Fabian Geyrhalter:
Welcome to the show, Jen.

Jen Pelka:
Oh, thank you. So great to be here.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Well, for someone who enjoys wine as much as I do, and for someone who once ran a branding consultancy for the wine sector, I only did this for a couple of years, and for someone whose parents own a small vineyard in Vienna, Austria, it is rather baffling that you’re the first wine brand on my show. So this is super, super exciting. So it’s so great to have you.

Jen Pelka:
Well, I’m so happy to be connecting.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So five ago you were the founder and CEO of the Ridler, which was a beloved champagne bar located in hotspots in San Francisco & New York City where you offered over a hundred champagnes to a clientele of mainly badass women, because that’s what the team was too. And then the pandemic hit. And fast forward to today, things are different. You’re the co-founder and CEO of the fastest growing sparkling wine brand in the us. Tell us a bit about that moment of pivot and how to transition from becoming more of a service oriented brand to actually turning into a consumer brand. How did that go for you? How was that? I mean, this is pretty crazy stuff.

Jen Pelka:
Yeah, I mean, you never start a business with the plans of eventually closing it down. So it is an incredibly challenging and emotional process to go through the closure of a business. And obviously none of us expected something as catastrophic and wild and unexpected as COVID to come along, but it was a pretty stark choice for us in terms of do we continue on at the Ridler when most of our employees don’t feel comfortable coming back to work? Especially our team in New York where New York was just hit so savagely and in San Francisco we were so heavily restricted. So the businesses and all of our fellow restaurateurs all around the area were just faced with a lot of really hard decisions around how we could possibly move forward. And we made the hard, but I think ultimately correct business decision to close the RedR. And through that process, my brother, who’s my co-founder Une Femme and who was leading all of our finance and operations at the restaurants, he and I together realized, oh, wait, we have all of the IP for Une Femme, which was a wine brand that we started really as a side hustle at The Ridler and

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Oh, interesting.

Jen Pelka:
Yeah. Yeah. It really started there without a business plan with a very modest amount of startup capital from two private investors who were also invested in the ridler. And it took nine months to a year, I would say, to fully wind down The Ridler. It’s such a long and laborious process.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Oh, I’m sure. Yeah,

Jen Pelka:
Yeah. And very emotional. But once we came through that, we realized we had a really great brand. And so the way that Une Femme was born was that all of our investors in the Ridler were women. And so many of our customers, as you mentioned, were women who were just really savvy customers across both coasts. And we would serve hundreds champagnes by the bottle, and it was sometimes challenging for our guests to figure out what to order. And so we started doing menu features, and once we started featuring wines made by women, they would outsell everything else. And we realized, oh, there’s something here. And I was like, why don’t we just start our own brand? So we started it really just for fun in partnership.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
It’s like a private label brand basically at this

Jen Pelka:
Point. That’s right. That’s right. That’s how it started, just really because our customers were asking for something like it, and it seemed like a fun side project. So we launched it there, and then after the Ridler closed, we still had the brand. And we originally thought that Une Femme was going to be a small local business, really focused on the kinds of wines that are available at the most high-end restaurants and are very small in production and are super, super special coveted wines. And we do still make some wines like that in our portfolio, but what’s actually happened is we’ve realized that there’s a much larger opportunity amongst a much broader customer base who are interested in high quality wines that are affordable, that are from California, that are certified sustainable, that happen to be made by women. And so now we’re a large and substantial brand, and it’s been really fun to see how much enthusiasm there has been for these wines outside of the confines of our two little champagne bars.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Yeah, too little but powerful it sounds like. And were you able to pull some of your tribe from the bar to the Champagne brand? I mean, did you have a solid Oh, absolutely. Okay. Okay.

