baby is ugly even if it is.
To avoid these mistakes, take some time to read up on research best practices. You can still be a scrappy startup founder while conducting research, just get creative with it. One example could be setting up a fake email account for emailing research participants so they can’t look up that you’re the startup founder. Act like you’re an agency that was hired to conduct the research for them. You’ll be shocked at how the quality and candor in your responses improve!
Let’s imagine that someone reading this interview has an idea for a product that they would like to produce. What are the first few steps that you would recommend that they take?
Conduct research early and often and know your users. From market research to user research, it’s important to know there is a market for your product and why. The best way to know your users and what they need is to talk to them. Knowing your users’ motivations and pain points is essential in creating a valuable product for them.
Many people have good ideas all the time. But some people seem to struggle in taking a good idea and translating it into an actual business. How would you encourage someone to overcome this hurdle?
Sometimes, you have to start small. We both had previous “side hustle” start-up experience. We worked on a woman’s accessory brand together, and Sarah previously had a travel blog. We learned a ton about building a business from those experiences, including how to leverage social media, DIY our product photography, and build a brand with limited resources. Working on side hustles also cemented that we wanted to create a startup and gave us the confidence to take the plunge when we had an idea on which we were ready to work full-time.
There are many invention development consultants. Would you recommend that a person with a new idea hire such a consultant, or should they try to strike out on their own?
Emily used to work as a consultant creating new products for Fortune 500 companies and startups. She took inspiration from the experiences and processes from her time in that role and applied them to the wine space when we started Vinat.
While the idea of hiring someone to assist in the ideation phase may sound nice, it’s not necessary, and those individuals may not have the same passion for your industry and problem space as you do. A user-centered design process is not new, but it is a tried and true process for ensuring you’re creating a product people actually want and need. Anyone can create an amazing product, you don’t have to have an invention development consultation, but you do need to have a clearly defined market that will purchase it.
What are your thoughts about bootstrapping vs looking for venture capital? What is the best way to decide if you should do either one?
Before you spend any money or decide how to finance a project, make sure that:
- There is a market and the ability to capture part of that market for your product.
- That the solution is scalable and has a path to profitability.
Simple things like talking to potential customers, creating a web page with blog posts, and creating social media pages can all be leveraged to gauge interest. Once you know there is a market and potential product market fit, figure out how to finance the idea.
Venture Capital and investors are not guaranteed, so figure out how and if you can bootstrap creating your product (even if it is just a bare-bones MVP). There are other financing types to consider, such as grants and crowdfunding. When considering financing options, you also need to determine your goals. With Venture Capital, you will be expected to grow your business quickly, and not all products have a large enough potential market for these types of investors.
Can you share thoughts from your experience about how to file a patent, how to source good raw ingredients, how to source a good manufacturer, and how to find a retailer or distributor?
We haven’t filed a patent, but we have spent a lot of time sourcing our partners. Our best piece of advice is to find experts where you aren’t and network with humility. There is a lot you won’t know, so ask many questions and talk to many people. We like to follow the rule that when you hear something three times, it’s a good idea to look into it.
Something that we did well early on was setting up advisors who could help us with marketing, sales, and operations. We also spoke to as many people in the wine industry as would talk to us (lawyers, winemakers, importers, PR firms, and warehouses) to understand what we should think about and each step of the supply chain. These conversations helped us determine what questions and criteria we should have for potential partners, the pricing we should be paying, and things to look out for.
What are your “5 Things You Need To Create a Successful Food or Beverage Brand” and why?
1. Customers
Successful brands don’t just have customers, they know them. Know who your target market is. Conduct research to deeply understand their wants, needs, goals, and pain points in relation to your product space. Create your product for them. Market your product to them, based on what you know about them.
When we decided we were going to start a wine company, we knew who our customers were before we knew what our product would be. We spoke with them, we observed them, we researched them. Our customers have been our north star from Day 1.
2. Product
You need a product that people want to buy that can stand out. Based on what you know about your target customers ideate on what you could create to solve for their pain points or aspirations. We were testing ideas and concepts with users before ever having a physical product. Validate product-market fit early and often through user and market research.
Your gut instinct may always be right, but it’s not going to be your only customer. With all our wines we go through many phases of product testing. User testing doesn’t have to be expensive or complicated. One of the early stages of ideating on a new wine for us is usually picking out a bunch of wines and testing them at a wine night to see what resonates and doesn’t.
3. An execution plan
Execution is the difference between a great idea and building a business around it. Especially when you are a small team and have limited resources, it can be challenging to prioritize and where to start. We started working on Vinat in IESE’s Summer Entrepreneurship Program. Something that helped us map out an execution plan during the program was creating a business model canvas. The business model canvas was a great way to lay out critical pieces of our business in a structured way. We then took each area and created specific action plans around who we needed to talk to, what we needed to do, and during what timeline to test our idea, make a product, and get it to market.
Startups have a reputation for being unstructured. For alcoholic beverages, where there are FDA approvals and lots of regulation, adding structure and organization, you can make it easier to budget, plan a launch timeline, and understand all the steps you need to take to get to market.
4. Understanding of the regulatory environment
Alcohol and many food products are highly regulated in the US. Understand the regulations and find experts to help where you aren’t. Before we started, we spoke to anyone in the industry willing to talk to us. You don’t know what you don’t know. These conversations helped us determine what we could handle in-house, where we needed to outsource, and the type of partners we were looking for.
One example of something we did was schedule several free consults with law firms. We got advice and different perspectives, but when we were ready to need services, we had already spoken to many providers and knew who we wanted to work with.
5. Mentors
You won’t be an expert in everything when you are a small startup team. When we had the idea to start Vinat, we tapped our network to identify experts who could be mentors in areas where we may need help.
One mentor who has helped us immensely on our journey is our friend’s mom. She has a background in marketing for consumer products, has a startup, and previously ran an accelerator program. We’ve been able to run ideas past her and get candid feedback, and she’s also been able to tie us into her network.
Can you share your ideas about how to create a product that people really love and are ‘crazy about’?
It may sound simple, but listen to your customers and meet them where they are at instead of trying to change your customer. You can do this through customer research and going to the places your customers are at and seeing what they order, what they like, and what they avoid. Look at the accounts your ideal types of customers follow on social media. Build what your customers love into your brand’s DNA, from the product you’re selling to your email marketing, customer service, social media, and blog posts.
Ok. We are nearly done. Here are our final questions. How have you used your success to make the world a better place?
We love to partner with non-profit organizations that create opportunities for female founders and underserved communities. We’ve donated products to fundraisers and events for non-profits that align with these values. We hope to do more as we grow!
You are an inspiration to a great many people. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.
We want to make young women feel more confident. Throughout our careers, we’ve seen a lot of negativity and discrediting of roles and tasks that are traditionally viewed as more female, like marketing, PR, and design. We can tell you firsthand from our experience launching a brand that these things are tough to manage, do well, and get right because there is a lot of ambiguity. Although we can’t tackle all the problems, we’d like to think we are doing our small part in making them feel more confident and less intimidated by wine.
Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.
Sarah and Emily Mack of Vinat On 5 Things You Need To Create a Successful Food or Beverage Brand was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.