Last Updated on May 25, 2022 by

Emily Harrison is the Vice President of Marketing and Direct Sales at HALL Wines, where she is responsible for curating the customer journey through all touchpoints. At HALL, Emily helps deepen and enhance the relationship with the winery and customers at all stages. She oversees and manages memberships, marketing, and public relations. She has over 13 years of experience managing national and global brands for iCrossing, Isobar, and The Talent Business. Emily graduated from the Academy of Art University with a degree in advertising.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn: 

• Emily Harrison talks about tightening the digital and in-person experience to create a lifelong customer
• Ways email marketing can be a useful tool for cultivating a personalized and introductory experience 
• How a cultural shift to remote engagement helped HALL Wines overcome challenging times during the pandemic
• Emily talks about using emerging technology to target and retarget consumers
• Emily explains evolving your brand’s relationship with customers through interactive events 
• How a membership element can be beneficial for the lifetime value your brand
• Ways technology can aid in consumer interaction at in-person events
• Emily shares what she is currently reading

In this episode with Emily Harrison

How can you create tangible and memorable experiences for customers? Is it possible to crack the code on brick-and-mortar and cultivate membership connections?

Emily Harrison says to never doubt the power of an Instagrammable moment. Fresh, fun, and interactive events for consumers to engage with your brand are going to resonate more than elementary marketing techniques. Through Emily’s work at HALL Wines, they are able to create programs that attract new clients — as well as lifetime clients — by engaging, adapting, and changing with technology.

On this episode of Legends Behind the Craft, Drew Hendricks sits down with Emily Harrison, Vice President of Marketing and Direct Sales at HALL Wines, to discuss connecting a winery with the consumer. Emily talks about how email marketing can be a useful tool for personalization, how emerging technology can benefit a winery and increase consumer interactions, and why a membership element can curate lifetime consumers.

Resources Mentioned in this episode

• Barrels Ahead
• Drew Hendricks on LinkedIn
• Emily Harrison on LinkedIn
• HALL Wines
• HALL Cabernet Cookoff
• Daniel Daou on Legends Behind the Craft
• Paul Mabray on Legends Behind the Craft
• James King on Legends Behind the Craft
• Michelle and Tyler Bredeson on Legends Behind the Craft
• Daisy Jones and The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid
• The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds by Michael Lewis

Sponsor for this episode…

This episode is brought to you by Barrels Ahead.

Barrels Ahead is a wine and craft marketing agency that propels organic growth by using a powerful combination of content development, Search Engine Optimization, and paid search.

At Barrels Ahead, we know that your business is unique. That’s why we work with you to create a one-of-a-kind marketing strategy that highlights your authenticity, tells your story, and makes your business stand out from your competitors.

Our team at Barrels Ahead helps you leverage your knowledge so you can enjoy the results and revenue your business deserves.

So, what are you waiting for? Unlock your results today!

To learn more, visit barrelsahead.com or email us at hello@barrelsahead.com to schedule a strategy call.

Episode Transcript

Intro  0:03  

Welcome to the Legends Behind the Craft podcast where we feature top leaders in the wine and craft beverage industry with your host Drew Hendricks. Now let’s get started with the show

Drew Hendricks  0:20  

Drew Thomas Hendricks here and the host of Legends Behind the Craft podcast where I talk with leaders in the mining craft beverage industry. Past guests of Legends Behind the Craft include Daniel Daou of Daou Vineyards, Paul Mabray, at Pix, and James King of King Family Vineyards. If you haven’t listened to these yet, be sure to check them out and subscribe. Today’s episode sponsored by Barrels Ahead. At Barrels Ahead, we work with you to implement a one of a kind marketing strategy. One that highlights your authenticity, tells your story and connects you with your ideal customers. In short, we help wineries and craft beverage producers unlock their story to unleash the revenue. Good the barrelsahead.com today to learn more, and super excited to talk today with Emily Harrison. Of HALL Family Wines is the Vice President of Marketing and direct sales. Emily is responsible for the creation and execution of the HALL Family Wines strategic vision by curating the customer journey for customers through all touchpoints. Emily works to enhance the HALL, Walt, and Baca experience for new customers as well as deepens the brand’s relationships with existing customers. In a role, she manages and oversees the membership, the marketing, the public relations, the e-commerce, and even the shipping departments. Welcome to the show, Emily.