Jen Pelka:
Absolutely. I mean, some of our best customers still are people who were regulars at the Riddler and who loved the spirit of the Riddler, and we like to think that that spirit sort of lives on in the UFE brand. Not a day goes by when somebody doesn’t ask me, when are you going to reopen the Ridler? I miss it so much. It was my favorite bar. So one day we hope to have a home for the Riddler again, but we like to think that that the spirit of the Riddler lives on in every single. I like

Fabian Geyrhalter:
That. I like that. Well said. Exactly. And so let’s talk a little bit about the wine makers. So obviously women, wine makers, but now that you sell branded wine, is it a rotating circle of trusted wine makers that make your wines? Or how does that work?

Jen Pelka:
Yeah, that’s originally how it started. So we worked with an incredible organic grower producer from Champagne, a fifth generation wine maker, Julie Mevy of the Go name mevy family. She was a regular at the Ridler and would come in anytime she was in the us. We served her wines by the glass, and she came in and we started in collaboration with her. She makes a small amount of really, really beautiful wines. So that was where we started and where we began in New York and California and Chicago. And then from there, I teamed up with one of my favorite California wine makers, Samantha Shehan, who makes Poe and mom and pop and ultraviolet, and we did a sparkling rose together in collaboration. So those were our first two collabs. And then we realized we needed a full-time in-house winemaker and looked for six months to a year to find the right person. And we teamed up with this amazing woman, Evan Cameron, who makes our wines day in and day out, focusing on all of our vineyard partners and sourcing with family owned and operated vineyards, our certified sustainable growing practices, and then of course the making of our wines in our house style, which is really all about California modern winemaking. So light touch in the winery, very, very little oak, very mineral driven, light, bright, refreshing, and really enjoyable wines that we love to make.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
That would’ve been my next question about how to get that uniformity of a wine taste year after year when you work with several winemakers under the one winemaker. Right. So that’s a huge challenge, I suppose, for any winery, even if they have it in the same vineyard, it’s still a challenge based on climate and everything. But now if you have a brand that grows year after year and you have to select different winemakers, different vineyards to get the amount of grape, and then that’s a pretty big job for your in-house wine maker.

Jen Pelka:
And I would say there are kind of two schools of thought in the wine world, whether you are the kind of winery where you want vintage variation and where you want your wines every single year to really reflect what’s happening in the weather, in the vineyards, in the terroir, all of those components. And so that’s when people are really looking for this particular vintage tasted rounder and richer. This particular vintage was leaner and meaner. Or if you’re going for more of, let’s say, what’s a tradition in champagne, which is like they call the non vintage or multi vintage style where vintages are blended across multiple years so that you get more of a consistent house style. So for example, if you’re somebody who loves vco, VCO is very secretive about varietals, the vineyard sources, the makeup of the wines, but you always know that a glass of cli co is going to taste like a glass of,

Fabian Geyrhalter:
It’s their taste. It’s like a brand. It’s reliable, it’s the taste.

Jen Pelka:
Exactly. It’s more like a Coca-Cola method than it is like a farm to table method. I mean, of course they’re doing incredible vineyard sourcing, but they prize consistency over vintage variation. And I would say for us in our wines, we also are really focused on a consistent house style where while we work with the same vineyard partners year in and year out, we do blend across vintages, and we do really focus on having a consistent house style so that if somebody had a bottle of our wine two years ago when they drink it now they’ll know, oh, I really loved that flavor profile and I want something similar.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I think that’s what it comes down to when you actually are a brand like yours, that’s widely available, but now you can be found in many places, right? From big hotel chains to I guess even targets and actually big chain stores. And it’s a different kind of consumer than the one who is excited about the nuance of a 2016 versus a 2015, right? What’s on the note. But I mean, that doesn’t make the wine better or worse. It is just a very specific way of getting to that which is even more difficult because you can’t just take what earth gives you, right? I mean, you have to blend different, it’s really exciting. And then talking about these nuances of the wine world, and I hope we’re not boring our audience, but rather edutaining them wine in cans. Yes, you can. Right? Let’s talk about

Jen Pelka:
This. Yeah. I never wanted to do a canned wine, but

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Here you are.

