Eric Sabourin, a native Canadian from Quebec who came to the UK in 1992, founded Falcon Vintners in 1995.
Falcon is a wine company specialising in supplying its clients with some of the world’s best fine and rare wines. Falcon is a stockholder and holds a wide selection of wines from all over Europe and the New World, but has a particularly extensive selection of Italian wine.
Requirements
Eric had originally commissioned a home-grown software solution to run the business that had successfully supported Falcon’s growth.
By 2020 Eric had his sights set on a raft of new initiatives and improvements to develop Falcon, and looked for a digital platform that would be capable of supporting his plans: including multi-channel selling; scaling up of brokerage activities; better tracking of stock across multiple warehouses in the UK and abroad, and access to highly selective ‘soft’ (or virtual) stock to augment the wine list without having to tie up yet more cash in stock.
As part of improving Falcon’s digital presence, Eric wanted real-time inventory online backed up with detailed inspection photos for rare, mature stocks.
Since going live with the Hub and the Hub Webshop, we’ve been picking up new clients pretty much every day; a couple of whom have since spent tens of thousands of pounds with us.
Solution
Eric moved his business onto the Wine Hub and the Hub Webshop (a fully integrated WooCommerce set up) in 2021.
“Since going live, we’ve been picking up new clients pretty much every day; a couple of whom have since spent tens of thousands of pounds with us”.
Sabourin sees his new e-commerce set up as part of a wider market strategy: “The ability to have real-time synchronisation is great, and organising multi-channel selling from one platform has been working well for us.”
The business has invested in rich content to make on-line purchasing totally transparent, including an incredible library of inspection images for back-vintages of rare wines.
Notwithstanding the facility to build content in one place, it does still require a considerable investment in time to add assets, although once done managing images, tasting notes and scores within the same system that’s handling our inventory and managing all transactions is very helpful,” he adds.
Multichannel principles work for incoming feeds as well as outgoing ones. Notably, the integration that Liv-ex has with the Hub and the feed of selective virtual stock through inventory management into e-commerce.
“That integration allows us to shape an interesting, broader list from a selection of Liv-ex offers that in turn attracts more new clients to Falcon.”
