Leading The Way: Brett Bayda
No matter what happened the day before, you need to roll into work with a smile on your face and accomplish the day. If I didn’t have a strong character or resilience, I would have broken down months ago …
When COVID hit, Drinjk Wines CEO Brett Bayda found that demand for virtual wine tastings and Drinjk’s single serving six-pack wines rose rapidly, but dealing with the logistics side of the business during COVID proved to be challenging …
Tell me about Drinjk Wines.
Drinjk is the largest online marketplace for single-serve wines in the United States. We currently offer 24 different wines in six-pack formations. We’re the only company in the world that uses this bottle because a) we designed it, and b) we’re the leader among companies who specialize in packaging single-serve wines in six-packs. Our most popular product is our wine Advent calendar which allows people to count down to the holidays.
Our goal is to keep building out a marketplace that serves a variety of single serve wines. Right now, we offer wines from seven countries but we want to offer wines from twelve countries and have a hundred or more different wines available for all different types of wine lovers. Sweet wines, fruity wines, exotic wines, gift wines. So essentially, we’re an online fine liquor store for single serve wines.
How long has Drinjk been in business?
I started the company three years ago in Canada and ran it there for a year. We had a growth spurt and decided that the best course of action would be to move to the United States and California in particular because of the nice warm winters. That way, we didn’t have to worry about the wine freezing the way it did in Canada. It also made more sense logistically because of all the great wine in California and the larger population (there’s more people in California than in all of Canada combined).
So we moved to California two years ago and launched a year later with our wine Advent calendar in Safeway. We sold out 100 Safeway stores across Northern California in a day with that product, and we realized, “All right, I think we’re on to something here.” So we worked hard the whole next year, and I mean hard because we were just a small team of only three people at the time. That led to this super successful Christmas. But I’ll be the first to admit we probably bit off more than we could chew!
What kind of impact did COVID have on Drinjk?
Shelter-in-place provided a big boost for the online alcohol industry. We’re not open to the public. We ship directly to our customers. Virtual wine tasting experiences took off like crazy. A few large companies with offices all over the United States started working with us and holding virtual wine tasting for their employees. Also, we have one of the best wine gifts in the United States – single serve luxury wine Advent calendars. Everyone’s looking for those great pandemic gifts or something to cheer themselves up. So COVID has been amazing on the sales side.
But on the logistics side, COVID has been a real struggle. We ordered a new bottling line in early 2020. It was manufactured outside the United States so once COVID hit, the engineers that built the line weren’t able to travel to California to set it up for us. It’s quite a complicated bottling line, the only one in the world. It’s custom made for our bottles. So I had to set up. Luckily, I’m very handy, having grown up on a farm and fixing things my whole life. I was able to put the entire bottling line together myself working every evening for three straight weeks. But, that put us a long ways behind schedule which creates stress and puts more demands on customer service since our customers are asking where their orders are because we were two to three weeks behind schedule.
How else did COVID affect Drinjk?
COVID didn’t affect our business plan. We set a direction last December, and I never detoured from that. We thought about how many Advent calendars we could produce, whether people would buy them, where to set the price point, how much inventory to buy, etc. We did decide to go to a half-size Advent calendar this year because we knew at that price point, everyone probably had $59. And everyone was going to need Christmas gifts or something to cheer themselves up. Then Costco came knocking and placed a big order with us.
What came as a surprise was COVID’s impact on our travel plans. We flew to France in March to source the wines for the Advent calendar and attend the biggest wine show in the world in Dusseldorf, Germany. We left spent a few days in Paris and then went to Bordeaux. By the time we left Paris, the city was shut down. By the time we left Bordeaux, that city was shut down. We had to spent 48 hours at the airport in Paris before getting on a plane to Munich, Germany where we got stuck for days before finally being able to return home. Two weeks in Europe and we never even got to taste a single wine! That made it challenging to source the wine for this year’s calendar – twelve different wines from seven different countries.
What's your plan for 2021?
We’re going to go full bore ahead. We saw the outcome of our product this year. It was a huge hit. So we’re going to double or triple the output and bank on our main “hero product” as I call it. Any of the other business that comes spilling in from virtual wine tastings or six pack sales is essentially gravy for us. Hopefully, customers will continue to buy online and won’t be as fearful about their wine not coming quickly enough or getting damaged in the mail. These questions were lingering in the wine industry before COVID but now people realize, “Oh, it’s not that hard to order wine online, and I’m okay waiting two days for it to show up.”
I'm normally a white wine drinker so when I attended one of your virtual wine tastings, I was surprised to find that I like the red wines the most.
