Direct to consumer subscription service Liquor Loot is continuing to diversify its business, announcing new retail partnerships with more still to come.
Through the brands Whisky Loot and Gin Loot, the company’s subscription model takes consumers on a spirit tasting journey with 12 sample size bottle packs that are delivered in a certain order. Each pack contains three 60ml bottles with access to online educational material, intended to provide a unique experience for the consumer to grow their knowledge while learning what they like about a particular spirit.
Through partnerships with Aldi and more recently David Jones and Qantas, Liquor Loot has created a different retail offering that follows that same goal of consumer education. Retail boxes have six 30ml sample bottles with tasting notes, intended to allow consumers to go on a self guided exploration of a bigger variety of products to get a taste for what they like.
Liquor Loot Founder and CEO, Joel Hauer, told National Liquor News: “It’s really just a natural evolution of what we’re doing as a business. We’re providing high end spirits in a format that people can taste them, enjoy them, and hopefully come back to the distillery and buy them.
“The move [to retail] correlates with where people are historically purchasing, like 95 per cent of people are buying their spirits from retailers. Obviously online is growing at pace, but in comparison to your normal bottleshop purchase, it’s still so far behind. So it was about putting our products in the space that people can come across it if they’re not already familiar… and putting it in those different locations for people to try.”
The expansion into retail has been incredibly successful so far for Liquor Loot. With initial partner Aldi, Hauer said they last year sold “over 5000 packs within about seven days.”
According to Hauer, this shows there is a gap in the market to provide an easy entry level way for consumers to build their confidence about shopping in new spirit categories they haven’t tried before.
“There’s a vast retail landscape out there, when you think about where you can access spirits. But really, right now it’s either a 700ml bottle or you’re not taking a bottle home at all. We really wanted to break that up and and provide people different ways to experience spirits, but also the content and education behind it as well, so they are equipped with the knowledge to buy something they trust they’re going to like, because they’ve been able to learn what they do like and what they don’t like,” Hauer said.
“That’s really where we see the Liquor Loot business evolving, into something that is omnipresent – it’s online, it’s offline, it’s in different retailers, and it provides you with a chance to trial, learn, and then purchase that full bottle because you’ve now got the trust in knowing what you enjoy.”
To meet that goal of helping consumers learn and explore spirits categories, Liquor Loot is open to working with new and existing retail partners to become as much of a staple in-store as it is to subscribers online.
One of the ways its begun doing this is through liquor advent calendars, which will be available for the first time in retail this year via David Jones. Previously the advent calendars had been a hugely popular item for Liquor Loot’s online subscribers.
Hauer has also hinted that there are new retail partnerships soon to be announced, and added: “We’re actively looking for retail partners to collaborate with on different products that we’ve got on the pipeline.”
