Online wine marketplace Winery.ph recently announced that it had raised over P30 million from its 2023 Angel Investor Program. This is the third time that Winery.ph has put together a significant funding round from angel investors based in the Philippines and abroad. Their unique fundraising approach has seen over 50 paid-up shareholders join the cap table since 2020, collectively funding the business through its market validation and initial scale-up phases.
Winery.ph is the largest online wine marketplace in the Philippines. Through its online-first sales approach, Winery.ph aims to deliver a huge selection of bottles directly to customers’ doorsteps at competitive prices. The company even offers same-day delivery to customers within Metro Manila, on its in-stock range of over 2000 wines plus over 1000 liquor, beer, non-alcoholic, and gourmet grocery items.
The 2023 Angel Investor Program, which closed in early May, gave another cohort of investors a chance to become a part of Winery.ph’s accelerating growth and expansion. This round featured over a dozen unique investors, including several passionate long-time customers of Winery.ph, all of whom are now shareholders in the company. Aside from the investment, shareholders enjoy perks such as exclusive discounts and buying opportunities on Winery.ph’s platform—an early dividend that you get to drink.
Funds from the 2023 Angel Investor Program will go towards scaling Winery.ph’s operations and infrastructure, including the operationalization of its Global Cellar Door and further development of its Makati distribution center.
Winery.ph’s angel investing program could not have come at a better time. According to estimates from the US Department of Agriculture, total wine exports to the Philippines reached $60 million in 2022 and will grow 5 percent each year over the next three years to $70 million.
Based on these export values, the Philippine wine market is estimated to be worth about USD 260 million in 2022, and forecast to grow by at least 5% a year to exceed USD 300M of retail sales value by 2025. “Wine’s increasing popularity and relatively low consumption create an extraordinary profile that makes the Philippines one of the most exciting wine markets in the world,” the US Department of Agriculture further notes.
Accessible wine for all
Founded in 2016 by Chris Urbano, who continues to serve as Executive Chairman, the startup was conceived as a way to drastically improve Filipinos’ access to good quality wines by offering a much wider selection at a more accessible price point. Typically, Winery.ph offers wines at 10%-15% less than traditional supermarkets. Winery.ph’s overall goal is simple: to become the go-to wine supplier in the Philippines. As reflected in the company’s slogan of “Vino for the Filipino,” the company believes that wine should be neither expensive nor pretentious.
As part of its strategy to deliver disruptive range and prices, Winery.ph provides an online go-to market route for dozens of Philippine wine importers who are not able to break into major supermarkets due to limited shelf space and high listing fees—by contrast it is 100% free to list wines on Winery.ph.
By aggregating this range, Winery.ph can then focus on marketing wines from regions and wineries renowned for their exceptional quality, yet may not be as widely recognized, while providing wine content and education to empower wine customers to discover new regions and styles that can offer better value for money. For example, not many know red wine blends from Australia’s Margaret River region closely resemble those of Bordeaux, France.
Urbano also explains that maximizing labor efficiency is another key to keeping costs low. The company has been bootstrapped since the beginning, moving distribution centers five times in five years in order to scale its operations at the lowest possible cost.
“We started out in my kid’s bedroom,” recalled Urbano. “It was just a tiny space where we processed orders, stocked bottles, everything. There was no layout and inventory was all over the place—so while we had minimal rent, we weren’t working efficiently. Fast forward to 2023 and our new home at 2247 Chino Roces is a game changer. As we’ve fit out a scale e-commerce operation, we’ve seen amazing improvements in labor efficiency. With proper space and layout, everything is easier, travel times are lower, inventory is easier to find, and inventory accuracy is better.”
to store volumes and boost overall productivity.
Urbano shared that with their recent move, Winery.ph is now processing around 100% more orders than 12 months ago, but has only increased operations staffing by 20%, which has come about due to operational efficiencies in inventory management, order processing, and order fulfillment. “We can pass those savings onto our customers and thereby increase our competitiveness,” added Urbano.
Connecting with Filipino wine drinkers
Yet beyond just offering accessible price points, Urbano recognizes that Filipino wine enthusiasts may not have the advantage of years of wine tradition and knowledge that their international counterparts possess. This is where the company’s social media strategy comes in.
