XChateau Wine Podcast

Helping wineries run better businesses w/ Ashley Leonard, InnoVint


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Drawing on her background in winemaking and Silicon Valley, Ashley Leonard, Founder and CEO of InnoVint, has developed a modern platform that tracks everything from the vineyard to the bottle. From getting granular with COGS to automating TTB compliance, InnoVint gets the winery out of spreadsheets and into a modern, cloud-based, mobile-centric system. This system is designed to accomplish InnoVint’s mission: Helping wineries run better businesses.


Detailed Show Notes: 

InnoVint overview - mobile-driven winemaking platform, tracks and manages all winemaking options, and automates compliance

  • >600 winery clients (~80% of wineries still using Excel)
  • 92% of clients in North America, 8% International
  • Mission: helping wineries run better businesses

TTB requires reporting for producers >500 cases

4 products

  • Grow - vineyard tracking platform from the winemaker’s lens; phenology dates, yield estimates, applications, harvest scheduling, historical trends
  • Make - winemaking from fruit reception to bottling; work enablement platform with digital work orders
  • Finance - tracks all costs associated with making wine, final COGS; the finance team applies overheads
  • Supply (2025 launch) - case goods management, inventory tracking, integrates with DTC platforms & distributors, has allocations as a planning tool

Has open APIs; integrates with TankNet and VinWizard for winery automation, receives data back for actions taken; integrates with quality control labs (e.g., ETS) and can take action more quickly

Core benefits

  • Key differentiator: profitability per SKU and true COGS/product (w/o InnoVint, calculated once per year)
  • Efficiency, working smarter, better decision making, and more transparency
  • Reporting to be able to manage quality
  • Some wineries use data to track carbon footprint (e.g., water use, weight of glass)
  • Reduces the risk of an audit

Compliance reporting (e.g., TTB 5120, export reports) - Gloria Ferrer went from 3 people over 2 days to 15 minutes for 1 person

Larger wineries tend to have more tangible benefits

  • Domaine Chandon saved $75k annually by making the workflow paperless
  • Patz & Hall saving 40 hours/month

Onboarding

  • 5-step self-serve process (vineyard sources, lots, volume, vessels, current inventory) takes a couple of days for small wineries
  • Premium package for larger wineries includes team training, and full data migration takes 2-8 weeks

Pricing - SaaS model

  • Scales based on size (production) and complexity (# of locations) of the winery
  • Not user or usage-based
  • Implementation ~$1-2k
  • Subscription starts at $2,400/year for a boutique winery for Make

Marketing - “has tried it all”, tries to add value to the end user

  • Does a lot of speaking engagements/webinars on being a healthy winery
  • Manages The Punchdown, a free digital community that is a peer-to-peer exchange
  • Referrals from clients are the most effective marketing
  • Launched the State of the Wine Business Health Report (2024) - surveyed with >500 participants
  • To reach wineries that don’t go to conferences - LinkedIn/social, co-marketing, financial webinars
  • Paid advertising sometimes works, but it's not a top lead generator

Barrier to purchase - resistance to change, case studies help overcome (e.g., Domaine Carneros saw what Chandon was doing and bought the product)

The product roadmap includes Supply module, AI applications, and embedded tools

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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XChateau Wine PodcastBy Robert Vernick, Peter Yeung

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