Emily Harrison  1:35  

Hi. Thank you.

Drew Hendricks  1:37  

Thank you so much for being on.

Emily Harrison  1:40  

Thank you for having me.

Drew Hendricks  1:41  

Great to talk to you. So Emily, we appreciate your telling me your you didn’t really start in the wine industry. It’s more recent. Tell me how you got into it?

Emily Harrison  1:49  

Sure, yeah. Well, I really got into the wine industry simply because I actually lived in Napa, I ended up marrying a person who grew up here. And so I worked in San Francisco, in ad agencies, digital ad agencies. And in 2010, we decided that we were going to move a little bit closer to family. And so we moved to Napa, which was my husband’s hometown.

Drew Hendricks  2:17  

Okay. Your husband in the wine industry?

Emily Harrison  2:20  

He was in the hospitality, business and fine dining business. Yeah. So it was kind of a nice fit for everybody. And I commuted back to the city for a long time, because it’s not too far to San Francisco. But eventually, when we had kids, I wanted to be a little bit closer. And, of course, what’s closer to Napa than wine?

Drew Hendricks  2:40  

Yeah, sounds good. Um, so you’re in charge of this strategic vision. And I want to, I want to actually just dive right into the meat of it and curating the customer’s journey through all touchpoints. Talk to me about that. Sure.

Emily Harrison  2:53  

So my role? Well, I’ll just start with the fact that I started out with HALL as the Director of Marketing, it’s really, you know, focus on marketing. And a few years into my tenure with HALL, we decided that we needed somebody to kind of oversee the entire customer journey, whether that was, you know, starting at the very beginning of your experience, where you were searching for a winery to go visit on Google, to coming to the winery, having a great brand experience, and then, you know, signing up for membership going home, and then all the touch points that happen as a result of your relationship with your new wine club. So we put me in place to kind of oversee that whole journey across the board. And the HALLs really felt that having somebody looking at all of those touch points kind of holistically would really help create continuity and, and deepen the relationship with the brand. Sure,

Drew Hendricks  3:47  

what was happening before you started, like, what was the customer journey, like when he when he started on board?

Emily Harrison  3:53  

Yeah, I mean, we were never like totally disconnected. But I think there was a little bit of a disconnection I think one of the hardest parts for wineries in general is just connecting the offline experience, you know, the in person experience with what happens when they go home, and they have to connect through email or phone calls, or their you know, shipments, their wine club shipments. And so we really tightened that up the that that kind of link in between leaving the winery and then becoming a lifelong customer. That was really my focus, my primary focus my first couple of years.

Drew Hendricks  4:30  

How did you go about doing that? Well, we

Emily Harrison  4:33  

looked at the process across the board, you know, actually, from an operation standpoint, we looked at how do people get entered into our system after they leave? And what is the process of their first touch point, you know, so what for us? We want a very high touch experience want our members to feel like they’re having a one to one experience? So we assign them a membership associate that was happening happening before me, but we really We’ve looked at that experience, what does that welcome call look like? How? What is the checklist that the membership membership associate has to go through to make sure that they’re telling the member everything that you know, we have to offer? What’s their first club shipment look like? What are the communication touch points along the way there. So just really evaluated all of those different steps of the process from leaving the winery to membership,

Drew Hendricks  5:27  

making sure that that experience that they had at the winery kind of translates and stays fresh. Because now how like, that brings up a good point, because one of the bigger challenges, especially destination type wineries, like a Napa where someone comes from New York, they joined the club, and they may not make it back to Napa. Maybe in five years, maybe not. Maybe that’s their one experience. How do you keep that passion with those visitors? Now that they’re back in their own hometown?

Emily Harrison  5:53  

Yeah, that’s a great question. It’s a major challenge. So one of the great things about customer acquisition acquisition through winery is that the customers they’re, they’re having a wonderful time, it’s usually very celebratory. The weather’s beautiful, the views are beautiful, the wine taste good. It’s this incredible brand moments, and it’s usually their first brand moment, you know, as opposed to, I don’t know, buying a swimsuit in the target, shopping center and looking at it and you know, not feeling so great about. So like, you’ve got this really amazing brand moment that you can capture, and you can leverage. And so we want to bring them back to that brand moment, we want to first thing we want to do is talk to them about their experience, how was their experience? How were the wines? Did they take them home? Did they try them? You know, let’s try to keep that brand moment going alive, you know, as long as possible. So we do that through, as I mentioned, the welcome call and kind of really having informed membership associates talking to them, but then

Drew Hendricks  6:55  

also actual physical, so you pick up the phone and call the person that is so I wish more wineries did that.