Jen Pelka:
I mean, here we are. Our goal now is to become the best and the number one canned wine company in the us. We already know that we’re in the top three, and we’ve only been at it for three years, and the other two have been at it for almost 20 years. So it’s a pretty exciting place to have such broad exposure to a massive, massive audience through our canned wines, which it’s really cool because canned wines are portable. They’re a smaller format. So they’re really in line with what a lot of, especially younger consumers are interested in these days, which is
Not only our taste and flavor profile of being light and dry and mineral driven and not oaky, but you can get a single serving, you can open one can instead of opening a full bottle, you can also take these cans on the road, you can drink them in a pool or on a boat or out on a hike or out on a ski slope at the movie theater, any of these kinds of places where people traditionally had not been drinking wine, they were maybe drinking beer, and then came the whole avalanche of seltzers. And so young customers are really comfortable with drinking alcohol out of a can, especially chilled, refreshing alcohol. And we’ve heard time and time again from our customers though that they don’t want to be drinking seltzer when they’re at the beach. Like sure, they’ll drink one or two, but they don’t want to be drinking seltzer all day.
And so for us, we aim to create the best and the freshest canned wine on the market and to be a really, really great solution for people when they’re out and about and having fun. And those wines are available everywhere from in the skies on Delta Airlines to incredible partnerships across many, many hotel groups. Everything from Marriott, Hilton, fountain Blue, the Atlantis, et cetera. We’re on Virgin Voyages cruises, we’re at tons of arenas and stadiums. So we’ve really focused on getting broad exposure to our customers where they want to be drinking something that’s handheld, that’s easy, that’s fun, and that’s a really great value, and that’s really, really high quality and made specifically for can,

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I mean, do you sometimes pinch yourself when you just rattle off all of these brands? And I know your brand is still pretty new. It’s pretty amazing. Yeah. I mean, let’s take a pause here for a second. That is awesome.
Thank you. That is really amazing. And it’s a roofless competitive market and shelf space is coveted and there’s so much that it takes, plus you’re selling alcohol on top of that, right? Which has its own you really, I mean, if you could have chosen a harder industry going from the service industry, a bar into a different industry, I mean, you couldn’t have chosen another one that’s more challenging. So seriously, this is pretty amazing. But what you mentioned before about where you can actually take a can of wine where you couldn’t before with a bottle from a brand storytelling perspective, I mean, that’s just wonderful, right? Because you literally can meet your customer wherever they are, which just opens that array of storytelling up so much too, versus you have to be in a certain space to open a bottle. You have to have a bottle opener, you have to have the glasses.
It’s a ceremony, which I also think that the pandemic, I mean, that changed a lot of things too. There are a lot of places now where you can drink outside, where you couldn’t drink outside before the whole camping van industry was booming. People want to go to other places. So pretty great timing. And then on the other hand, to finish my little monologue that I’m on here, on the other hand, I also feel that it’s interesting where 10 years ago, if you would’ve launched wine in a can, it would’ve been really, really difficult. And I think now because of the seltzers and because of other wine brands that have fought the fight for, it’s most probably much easier to have that wind in the sails where people are already more acceptant of that, right?

Jen Pelka:
Yeah, absolutely. And there was really a first wave of cans. I’d say about 10 years ago. Coppola made a very famous That’s

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Right,

Jen Pelka:
Sparkling can Sophia Coppola, those Sophia cans, which that’s really what sort of put canned wine on the market. They’re super cute, very small format with a little straw, and that really popularized the format. And then a lot of the big wine companies rushed into the market to launch canned wines. But what happened was unfortunately, a lot of lower quality wines were put into cans. It was like a place where people would put their extra stuff, they didn’t want to put in a bottle or they were putting wines into canned that would typically perform really well in a bottle, but because of the chemistry of a can didn’t do well. And so what I would say is happening now is sort of in canned wine 2.0 is the people who are making canned wines now are much more serious about making great quality wine first and foremost, and it happens to be in a can.
And then second, creating wines that are really great and stable in a can. The worst thing in the world that you can get is a canned wine that’s a year and a half old that has gotten pretty gross in a can. So we really focus entirely on freshness. And so because of that, we can every single month. And so you can always know that our wines are the freshest on the market anytime that you’re finding them, whether it’s on a plane or at an arena or at a hotel, they should be incredibly fresh when you get them in your hand.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
That is amazing. And that’s all about volume, right? It’s a volume game and it’s a distribution game at that point that you have to really ace

