Curated wining

Vino 100 brings clarity to an often confusing business; its fast growing franchise formula offers consumers one hundred great wines for USD 25 or less.

Abundance. Choice fatigue. Insperiences. Curated consumption. Get ready for another year of buzzwords hinting at a huge market for curators and editors, helping uber-critical yet time starved and sometimes bewildered consumers make the right choice. Which is why we like US-based Vino 100, whose wine stores offer their customers an easy to digest “one hundred great wines for USD 25 or less” (EUR 21/GBP 14). The experience-style stores showcase each of the limited edition wines on its own pedestal, accompanied by the Vino 100 Wine Barometer (a dummy-proof wine rating and information system). In true tryvertising– style, wine-tastings are part of the experience. In Vino 100’s own words: “Wine stores are all too often intimidating, snobbish and expensive, or are designed as wine “superstores” where the quantity of wines is overwhelming and the quality of wines and the service provided is under whelming.” Vino 100 is expanding fast, using an aggressive franchising strategy: it has 29 stores across the US, and is planning to open another 17 in the next few months. The franchise fee to own and operate a Vino 100 is USD 30,000 (EUR 25K/GBP 17K), while the average cost to develop a Vino 100 store is approximately USD 150,000.

Opportunities

For entrepreneurs looking for a franchise opportunity, Vino 100 looks ripe for the picking. The concept also looks tasty for those considering a global roll-out (read: copying the concept to other countries). Needless to say this curated thinking applies to virtually every B2C industry: pick your area of expertise, limit your offerings to a well-explained, well-chosen assortment, and you’re in business. Oh, and how about a chain of curated cheese shops, located next to Vino 100 stores?