Emily Harrison  7:03  

That’s yeah, yes, every member has a membership associate that picks up the phone and calls them to welcome them to membership. And just to talk through their experience. So we use Salesforce to you know, take down notes to understand what their experience was like, so that when we talk to them, we can talk from a place of, you know, being informed about how their experience went. Sure. So another thing that we implemented was triggered emails, like a welcome series, that just reminds them of all of the great things, you know, there’s beautiful pictures of the vineyard and the tasting room experience and the wines and all of that. And we do for haul, we do a three email welcome series

Drew Hendricks  7:40  

and ask you about how you how you set up the sequence. Yeah,

Emily Harrison  7:44  

it’s, it’s over the course of three weeks. So we do one email a week just kind of ease people into it. And we suppress all the other emails, of course, during that welcome series period. So they’re just getting kind of the nuggets that we want to give them and really give them a good strong brand, brand foundation.

Drew Hendricks  8:01  

That’s important. I like that you said you suppress all the other random stuff, because it’s weird when you get a nice personalized email. And then the next one is this really weird transactional one that is completely detached from that series. So you onboard them nicely. Now, in charge of three different portfolios HALL, you’ve got Walt, is it different? Do you have different sequences? Or is there a different methodology between the brands? Yeah,

Emily Harrison  8:26  

there is, um, you know, one of the things that is nice about the brands is that we there’s a lot of efficiencies and there’s there are a lot of things that are very similar. So for HALL HALL’s, the biggest one, we have the most content for HALL, we actually started our welcome series with HALL HALL is three, the other two brands have two in their welcome series. But they actually do follow a very similar, like email template. And the type of information that we give out is similar across the three. So we do find some efficiencies. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time. But the biggest thing I think, between the difference of the brands is just the voice, the brand voice that we’ve crafted. And then of course, the key messaging.

Drew Hendricks  9:11  

Sure. So you’ve got the three welcome series, and then how do you continue to nurture the people that have over the course of years? Yeah, so that excitement and passion,

Emily Harrison  9:21  

there’s all kinds of things that we do. You know, of course, there’s social media, which is a great tool to cultivate a community and that’s what we really want our membership group to be and we want our members to be feel like they’re part of a really amazing community of wine lovers with common interests. So we utilize social Of course, and then we’ve got emails throughout the year. They’ve got their four quarterly shipments and so we really try to pick up the phone at least touch them four times a year with like a phone call and at the very minimum, four times a year. But you know, the, the quarterly shipments have many, many communications And touchpoints, they’re triggered emails, there are direct emails from membership associates. There’s lots of stuff going on. For a while we were doing. We were doing virtual, like zoom tastings with the winemaker after each shipment went out. So you got your wine and you could hop on and and watch a zoom. We’ve pulled up Max about twice a year now, instead of every every quarter, but

Drew Hendricks  10:24  

put up during the pandemic, when Yes,

Emily Harrison  10:27  

yeah, we absolutely ramped it up during the pandemic. And then in social, we started doing our happy hours. And during the pandemic, which was really fun, you know, we got to have lots of amazing wine lovers come on the on the happy hour show, and we just live streamed it on Facebook and Instagram, so anybody could tune in. And it was great. We got so many amazing messages from members saying, this made my afternoon, you know, I’m opening a bottle of your wine and watching this, the show. And I think for a lot of people, especially in the beginning of the pandemic, where nobody was really leaving their house, man, I think we all saw a big e-commerce boom in in April, where everybody was just terrified to leave their house and they were ordering and wine. We saw it, you know, just so many people so grateful that we were able to connect to them, you know, through the internet.

Drew Hendricks  11:17  

I guess we were similar. Since we’re talking about the pandemic, what is we’re coming out of it, we’re still in it. But it’s evolved over the last two years. What lessons have, have you guys learned in the in the marketing department that you’ve pulled out of the pandemic that you’re continuing to implement now?