Jen Pelka:
Pretty amazing. Absolutely. Completely, completely

Fabian Geyrhalter:
True. And so for some older listeners myself, we have this kind of perception of, well, you get this aluminum taste out of a can, but it’s really silly because we’ve been drinking really good beer for a long time out of cans, and there is none of that taste really. Is that all just like a myth, or is there some truth to it depend, depending on what,

Jen Pelka:
There is absolutely truth that there is a chemical reaction that happens between a can and wine, but there have been these incredible liners that have been invented that are specific for canned wines. And so if you as a company invest in the right kinds of liners, that barrier prevents any kind of seepage between the aluminum and the wines. And so we invest in the very, very, very best canned liners. And we actually are leading a consortium with a professor at Cornell University and about 10 of our fellow competitors where we are all sending our wines to Cornell for scientific analysis and for us to be able to share out research with the wine community to say, Hey, these are the right kinds of wines to put into cans. This is the right pH level, the right acidity level, this is the right amount of aging, et cetera, so that we can lift the quality of canned wines across the market broadly. Because we really believe we want every single consumer who tries a canned wine for the first time or who goes back and tries one for a second time to say, oh, this is actually good, and we want to broaden the market as much as we possibly can with the best possible quality with all of our friends who are also making wine.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
That’s a super great insight into the industry, had no idea that that’s what’s going on. That’s really interesting. Another market trend that I think anyone really sees from the outside is that there’s this big slowdown in alcohol consumption with the next generation and the next generation doesn’t drink enough, and entire wine market is kind of like tanking right now overall globally. I mean, you obviously have a legs up with your brand and the way that you build it and for whom you build it, but do you feel that, is it true or are you actively working your brand towards going with a certain audience? Or how do you overcome that?

Jen Pelka:
So there are a few things that are happening. First, there was a massive bubble in the wine market during COVID because everyone was at home and they didn’t have a lot to do. So a lot of people were purchasing a tremendous amount of wine and drinking it at home. I can

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Relate, I can relate.

Jen Pelka:
But if you actually look at the trend lines, we’re basically back to pre COVID levels. So it feels like a massive decline from 2020 and 2021, but we’re actually up from 2019.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Oh my God, how deceiving. Okay, well that makes sense of sense.

Jen Pelka:
So that’s an important detail. But what happened in 20 20, 20 21 and 2022 is there was so much excitement and opportunity in the wine world that many new brands came into the fold, and many brand owners planted a lot of additional vineyard space, and there’s way too much, there are basically too many grapes on the market. And so right now, this year and last year, people have been ripping out vines all across Napa Sonoma. So I think what’s going to happen is in the next year or two, it’s going to stabilize, but there’s actually probably going to come a point, especially we don’t know exactly what’s happening with tariffs and the implications on demand for American wines, but there probably will be too few vineyards available in the next few years. So there is a very cyclical pattern in alcohol and wine in particular. I will say the couple of categories that are growing are lower alcohol styles, fresher styles, less oaked styles.
So they’re just a little bit different. What an older consumer who is traveling to Napa or Sonoma who is interested in these big California cabs or really oaky chardonnays, what they were into 10 years ago. And I think that that’s frankly influenced a lot by just the taste of a younger generation that’s interested in higher acidity foods and brighter, fresher flavors. These are trends that happen. We’re really, really grateful. Even though the wine industry is down about 5% this year, again, this year we’re up 140%. So we’re growing crazy. And we have a lot of other friends who are in similar positions to us who have fresh, young, cool brands. But it’s been a challenging time for a lot of the legacy players, that’s for sure.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Oh, a hundred percent. And then they have to fight the heating of the planet, and how do we now deal with that? Because that’s going to push up the alcohol level as well. Yeah. But hey, I mean, I think the wave of Rose came your way and after Rose is like everything changed. So I think that’s really it. Very, very cool. Let’s move over a little bit to your community and what your brand does to give back. It’s really important for you, and it has been from day one for you to give back on your website. You’re saying at UN Farm, giving back is central to everything we do For every bottle sold. Un Farm makes a donation to a charitable organization that improves the lives of women. It seems though, looking through the history a little bit as much as I could of your company, it seems like your way of giving back may have matured a little bit over the past years, maybe a little more focused. Can you give us some insight on what you do as a brand and how important it’s for you?