We never promise our customers they’ll like all of the wines because that’s not the idea. We want to throw a bunch of curve balls at you. We want to push you, challenge you, make it a new experience for you, let you try wines you normally wouldn’t try. You might only like five of the six wines, or even four of the six, but that’s okay. Buy more of the ones you like and move on from the ones you don’t.
When you go to a market, it’s hard to know which wine to choose. Wine review apps don’t help because some people love it, and some people hate it so wines often wind up with three stars out of five. Many wines are made at the same winery in the Central Valley and then sold to different companies who put their own label on it.
We surveyed several thousand customers, and they told us that what they’re most afraid of is buying a full size bottle of wine that they don’t like. It does suck when you do that. You’ve had a hard day or you want to celebrate something. You buy a bottle of wine you haven’t tried before, take it home, open it up and nobody likes it. And you probably only bought the one because it’s just you and your significant other and now it’s not as much of a celebration any more. That’s where the concept of Drinjk came from. We want you to be able to try more than one wine. It’s all about convenience and variety. The convenience of having a single serve bottle of wine and the variety of being able to try wines from all over the world. It’s economical, and it’s a great way for beginner wine drinkers to start experiencing wine.
What's next for Drinjk?
We’re looking forward to improving our wines and ramping up the quality. As we become more popular, more and more wineries want to work with us. The wineries that are approaching us represent everything we stand for – handcrafted, small, boutique. So we’re excited.
We’re hoping COVID pulls back this spring so we can travel to Europe to meet with the owners of these wineries and start improving and growing our inventories. We can see the wineries, taste the wines, meet the wine-makers. We can take pictures and videos of the wineries. That will allow us to do virtual wine tastings at every winery. When you go to our website, you’ll not only be able to meet the wineries the way you can now, you’ll be able to take a 3D tour of the winery and feel as though you’re actually there while you’re drinking their wines.
During such a crazy time, how do you prepare to face the day?
I get up at 5:45 am. I don’t check my phone; otherwise, I’d just get caught up in social media. I tell myself, you’re going to have a good day. I get my dog and go for a half an hour walk. I sit on the top of a hill and let the sun warm my face. I go home. I shower. I have breakfast with my wife, and then we meditate and pray and get ourselves into the state of how we want to start our day.
What lessons have you learned during 2020?
We have been on a rollercoaster ride these past nine months. Not just COVID, but startup life. Startups are challenging. I was in the construction industry before. I used to build homes, which is much easier. You order the materials, you build the home, you sell the home. It’s a straightforward business model. With startups, the more success you have, the more difficulties you encounter. Success drives growth spurts which means you have to raise more money, produce more product, acquire more space, buy more inventory. You have to take more risk. You have to hire more employees. There’s not enough time in the day to do all this. Somehow, you plug through 12-14 hours/day every day. You’re exhausted but you get through it. Your head just comes above the water, and then all of a sudden, you hit the next growth spurt and you have to start all over again. It’s a real struggle, and that’s essentially what we’ve been going through for the past nine months. I was completely burnt out on September 1st. I have no idea how I just moved thousands of Advent calendars in the last six weeks.
The biggest lesson for me was strength of character. Resilience. Trying to stay calm when everything is falling apart around you. Trying to be a leader to your team when you’re just as scared as they are. Trying to hide that you’re running out of money and have to go raise some more.
At the end of the day, no matter what your business does or how it all plays out, you want to be happy, and you want to remember your ‘why.’ Why am I doing this? Why am I showing up every day? Why am I taking this risk? No matter what happened the day before, you need to roll into work at 8:00 am with a smile on your face and accomplish the day. If I didn’t have a strong character or resilience, I would have broken down months ago. We would never have gotten through this.
I also saw a side of me I was embarrassed by sometimes. Anger. Getting down. Losing hope. Just short bursts of this, but it reminded me that I’m human. That it doesn’t matter how hard you work. You’re going to burn out just like everybody else. You’re not invincible, and you just have to pick yourself up. You have to ask for help. You have to be inspired by other entrepreneurs or people in the self-help industry and keep strengthening your character. I’m a much stronger person than I was nine months ago. But I still have a long ways to go, and I look forward to building that character so I can keep leading this company in the right direction as it grows because no company can succeed unless the CEO of the company grows with it.
Brett Bayda is the founder, CEO and Chief Wine Hunter of Drinjk Wines, the USA's fastest growing single-serve online marketplace. It's Drinjk's mission to reinvent the wine industry by offering wine lovers more convenience and variety. To make wines more approachable and to make it easier for consumers to sample handcrafted wines from around the world at a great price.