Emily Harrison  11:34  

Yeah, I mean, I think for our team, it was, as for everybody, it was a huge cultural shift, we moved to all remote. And we had always been an in person, environment and personal office. So that shift alone was was a really big deal for our team. And we learned how to work together, all remotely, because we were very collaborative team, we have a pretty large team, and everybody is incredibly talented. And also just kind of contributes in their own unique way. And we all feed off of each other. And we’ve been together for many years, our marketing team has quite a tenure. So for us to all of a sudden be separated, and now only talking through screen was a little bit of a shock to our system. But we evolved and we got really good at working that way. And so we’re really excited to actually be moving to a hybrid model for work now. So that we can, you know, provide kind of the work life balance, but then also the getting together and feeling like we’re part of a team and getting to collaborate in person, which is also so important. So I think we’ve pulled a ton of great learnings out of that. And I think we also just learned that we can overcome anything, you know, we at all, in particular, we’re just very, not afraid of big challenges. And we’re also very not afraid to just do something we don’t know how to do it, we just start start working on it, start learning about how to do it and put together kind of a playbook. And so the happy hours were a great example of that. Nobody had ever, you know, produced the happy hour show. And we had some really great leaders in that on that team. And we all came together and over time, just improved it and improved it and, and created something cool.

Drew Hendricks  13:31  

That’s fantastic. I love the idea of the happy hour. He talked about your team and all the tenure. And one of the biggest one of the things we’re talking about in the pre show is how you’ve actually built a in house agency for this HALL family of wines. Now, talk to me about how you ended up building this agency and how that’s different from a marketing department. Yeah,

Emily Harrison  13:52  

I don’t think we ever really intentionally built an in house agency, it just kind of evolved into that. As I mentioned, my background wasn’t in wine. I was on the agency side for my whole career before HALL. So that was really the only way I knew how to market was, you know, through the operational system of an agency. So when I started with HALL, they had a marketing department and they you know, they had a team, it was about three people. And we had a focus on marketing and a focus on E comm. And so our team was really kind of intertwined with the ECOM team. We were one in the same for a long time. And it just kind of evolved that way. We started to approach projects from an agency standpoint, looking at key stakeholders as clients if you will. The the way that we work operationally, like the number of projects that we have and how we triage projects and how we how we staff projects, just it comes kind of from an agency model and then And we wanted to do everything in house, we didn’t have any agencies. So we were just, we just started doing it and, and our, our capabilities just kind of built and built and built up until all of a sudden, we were really work kind of full service.

Drew Hendricks  15:12  

Oh, now, he talked about the triaging. And so to bring this into perspective for other wineries that are listening, what’s the what are the steps? And what are the benefits on kind of taking more of the more I guess, responsibility is not the right word, but more ownership and more, I guess, responsibility over the full circle of the marketing and the development of the site and all the other type of agency things to advise and whatnot.

Emily Harrison  15:42  

Yeah, so I think our team is incredibly effective and efficient. And getting things through the door, I’m always amazed at how much we do. And so we have to be really, really organized, the first thing we did was created a giant status doc. And we actually just use a Google Doc, we don’t use a fancy, you know, tool we aren’t, we aren’t using JIRA or anything like that we use JIRA for some web dev stuff. But for just like running the department, we use just a simple status doc, with lots of tabs, everybody’s got a department, and we just everything goes on the marketing status doc, every request, because we get requests from all different types of people and different departments like that is one of the coolest things about working for a winery, especially not a big huge corporate winery. You know, we’re a midsize family owned winery. There’s not, there’s not a lot of corporate tea. And so we have, you know, requests coming in from tasting rooms that need a new order form or a flyer for something that they want to stuff in a bag. We have requests from, you know, one of the brand directors who wants to go into wholesale and do a wine dinner, we’ve got requests from investors, we’ve got requests the interest from all different angles and sides of the business. And so because of that, we get requests in a very non formulaic fashion that can you know, maybe it’s a bit of a request or an idea that somebody has. And so we have to, we put everything on the status dock, and then we go through it once a week. And we have color coding and all kinds of kind of ways to organize everything so that we can give people on our teams, just simple tasks. And I think one of the things that has been so beneficial about being in house is that we understand the needs of the business. And so we can say, that flyer can wait, this can’t and we can just kind of rework everything. It’s like a game of Tetris all all the time to make sure that everybody is using their time in the most optimal way. And everything is getting done. That’s yeah.