Jen Pelka:
Yes, absolutely. I mean, as you read, it is so core to our DNA to be focused on our community of women. And it has been back to the Riddler days. I mean, it’s just kind of how we think. And I think it’s how a lot of people in my generation think it’s how we choose to spend our money is to be aligned with brands that are aligned with our own personal point of view. So for us, we started and worked with a number of different charities. We worked with Dress for Success, an amazing organization that helps women to get on their feet and back into the workforce. We worked with an environmental organization called Tree Sisters. We support tons of local charities, and as you can imagine, we receive countless requests for donations for events that happen throughout the year, but we’ve really focused our giving on two charities now.
So one is the Breast Cancer Awareness and Research Fund, which is our key partner through our partnership at Delta, which is really how we got in with Delta in the first place. They selected us with our sparkling rose in support of their October annual initiatives in 2022 when they selected our rose to be on every Delta plane in the US for really highlighting BCRF. And we’ve continued that partnership since then. So the last three to four years, and that’s obviously really, really important to us as women. And our second partnership is with an organization called batina, which is a nonprofit and mentorship program that really elevates and supports women in the wine world. As you can imagine, the wine space is still so not balanced in terms of opportunities for women. It’s sort of like a luxury space to be in and is a, it’s kind of similar, I think, to the culinary world where I come really from the fine dining restaurant world, and you still don’t see that many women at the helm of Michelin two and three star restaurants. And the same is pretty true in wine. The situation’s gotten much, much, much better in wine in terms of women who own or co-own wine brands or who are the head winemaker or the head vineyard manager. But there’s still a tremendous amount of room to grow, and that carries across the entire industry, which includes som wine shop owners, et cetera. And so Batina is an amazing organization that helps to mentor women who are interested in any aspect of the wine world. So we’re very proud to support a lot of their grant programs.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
That’s really cool. That’s what I got from your website too, that there’s this focus on both of those organizations, which is really nice when people know year after year, this is where part of their money goes. Let’s talk about the breakthrough moments. Was there one, I mean, I know there’s so many. There’s so many, right?

Jen Pelka:
Yeah, and it’s not to say that it’s not challenging. I mean, I am incredibly, incredibly lucky that my co-founder is my brother who is a counterbalance to me. And in some ways we’re so similar, but in many ways we’re the yang to each other’s yang. And on hard days for me, he’ll push me forward similarly on hard days for him, I’ll push him forward. And I’m so grateful that we have each other as partners. I’m also incredibly grateful that my husband is also an entrepreneur he owns.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Oh, that helps.

