No wine retailer excites such strong and contradictory comment as Naked Wines. The customers of this six-year-old, mould-breaking online retailer seem to love it – at least, to judge from the thousands of web reviews of their wines. They like Naked’s methodology of funding winemakers in advance, and these producers obviously also love Naked. But producers who have never had dealings with Naked, or who have been approached but have declined to do business with them, are deeply suspicious. And the conventional wine trade fears and loathes Naked in equal measure.
You rarely hear a kind word about Naked in wine trade circles. According to rumour, theirs is a bubble that is about to burst. They are masters of spin who tell half-truths and have committed the worst sin of all: turning tens of thousands of wine drinkers into loyal customers. Typical of their public relations prowess is an article that appeared in The Daily Telegraph in March last year headlined “Naked Wines shares maiden profit with staff”. What is described as a “wine venture capital firm… handed £35,000 to 34 staff”. No mention of owners Wein International, the German company once better known as Pieroth in Europe (PRP in the US), which used to send hapless wine salesmen to people’s homes. Instead we are given the impression that this is the cuddliest of struggling wine retailers.
But when I asked the head of Majestic Wine the other day whom he saw as his main competitor, he spat out “Naked” in a trice. In the old days it would probably have been the Laithwaite’s/Direct Wines group, Britain’s biggest direct wine seller and owner of most of Britain’s mail-order wine clubs, which has now expanded into the US, Australia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Switzerland, Germany, Sweden, Denmark and Poland. I see a parallel between Naked Wines and Laithwaite’s. They both have a business model that operates outside wine trade norms. Not for them the old system whereby a retailer buys from a wholesaler, who might buy from an importer or the agent of a producer. They don’t need to kowtow to any supermarket buyer but go straight to the producer and offer wines unavailable elsewhere, thereby making direct price comparisons virtually impossible.