Drew Hendricks  18:00  

There’s only so much time. And yeah, as far as like, what so you’ve got the three, the three, three brands, how large is your team that’s managing these three brands?

Emily Harrison  18:12  

Yeah, the marketing team is eight. And then our econ team has three people on it. So between all of them got to live in.

Drew Hendricks  18:22  

That’s a pretty I mean, that’s pretty nice size for an agency for a smaller winery or for a winery that maybe only has one brand. What’s the one marketing component that you would urge them to keep in house?

Emily Harrison  18:35  

Oh, good question. Um, yeah, well, I’ll first say that, we were all in house. And then a few years ago, we started actually siphoning some things off because we, we got to a size that we felt like we could actually work with some agencies. So we’ve done a little bit of that, for example, media buying, we now have an agency do the media buying, we do all the creative work, but the buying is done by an agency. So I think the creative work is probably the one thing that you want to keep in house because you know, your brand voice more than anybody else. And you still have to do all of the work, that is brand guidelines and key messaging and kind of all of that work still has to be done, because that has to be disseminated out to the everybody who’s using it within the organization. So you still have to do that. But you still you know it so well that you can break your own rules. And you

Drew Hendricks  19:31  

know what, you know, it’s rules to break the law actually move it forward in the correct way.

Emily Harrison  19:37  

For sure. The other component I think, which is not really like a specific area or discipline, within marketing, but just a technologist, like I think having somebody who understands technology is good at learning about emerging technology and solving problems with technology is just so helpful, they can jump in and do like coding, they can go find something that is, you know, going to be a plugin solution, I can’t tell you how many tools we use, you know, we, for example, we’re having our cab cook off next week. And we’ve we needed to build a voting system for voting for the winner. And so we’re going to use a type form, just having somebody who’s willing to go out there and scour the internet for all the different cool technical, you know, products out there that could help solve your problems and make it a little bit easier. For like, a small fee, you know, type form is, I don’t remember how much it cost, but it’s, you know, under 100 bucks. It’s like a simple solution, to really add a little polish and and help your execution along.

Drew Hendricks  20:46  

That’s good. That’s good. You know, like the talking about, even if you have I gave you could be the biggest agency in the United States, you’re still gonna have one aspect that’s so specialized, that makes sense to outsource it. And I think you hit the nail on the head with the media buying it’s in maybe PR, because it’s all about connections, it’s very hard to have. Have that completely in house.

Emily Harrison  21:10  

Yeah, yeah, no, I understand that, too. We do our PR in house. But we’ve got a awesome person who’s been with us for a long time, and has spent a lot of time building connections and relationships. But on the media side, I just feel like, you just can’t, you can’t replicate the power of buying for all of your clients, right. So an agency, like we as one little company, we only have so much buying power, but an agency is representing tons of clients. And they when they go talk to a publication, you know, they’ve got the buying power of everybody. And it may not be that everybody on their roster is going to buy an ad in in town and country. But you know, they’re going to be buying and other parts of the media portfolio. And so it just seems like it’s a much more effective way, especially if you can get to a level of media spend that is, you know, worth engaging with an agency

Drew Hendricks  22:08  

for what some of the better. Where are you finding success right now in your media buying?

Emily Harrison  22:14  

Well, not face. I don’t know if you know about the iOS update last year, but it really kind of twisted the way that we we find people who are interested in wine, you know, media, buying for fine wine is really tough, because you don’t want to have a lot of waste in your media buying. You want to try and find people who are really interested in fine wine. And that could be somebody you know, who looks like me, or it could be somebody who looks totally different, because wine is so unique, and so many different types of people love wine. So anyway, it’s a little bit of a challenge to prospect. I think where we find a lot of success with media buy is in retargeting and is in talking to people who are already our customers and getting them to repurchase. So bringing people into the brand, we find that that’s easier to do through brick and mortars and through tasting experiences where they have that amazing brand experience. But then the digital ad, space is much more effective for talking to people who already know about us and keeping us top of mind and keeping key wines that we want to make sure we’re focusing on top of mind for people for

Drew Hendricks  23:31  

sure. And thinking about top of mind and your retargeting. Now on your website, are you doing anything with like personalization? Yeah, about that.