Jen Pelka:
It totally helps. He owns six restaurants in the San Francisco Bay area called Souvla Greek Restaurants. And between the two of them, nearly all we talk about is work and creativity and brand building and community building. And so that’s really helpful. But in terms of breakthrough moments, we’ve had so many. I would say the most recent one was our realization that we had become a formidable player in the canned wine space, and we really launched as a sparkling wine brand. And our roots were in champagne, and we happened to make canned wines because they were needed on Delta and at some of our hotel partners. And so that was a format that was important to us. But when we realized that all of the business that we were winning was with the cans, and then we dug into the data to figure out how big of a player we really were, and we realized we were third, we’re like, whoa, it sounds like we’re actually a canned wine company after all.
So we really stepped back as a leadership team and thought through, what does this mean? Where do we want to go? What do we want to be the first, the best, or the only at which is something that I’ve always coached my friends and fellow entrepreneurs and my team to think about. I used to have a PR company called Magnum PR in San Francisco, and one time we met with an editor who is a food writer at the New Yorker magazine, Helen Rosner. And we asked her, what is the thing that jumps out to you as a writer or as a reporter when you get pitched a PR pitch? And she said, ah, you got to be the first, the best, or the only really stuck with me. So now we’ve decided what we want to be is the best canned wine company in the us.
And so for us, that means number one, in terms of market share, but it also means the best quality and the freshest. It also means the biggest and most devoted and most excited community. It means incredible awards. It means putting our wines in front of sommeliers and buyers in blind tastings, and having them be shocked that these wines are canned as opposed to bottled. It means the highest quality sustainability practices, the highest quality relationships with our vineyard partners, the best team. It means also being the best partner and being the most consistent partner with our long-term customers. And it means really having the best customer base, meaning our go-to-market strategy is really all about looking at the full landscape of places where you can buy wine or drink wine and systematically going through category by category, which are the best partners, Delta, Marriott, Hilton, Virgin, Yankee Stadium, et cetera. And going after those one, after another after another because we know that the people who are loyal to those companies, if they find us there and become loyal to us there, it’s going to have this really

Fabian Geyrhalter:
By association, right? Yeah, exactly. Absolute,
Yeah, an amazing spread. Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, you just said the word the best, most probably 15 times, which is no pressure, no pressure, but the best of pretty much everything. Now going to the other side of the best was, I mean, every startup goes through so much trouble and failure. And of course as entrepreneurs kind of like to talk about failure too, but what was a big brand fail that you went through with either back then the bars or now with getting into this consumer market? Did anything stand out? Anything you want to share?

Jen Pelka:
Sure. Yeah, I think the thing that’s actually been the hardest for us to sort out is we have so many amazing national partners in terms of restaurants, hotels, airlines, cruise lines, et cetera. But it’s really hard to reach a national audience at retail, especially because it costs so much money to be really loud on social, across every single store in a retail chain all across the country. And there are very few really high-end retailers that are national. We have a great partnership with Neiman Marcus, which really aligns with our partner, with our customer base and our partnerships outside of it, but it’s still kind of a smaller base than let’s say massive chains that sell a lot of wine. So I would say one area that we’re still working through, still thinking through is what is our presence at retail when we’re a team of 10 and when we can’t show up to do samplings ourselves at every possible retailer in every chain across the country. So sorting through how to train the trainer, and it’s really complicated in wine because you don’t always know your customer like your end consumer. It’s different from other consumer brands where for example, you cannot pay for an end cap, which you can do in beauty, which you can do in apparel, which you can do in protein bars, in wine. It’s so heavily regulated that you have to really fight for those kinds of placements, and it’s really at the whim of a buyer. So you kind of have to show up and be as loud as possible in all of your other own channels when you know that you can’t really pay for them artificially in other places.
So retail is very challenging, but we’re still finding our way there, and it’s a pretty small percentage of our business. Typically, most brands, when they scale, it’s about 90% of their business is at retail, and for us it’s less than 5%.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Well chin now it is. You’re going to be the best at retail. Oh, sure. Exactly. Just havent

Jen Pelka:
Yet. We haven’t cracked the net yet, but when we do, you’ll see us everywhere.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Exactly. Exactly. So what does that often most mainly misunderstood word branding mean to you? I mean, your background from PR agency to the food world to running establishments that you have to connect with people and they won and service industry and now selling on the shelf and selling to corporate, there’s so much brand thinking as part of that, and like you said, with your husband and with your brother, that’s all you talk about. This is brand building. What does branding mean to you? How would you describe it today?

