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
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