Emily Harrison  23:46  

Yeah, so um, there are a number of different tools that you can use for website personalization. And they’re so good for so many things. The first thing is just like making simple changes to your site that you don’t want to, you know, work with a coder or do heavy lifting, you know, on coding. The next thing would be like just optimizing the site like making this button green because green means go versus making this button red, right like little tweaks here and there to kind of optimize the customer journey, maybe the cart experience. And then the next thing is that we’re we’re really starting to explore is really changing the site for your relationship with us as a brand. So are you or are you a member? Does that mean you see a different homepage? Do you live you know, in a in a cold state or hot states, maybe we’re highlighting, you know, white wines. If you’re in Texas or Florida right now, we’re still highlighting reds if you’re in New York. So really kind of shifting the whole site experience depending on your relationship with To us, and the best example of that would be the membership experience.

Drew Hendricks  25:04  

So when you once you log in, and then you’ve got your whole database, and you’ve got all the ability to do the personalization, I’d say one of the keys to personalization is that you want to make it look like it’s not personalized. Otherwise, it starts to look creepy. But if you know, and they’re getting white wine, and they’re in a warm state or whatnot, it tends to build that resonance, it builds that affinity.

Emily Harrison  25:26  

Yeah, I mean, I think nobody wants to creep anybody out. And no, we don’t want to be creepy. We just want to give you the best possible experience and give you content that is interesting, and relevance. And so I think the goal is just to give you content that is going to resonate with you, and that is going to be helpful. You know, if we’re showing you a whole bunch of stuff that you’re not interested in, and you’ve demonstrated that, then that’s not a brand you want to be part of.

Drew Hendricks  25:55  

Yeah, no, for sure. And I’m talking about customer experiences over the seven, eight years, you’ve been with Hall? How have the experiences evolved? Online? Yeah,

Emily Harrison  26:09  

um, yeah, I mean, I think, well, I don’t think you can underestimate the, the experience that everybody had through the pandemic, I think that really shifted a lot of people’s relationships with brands that they are members of, and had an existing relationship with. I think our relationship with customers has gotten more sophisticated. Over time, we do a lot of custom work on our site. And kind of all of the systems that we use are all fairly custom, we don’t use like an all inclusive wine system. Because we want to be able to make whatever we want. We want to be able to create programs that are going to resonate with people and some of that stuff we haven’t even thought up yet, you know. So I think over time, it’s really evolved. In my second year, here, the halls published a book. And so I think that was a really cool marketing tool, actually. I don’t think that’s why they did it. And they just wanted to tell their story. But you know, people like have a really in depth relationship with us if they’ve read that whole book. And, and then they get to meet Katherine. And then you know, it just really has evolved their relationship to a kind of a really neat and neat level. You know, we’ve had many members who’ve been part of our membership for 1015 years. And so as as our membership has grown, and as our as time has gone on, we’ve gotten more and more of those amazing relationships. And I’m so excited that we get to start seeing people again, with, as I mentioned, the cab cook off. We’re all going to be, you know, together at the winery, we’re going to be seeing so many old friends that we haven’t seen. We haven’t had that event for two years. The last time we

Drew Hendricks  28:04  

took off, it sounds fascinating.

Emily Harrison  28:07  

Oh, it’s so fun. It’s so fun. Someday. I would love to attend it as just as a guest. Yeah. But it’s really fun. It’s at the winery, which is at the St. Halina winery, Hall signaling a winery. And it’s a beautiful campus. And what we do is we have I think it’s this year, it’s 12. Chefs from Yeah, different areas, different restaurants in the Bay Area, in California. And they all come in and their their goal is to create the best dish, a small dish that pairs with our Cabernet. And yeah, they do it on behalf of a charity. So they get to pick a charity to like, fight for. Yeah, so it’s super cool. All the charities are there, all the chefs are there. All the people are there, everybody gets to vote. And then we have a judging panel. So there’s lots of winners. Everybody gets to win something. And it’s just so fun. And it’s a great opportunity to, you know, soak up some Napa sunshine and eat good food and drink good wine.

Drew Hendricks  29:11  

That’s fantastic. And is this a member’s only one? Or is this something where people buy tickets to it for the charity event?