Jen Pelka:
To me, it’s the entire world that your product sits in, what it stands for, what it looks like, what it sounds like, and it’s really what people say about you. It is that what is your first best or only that people describe about you. It’s memorable about you. It’s how you build your community. I think it’s one of the things that is so tempting to outsource, to find an agency that seems to be an expert to help you to execute, but you have to be so hands-on, even when you bring in experts to help you to bring your vision to life. Consumers are really smart and they know authenticity and they know things that are not. So it’s actually been one of the things that I’ve found to be the most challenging, and in some ways the most fun about building Un Femme is that when we had the Riddler, we had a complete control over our brand world. We created the physical space, we set the scene, we controlled the team and what they wore and what their hospitality vibe was, we created the wine list. We led everybody through the entire experience. And then when people were in the space and took photos or posted reels or posted they were in our brand world,
Much harder When you have a consumer product that they take into their

Fabian Geyrhalter:
World

Jen Pelka:
And seeing how people bring those things to life, you can give an influencer a brief that says, this is what our color palette looks like. This is what our voice sounds like. This is what we want you to do with this product. But ultimately you have to kind of give up control and let the product exist in other people’s worlds. But it’ss a wild experience going from something completely owned by us to the freedom of having other people interpreted into their own creative space,

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Super intimidating and nothing you think about when you first launch and then suddenly you start seeing it out in the wild and you’re like, who are these people and what do they do with this product? It’s like, I mean, I have the same experience with a product brand that I launched a couple of years ago, and it is mind boggling to me. I’m like, wait, you do what? Why? No, this is not how that’s, you’re supposed to do it, and please don’t share this on social. Oh, you just did. So, yeah, no, very interesting. If you would take the entire Une Femme brand that it now is from sparkling to red to white, the cans, the whole conglomerate that you’re currently in midst of building, if you take that and you put it through a funnel and out comes one word that can describe the essence of the entire brand, what could that word be? And I sure hope you got my message about that because this is something people need to prepare for.

Jen Pelka:
Well, for us, it’s a new word, but it’s fun. We went through a light rebrand internally when we were evolving from sparkling, sparkling, sparkling, which I would say was more of an aspirational brand, which was more about celebration, which was more about commemorating and supporting and celebrating women to really, our new tagline is Pairs well with fun. And that’s the lens through which we view everything. Now. It’s like where are customers out and about and having fun? What is the most fun way for them to enjoy the moments that they’re having? It’s with something that is light, easy, fresh, portable, and it’s all about those moments between things that the time that we all take away from work, away from some of the heaviness of the rest of the world. And we are together with one another, just having fun. We began the brand so centrally focused around women, supporting women around a lot of social issues, around a lot of education, and all of those things are still very important to us as a company, as a brand, as a team. But the conversation has evolved a lot in the last five years. And so we as a team have also evolved and we are evolving our place in the conversation. And the thing that I have found that most of my friends want more than anything right now is just to be together and have fun,

Speaker 1:
And

Jen Pelka:
We can be at the center of those moments for them. We are all for it. And I really think that that’s where the opportunity is for a younger consumer who’s drinking wine. They don’t necessarily want to be in a scenario where they’re feeling intimidated by a sommelier in a restaurant where they’re having to think about swirling a glass or smelling or knowing specific varietals. But they do want quality and they do want value, and they do want to have a ton of fun. And so for us, we are all about being poolside, being on a boat, being at an arena, at your favorite concert at the Super Bowl, any of those kinds of moments that are just, when you close your eyes and you think of fun, that’s where we want to be.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
My wife and I, we went to the Getty Center once to the beautiful museum at Buffalo Los Angeles, and we took Starbucks coffee cups, and then at the Getty Museum we filled rose into those Starbucks cups and we walked through the museum all day and it was wonderful. That’s fun. And for you, of course, it’s also strategic decision because now that you go towards cams, and that is a really big category you need to own, what does that equal? It equals fun, right? Totally. It equals your from the go, you’re doing something. It’s social fantastic. As we slowly wind down the show today, any brand advice for founders or even marketers as a takeaway from your end?

