I buy (and drink) a lot of wine. I have never been tempted by the Naked Wines 'offer' of £60 off a £100 case of wine, or whatever.
1. I dislike mail order companies that rely on hard sell, and complicated price structures.
2. They are 40% owned by Pieroth. (For those who do not know, Pieroth have been doing door-to-door selling of Germany wines through in-home wine tastings. Their reps tend to have started life as car salesmen or double glazing salesmen. Their wines are unremarkable and hopelessly overpriced.)
3. They have an absolutely awesome web 2.0 plan. You can talk to other people drinking the same wines; you can talk to the winemakers. It's a cult. All credit to them for embracing the best that the web has to offer.
4. The few journalists who have dared to write about them have not been overwhelmed by the wines. But beware, publish negative comments and the Naked Wines cult followers will pile onto you.
5. They have an awesome strategy of dealing with special parcels. Once a week they offer a few hundred cases of a "special parcel" to their customers. These always run out very quickly. The wines often haven't even been made/bottled at the time of sale... and delivery - of a wine that nobody has ever tasted in its finished form - can be several months later. What an awesome marketing tool; drop shipping at its best, no risk for them at all, just a neat profit.
6. They have this 'wine angel' thing. Pay £20 each month by direct debit. They 'invest' this cash in unknown wineries start-ups. That sort of thing. And then you can use the £20 you spend against your next purchases. Or you can ask for the £20 back as it's held in a trust account. So..... if it's held in a trust account, how can they 'invest' it in start-ups?
All in all, the marketing is so slick, I don't trust it. It's even more obfuscatory than the 'half price' wine offers at Tescos.
That said I had a really delicious Manzanilla the other night that had come from them. At £10 per bottle 'angel' price, it's about the right price, but it was really impressive. At the full £14 per bottle price, it's outrageously expensive. www.nakedwines.com/wines/manzanilla-la-jaca-sherry.htm?cid=UK
Anybody use them?
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Naked Wine new
Naked Wine new