Emily Harrison  29:17  

Yeah, anybody can buy tickets to it members definitely buy lots and lots of tickets. And we let them know about it and the dates first, but it sells out every year. So it’s very popular. And we’ve been doing it for many, many years. So people are, you know, repeat. Visitors

Drew Hendricks  29:34  

love the idea of well, he’s known for a long time, but I really love the idea of wineries taking just beyond just the pickup party or just beyond and having an actual event and then combining it with you know, doing social good. And coming to a charity event that helps kind of proclaim the message and just expand the brand. Yeah, it’s winners do that.

Emily Harrison  29:57  

Yeah, it’s really neat to get to know All these different charities, we’ve also been able to create long standing relationships with these charities over the you know, over the years, because we’ve had some several repeat charity guests and repeat chefs. And so it’s just cool to be connected with your community. And as I said, before membership is all about, you know, crafting this community around the love of wine, and finding people who are interested in similar things. Yeah, so

Drew Hendricks  30:29  

for winery that may not have the history of Paul or the means to have 1212 Just together, what advice would you give a winery, a smaller winery that wants to kind of start to jump into these more personalized experiences?

Emily Harrison  30:43  

Yeah, I think, um, I think you’re absolutely right, you have to go beyond just a pickup party. So you need to have something that’s unique and special. And I think that you also need to make sure that you’ve got a membership element, you may want to use this events as a as a prospecting tool to bring people to your brand. But if you can find some way, whether it’s a discount for the members, or you give them first access, or maybe there’s a members area, or some kind of badge that the member gets to wear, you know, you really want to exalt Your members and make sure they feel special and have something that kind of identifies them as as unique and special to you as a brand.

Drew Hendricks  31:26  

Oh, yeah. No, for sure. I was I was taught what talking about events I was talking with Taylor, Michelle Bredeson and a bold North sellers, they’re up in Minnesota. Alexandria, Minnesota, in every year, and in September, they do this, um, grape stomp competition. So it’s can they have the fine wines, but you can also just have fun, and they get about 15,000 people in for this grape stomping and you buy tickets 40, I think it’s $40 for and then they met first one to fill up a gallon worth of juice wins. And then they have different levels. And it to me, it was just kind of fascinating and a great way to kind of go beyond just the wine and create like an experience. And then they have food trucks and whatnot. But I was always curious to see how wineries take that unique angle.

Emily Harrison  32:16  

Yeah, I am always amazed at our team’s ability to come up with creative ideas for events that we’ve been doing for years and years and years. So you know, kept book off we’ve done every year, except for the last two fourths due to COVID. But um, you know, every year we find some way to come up with something new or fresh, whether it’s bringing in some new talents or creating some new like, art piece that people can interact with. You know, I think it’s really important for you to, as said, create an experience, create something for people to do that’s tangible, that they’ll remember. And I think also you can’t underestimate the power of, you know, Instagrammable moments, right to use those events to spread your brand and create a moment on social media, you know, as well.

Drew Hendricks  33:08  

Absolutely. Talk about the history and all the all the events that happen year after year. Going forward. Where do you? Where do you see wineries in Hall Hall Family Wines going forward to the next seven years? Where do you see this customer journey evolving? Oh,

Emily Harrison  33:23  

let’s see. I mean, I think that we are, we love the brick and mortar experience. And so I think we would love to continue to invite people in to have to experience our wines in person and start their relationship with us that way. So I could see some growth in that regard. And then, you know, I think that we haven’t quite cracked the virtual interaction. I want to continue to work on that more. As I mentioned, we were doing the vegetable tastings a couple times a year, and now we’re before the pandemic. We did it occasionally not with any regularity. We do an events week long event in the middle of summer, called member Appreciation Week. We were always doing it from member Appreciation Week. And we always were trying to think of ways to connect with people who who don’t live near the winery, but are also you know, huge fans. So we always did it during that period of time. And so we’re trying to amp that up a little bit more. But I’m really interested to see what happens with the metaverse and just kind of as technology goes and changes and consumers adopt new new ways of connecting with brands. You know, maybe something really cool will come out, you know, for wine that we could we could capitalize there. But for now I don’t think there’s anything better than being in person with people and getting to connect with people in person. So yeah, maybe maybe that means we go on the road, maybe we you know, and we have done that. In the past, but I definitely think that we’re all craving in person connections right now. And so I’m hopeful that we’ll get to kind of explore that a little bit more, and then maybe find technology that helps us connect virtually a little more closely.