Jen Pelka:
Yeah, I mean, number one, if you’re going to partner with agencies, teams, junior members of your team, you have to be so incredibly hands-on and meticulous about the messages you want to convey. And it should be the most fun piece of your business is bringing your brand to life. I think so often we are as entrepreneurs working so hard to get the numbers and to make sure that the business is working, but ultimately when it’s working, when your community is really responding to something because it feels really real. So I would say that component and then think about what you want to be the first, the best or the only at, and it doesn’t have to be the first, the best or the only in the world. It can be in your city, in your town, online, et cetera. When we had the Riddler, we wanted to be the best champagne bars in San Francisco and New York, and it was undisputed. And so if you could get somebody saying those things about your brand, when the word of your brand comes up, that’s magic. That’s gold.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I so agree with you. And these are literally my goals too with my product brand. It’s the exact same thing. And even if you just get two out of the three, right, consistently, you’re good. But you know, can get to great. And you said something that I want to just go a little deeper on because I think it is so important for everyone listening, especially for founders of startups, that idea that working with agencies, and look, here I am, I’m a partner in a transformation company. I run my own small brand consultancy. That idea that it has to come from within and that you have to be very, very selective within agency that you don’t get top down, here’s my creative stamp on your company kind of ideas that you then have to fight. And after a year you realize that’s really not what we should have done, but we got convinced that is so important.
I run brand strategy sessions that are eight hours long crewing with my clients, where I get out of them what the brand is, rather than me telling them what their brand is, it has to come from them. So I think it’s so important that you say that, and I think it’s the biggest joy of creating a brand to actually, I call it brand therapy, to get it out of the client, to get it out of the entrepreneur, and they feel just like, oh my God, this is it. This is us, and then everyone owns it within the company, right? Because otherwise you just have an agency stamp and that’s usually worthless over time.

Jen Pelka:
Totally. Totally. And I mean, we’ve worked with incredible agencies and as I said, I had my own PR agency, but I think it’s kind of similar to working with, let’s say a personal trainer. You get out what you put in and you really, really need to work at it as hard as you can or as much as you want results, but it should be a very fun piece of the business.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Totally. Totally. That’s the one place where you should have fun because it shows on the outset that you did have fun, because if you don’t like it, they’re not going to like it. Absolutely. So totally. What’s next? What’s next for your brand? What are you excited about in the next six months that you can share with us?

Jen Pelka:
Well, we’re officially launching our two still wines. These are our first still wines that we’ve ever brought to market. We’re so excited about them. We’re introducing a chardonnay that’s a really refreshing Unoaked, California Chardonnay, so delicious.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Nice. It’s

Jen Pelka:
So great for summer and an awesome red blend that is Cabernet and Pinot noir forward. It is light and it’s great chilled. If you’re somebody who loves a lighter, relatively lower alcohol style of chewable red wine, it’s perfect for that. And so those are launching in June, which we’re so, so thrilled about. We already have them available flying on planes and at a lot of airports and stadiums and retail shops and restaurants and bars, but they’re going to be really available on our website all across the country. And you’ll find ’em in more retail stores too. So we’re so excited about them.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Oh, that is super exciting, and I can’t wait to taste those. That sounds like fun. There you go. There you go.

Jen Pelka:
For summer.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Yeah. Yeah. Now that we got the rhythm of it, now we have to finish the show, so the bummer, but where can people follow you, either personally connect with you, or where can they get to know Une Femme?

Jen Pelka:
Sure. So we’re at unefemmewines.com. We’re of course on Instagram @unefemmewines, and I’m @Jen Pelke, and that’s where we are, LinkedIn, all the sites, but unefemmewines.com

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Of course. Fantastic. This was so great. What good timing for this show to air in June for everyone? So get your wines on your light Summer wines. Don’t be afraid to chill a red wine. I know it’s crazy, but it’s going to be good. And hey, Jen, thank you so much for making the time to chat with us.

Jen Pelka:
Oh, my pleasure. Such a fun, fun time,