Entrepreneur"s Edge: Selena Cuffe Wed, Feb twenty-four 2010 < 1 / 4 > TORONTO (Reuters) - When you think of your standard soccer fan, you don"t design them holding a potion of booze in their hand. Beer is unequivocally the splash of preference for diehards, but businessman Selena Cuffe is anticipating to have use of this year"s soccer World Cup in South Africa to modify a small of them.
"When we proposed this commercial operation it was regularly with 2010 in mind, since the spotlight is on South Africa for the World Cup," pronounced Cuffe, 34, who in 2005 founded Heritage Link Brands, a Los Angeles-based association that imports wines constructed by black South Africans.
The thought for Heritage Link Brands www.heritagelinkbrands.com began fermenting after Cuffe attended a booze legal holiday in Soweto and met the owners of a internal winery - Seven Sisters - who was struggling to get her wines distributed.
"She common with me that South Africa had a $3 billion booze industry and of that less than 2 percent is owned by black South Africans, who are 85 percent of the population," pronounced Cuffe, who a month after returning to the U.S. proposed her company. "There is indeed something going on here that needs to be brought to the courtesy of booze consumers and booze lovers everywhere. So that was the "a-ha" moment."
Cuffe and her husband, both Harvard graduates, invested $70,000 in personal assets and eighteen months on endless marketplace investigate and product growth to have certain they had a leader on their hands. They strictly launched their association in Feb 2007.
Despite flourishing up in California and spending a small time in the important wine-producing Napa Valley region, Cuffe never deliberate herself a expert and certified that in the commencement she didn"t know her Pinot Noirs from her Merlots.
"Mixing up varieties of wine, going to representation commercial operation and unequivocally not meaningful a total lot about the booze industry," Cuffe pronounced were a small of the mistakes she made, but combined she was means to recompense by charity a clever worth tender to clients, formed on her passion and the marketplace investigate she had done. "The things I didn"t know, appreciate integrity the commercial operation knew."
The initial year they sole only $100,000, pronounced Cuffe, but last year that jumped to $1 million and Cuffe expects revenues to grow by 35-40 percent this year.
Cuffe smartly targeted her wines to grocery stores and alternative consumer markets, such as the Walmart-owned Sam"s Club stores, that helped her equivocate a poignant recessionary hit.
"We"ve rather buffered a small of the hits a small of the vital competitors or colleagues have seen, who have finished commercial operation essentially with restaurants," she said, surrender deduction are down from deals struck with United Airlines and American Airlines to offer Heritage Link Brand wines to their first-class patrons. "Corporations are not easy a business-class sheet from L.A. to NYC - you improved get in the back. So we"ve seen a rebate in purchasing from that perspective."
THE PITCH
Cuffe is targeting her wines essentially to "millennials," the 21-30-year-old demographic that Cuffe pronounced is pushing the booze industry and who "completely skipped over the drink difficulty in conditions of their opening in to ethanol and went loyal for wine."
Cuffe is additionally pitching her products to the "conscientious consumers," who caring about the certain stroke their purchases are making, and to her African American compatriots, who she pronounced feel "a reciprocity with these good people in South Africa." In this regard, Cuffe compared the South African booze industry underneath apartheid to the U.S. string industry during slavery, adding that "those dual industries built dual countries and it was unequivocally on the backs of worker labor."
One of the greatest hurdles Heritage Link Brands faces is navigating the assorted ethanol laws in each U.S. state, the infancy of that prohibits Cuffe from offered without delay to consumers. Cuffe pronounced she is forced to go by a distributor, who in spin sells by a retailer, such as a grocery store or restaurant, who afterwards sells to the consumer. Cuffe pronounced it"s a unpleasant routine that"s same to traffic with "51 opposite small nations" and a "thorn in my side each day."
Despite the challenges, Cuffe stays loyal to her strange idea of using a commercial operation that incorporates the broader bulletin of becoming different peoples" perceptions about Africa and compelling black South African entrepreneurs. To stress this point, Cuffe pronounced it was transplanted vines from South African that proposed the Australian booze industry in the early 1700s.
As the commercial operation has grown, Cuffe has branched out from only representing black South African-based wineries, to distributing wines from the broader Diaspora, "where people of color in ubiquitous could see to us as a probable go-to marketplace for their wines."
This is because Cuffe not long ago cumulative a U.S. government-backed loan from the Small Business Administration to have certain her wines strike the palates of booze lovers in attendance the World Cup this June.
"Our idea is to have certain that the healthy occurrences that occur around us, similar to the World Cup, are leveraged in such a approach that we have the wines inside of the portfolio domicile names."
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