Drew Hendricks  35:16  

I agree that um, and he brought it up. So what do you where do you see wine fitting into the metaverse?

Emily Harrison  35:22  

Oh, I do not know. We just had my econ director just went to a conference and it was all the rage all over. And so I had to have him talk me through it. And we were looking at it and you know, definitely starting to explore I think it’s going to be a very long time for us, personally. Our consumer does not typically, they’re not early adopters. When you think

Drew Hendricks  35:49  

about wines or wineries is they’re probably the slowest to embrace technology. And you guys are on the forefront. So I do see it being a slow, a slow crawl into the metaverse, but I do see a fitting for it. I’m always curious to see how people’s visions are.

Emily Harrison  36:05  

Yeah, I don’t know exactly what it will be. I mean, I think one of the most amazing pieces of our brands and wine brands in general are the connection to the vineyard. It’s a really strong piece of the Walt branding, in particular for our Walt branding. It’s 1000 miles of Pinot Noir. We talk about the vineyard sites, we really specialize in single vineyard Pinos. And so if there’s a way to transport people to that vineyard, to really get a sense of the individual places in time and space that are captured in this bottle, through the metaverse, I mean, I think that is definitely worth exploring. And, you know, I would love to transport everybody, you know, up to Willamette, and che che che has vineyard up there, you know, or down to rosellas. You know, just and being able to do that all from the comfort of your home. In a single sitting. You know, I could see really interesting applications for even for in person experiences at the winery, because those those vineyards are so far apart, right? So I don’t know, there could be some something really cool there.

Drew Hendricks  37:17  

I like that idea of stepping up the virtual beyond just kind of a 2d vision of people talking or in the pandemic, having the winemaker on walking people through the wines, that leveling up that experience where people are actually immersed into the wine. And he can do that through all the visuals, in great point on taking the tour of the vineyards being there, making it a little more immersive. I do see that direction.

Emily Harrison  37:45  

Yeah, we’ll see. We’ll see what happens. I’m not sure. It’s gonna It’s a whole new world for sure.

Drew Hendricks  37:51  

Absolutely. So, ashes. We’re kind of wrapping down here. I always like to ask something, what have you been reading lately?

Emily Harrison  37:58  

So I’m a big reader. I read not only to my kids all the time, but for myself. And right now I’m reading Daisy Jones, and the six, which is a novel that is about a rock band. And it is written in a way that is kind of as though a documentary was transcribed. So it’s a little bit different. But it’s been really fun to read and about halfway through it. So looking forward to finishing that soon.

Drew Hendricks  38:29  

That sounds fantastic. Who’s the author? Oh, gosh,

Emily Harrison  38:31  

I have to pull it up. Well, so it’s got three names. She’s got three names. Um, now I can’t remember her name, but she’s pretty. Taylor Jenkins. Reid I think.

Drew Hendricks  38:44  

Okay. Yeah, that sounds like a good. Sounds like a good book. What about this? What’s less business book you read? Oh.

Emily Harrison  38:53  

The undoing project?

Drew Hendricks  38:55  

Oh, tell me what the undoing project? Yeah, I

Emily Harrison  38:58  

actually think I have it in here somewhere. Um, yeah, it’s, um, by the gentleman who did The Big Short. Yeah. And it’s all about understanding your biases, and using kind of science to pull them back and not have any biases. And so as it’s applied to marketing, or business decisions, it’s it just kind of studies our natural biases. Oh, that’s

Drew Hendricks  39:26  

fascinating. I’m gonna pick that one up. Yeah, it’s cool. Well, Emily, thank you so much for joining us today. Where can people find out more about you and her family wines?

Emily Harrison  39:36  

I’m HALLwines.com. My LinkedIn, my own site, so

Drew Hendricks  39:44  

sounds good. Emily, thank thank you so much for joining us today.

Emily Harrison  39:47  

Awesome. Thank you, Drew.

Drew Hendricks  39:49  

Thank you. Have a good day. All right, you too.

Outro  39:58  

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