Willy Wonka Inspired Me to Say 'Yes' to Anything for a Year. Here's How It Led to a $200 Million Company Within 17 Months. It's funny how much you can learn from what kids watch.
By Amanda Breen Edited by Jessica Thomas
This as-told-to story is based on a conversation with Neha Kumar (COO), co-founder with Louis Amoroso (CEO) of Full Glass Wine Co., a brand acquisition and management firm focused on rapidly acquiring direct-to-consumer (DTC) wine companies to build a multi-brand marketplace. Learn how Full Glass Wine Co. completed seven acquisitions and grew to $200 million in just 17 months. The piece has been edited for length and clarity.
Image Credit: Courtesy of Full Glass Wine Co. Co-founder and COO Neha Kumar.
My son really likes the movie Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and there's this scene where Willy Wonka finds his first gray hair and realizes his mortality. He needs to think about what he wants to accomplish next. Around that time, I got my first couple of gray hairs — it's funny how much you learn from what kids watch. It motivated me to embark on a year of "yes": a period of time when I'd say "yes" to any incredible opportunity that came my way. When you're in that mindset, it shifts your perspective to a forward-looking one.
The market has been right for consolidation for the past couple of years, with low interest rates at the height of the pandemic and a lot of money floating around. Many startups saw valuations rise, and valuations were inflated. All of those textbook market triggers were there. So, when Winc filed for bankruptcy in late 2022, that "yes" mentality fueled me. My co-founder and I decided to acquire it.
Financing was difficult in the beginning because so many people had been burned. As we've acquired companies, we've done deals in various structures. Some of them had a component of cash, equity, seller financing or debt. We were focusing on all of these companies that could use some help with infrastructure. We could put them under one umbrella and streamline operations. Since 2022, we've completed seven acquisitions, including companies like Wine Insiders, Scout & Cellar, Cameron Hughes and Splash.
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Bringing these companies together has given Full Glass Wine Co. access to so much data. In fact, sometimes it's hard to manage it all. We know what customers are looking for and at what point in the year they want it. It's about making sure that you're listening to your audience, closely monitoring the data in regard to their purchasing behavior and then finding ways to communicate with them. The process is not only extremely important but also fun because you have a chance to see consumers interacting with your product and hear what they're saying.
Right now, I love seeing social and AI come together. We can use AI to understand customer taste preferences, determining what they'll like based on their profile as they buy more wine, fine-tuning that and combining it with social media. This helps establish an in-real-time relationship between our brand and its customers. You can think about it like if you're at a concert and someone tweets a suggestion or song request, that audience sentiment alters the performance on stage.
Related: Analyzing Customer Behavior Can Shape Your Future Marketing Campaigns
Varietals for wine are always important and will always have a long lead time. You don't want to change that too much because you want the love, care and attention to go into the grapes and winemaking process. But marketing and messaging can be different. We're working with printers at all of our warehouses to be able to alter our labels, images and colors based on market feedback at a really quick rate. The lead time in physical products is really difficult; it typically doesn't allow you to change things as fast as possible, but what's relevant in the market, what's fun and exciting, happens so quickly.
I worked with Meena Harris before I was working on this, and when Charli XCX came out and said, "Kamala is Brat," I'm like, "How fast can we get a label to come out?" Could you imagine if we'd been able to punch out a label — just plain green? No words necessary. But the challenge we had at that time was the way printing was done: on site at the bottling facility versus at the warehouse.
When we're in tune with our audience, when we're one — to me, that's where the magic is.
I teach at UCLA, and when I was in the thick of starting up Full Glass Wine Co., my students would ask me, "Well, how do you think it's going to work out? How can you stand here smiling, thinking this is going to happen?" And I'm like, "I actually don't know, but you almost have to have this faith and optimism that you're going to figure it out." And that's what ties in with the year of "yes." My husband and I have talked about this quite a bit — what it takes to shift our mindset to essentially say, Yes, we're going to figure it out. We're going to make it happen.