To cater to customers, Winery.ph strategically organizes its social media presence with five key purposes: inspire, inform, entertain, sell, and operational announcements. The first three aim to build a rapport with Winery.ph’s audience and make the company someone wine enthusiasts and people curious about wine can trust. Content here ranges from infographics about wine storage to taste tests with in-house sommeliers to funny memes about wine culture. These are also important in fulfilling Winery.ph’s goal of giving Filipino consumers more wine knowledge.
interest and evolving taste in wine.
Having built a relationship with customers online, Winery.ph then practices ‘permission marketing’, mixing in its sales-focused content which includes weekly wine flash deals, featured collections, and its annual calendar of sales events and activities. Surprisingly, operational announcements often drive orders—these types of content consist of sales announcements or reminders to check out orders before the busy Christmas rush. “It’s funny, we sometimes sell the most when we don’t ask for a sale at all. But publishing our holiday delivery schedule, people think ‘hey, I better get my wine order in right away’,” said Urbano.
To help empower Filipino consumers to better shop for wine, Winery.ph also publishes an annual Kavino Choice Awards list (‘Kavino’ is the company’s term for its community of ‘fellow wine drinkers’). This program lists the most popular wines among Filipinos that year, based on actual sales data from Winery.ph, which serves as a significant gauge for the taste preferences of the Philippine wine market.
“Who would you trust more for a wine recommendation: the supermarket who has been paid money to push a certain brand, or the opinion of thousands of Filipino wine lovers who have voted for with their actual wallets?” asked Urbano.
Proven traction and the road ahead
Today, Winery.ph currently holds over 2,000+ different wine SKUs making it the largest wine assortment ever assembled for direct-to-consumer purchase in the Philippines, and the company expects to reach 4000+ wines by 2025, which would represent more than 80% of wines imported to the Philippines.
Winery.ph has also built a loyal fanbase among customers nationwide. And wine customers are a lucrative segment indeed: Urbano points to its very high average order value in the range of PHP 6,000-7,000, possibly the highest online “basket” of any consumer category in the Philippine e-commerce.
Meanwhile, its VIP customer segment or “super whales” drive around a third of all sales value despite making up only 4% of customers. “Customer annual purchasing values between PHP 200 – 400k/year are not uncommon for us. I want to be clear, these are not restaurants or bars, these are individual households, it’s an amazing category,” added Urbano.
To reward and engage these valued customers, Winery.ph offers exclusive perks such as complimentary VIP wine tastings featuring a selection of premium and expensive wines, as well as wine related events and activities hosted at its Global Cellar Door.
Winery.ph also has a significant B2B business including corporate accounts and hotels and restaurants. “We never neglected the B2B side of things, even at the height of the pandemic, we never laid off our sales team,” Urbano explained. “It takes time to build these relationships and you need the team in place and ready to go when the market does turn so I believe it was a wise decision.”
Urbano’s hunch would be proven right. Today Winery.ph supplies products to around 100 hotels and restaurants, a substantial increase from about 20 before the pandemic—a key factor as wine consumption shifts back from in the home to on-premise in the post-pandemic period.
Of course, Urbano never forgets that Winery.ph’s angel investors made this growth possible in the first place and shareholders are quick to see the fruits of Winery.ph’s labor. “Our angels haven’t just funded the growth of the company. We have debt requirements too for funding our open inventory position. As a company in its high growth and burn stage, banks wouldn’t look twice at us. But our angel investors continue to turn up,” Urbano said. “So, we pay them back with hefty interest payments that provides fair reward for their risk.”
Urbano reveals that Winery.ph is looking forward to supporting its expansion plans with more funding rounds in the near future. “Coming off a great result with our angels again in 2023, we’re now ready for our first institutional funding round this year,” revealed Urbano. “So that’s definitely something to look forward to.”
Overall, Winery.ph is ripe to take advantage of a market with massive potential. The company’s effective cost management practices, strategic customer engagement, and commitment to its shareholders position it favorably for its future plans—whether it’s coming funding rounds or an inventory expansion.
For Winery.ph’s customers, angel investors, employees, and import partners, there are undoubtedly exciting times ahead.