Riches is the former Marketing Director at Naked Wines and CMO at 31Dover, an online retailer of fine wine and spirits. She started her career in Management Consultancy at Javelin Group, now part of Accenture Strategy, before building the Professional Services team at VC-backed tech startup Qubit.

Her Co-Founder, Laura Rosenberger, joined UBS Investment Bank after graduating. As an analyst covering the leisure and hospitality sector, she researched the impact of an emerging US travel startup, Airbnb, on traditional listed hotel groups despite owning no rooms. The startup seed was sown, and Rosenberger left to join Onefinestay, a high-end homestay startup, as a financial analyst.

“You must jump through many hoops to start a business,” she continued. “So, we registered the name on Companies House and put up a Shopify, but we didn’t have that much of a plan. It was very much a case of let’s see what happens, and at first, it was bought by friends and family and people who maybe felt obliged to buy a box of wine.

“Then it was friendship circles and the people we’ve worked with in the past or friends of friends, who shouldn’t have felt obliged, but I was very pleased that they did. Then it took on a life of its own, and we sold out of 2000 litres of wine in 13 days. So, at that point, our idea, which was to create a premium boxed wine, the sort of wine you’d love to drink on a Tuesday night and have the odd glass that looked beautiful and tasted amazing, became a reality. And here we are, nearly four years later.”

Boxed wine has long suffered from a reputation tarnished by its lower price point and portable packaging, often seen as the poor cousin to its bottled counterpart. But this outdated image is vigorously challenged by a new generation of vintners embracing the cardboard-clad variety. Savvy winemakers are proving that quality wine can come in a box and are making a strong case for it.

“Glass bottles will always play a really important role in wine because they’re the only way to age a wine, and for really fancy high-end wine that will always be important,” she continued. “So, I don’t imagine there’s a world where there are no more glass bottles. However, glass bottles are a format that hasn’t changed for 200 years.

“They’re not necessarily the most space-efficient packaging format, so for me, it was less about asking or suggesting a switch from glass bottles to boxes but more of an idea that glass bottles no longer serve us as consumers. They oxidise the wine quickly, and you have a bottle in your fridge door. So, I think it was just questioning whether a format that hadn’t evolved in 200 years could be done better. Interestingly, boxed wine in the UK represents a tiny portion of the market. It was only 2% of the UK wine market at the time, but it’s way more internationally. In France, 44% of supermarket wine is sold in a box. In Sweden, that number is north of 60%. I guess there were hints that this was how the market was heading, particularly internationally, and it does seem like a smarter way to drink.”

Embarking on the entrepreneurial journey is a rollercoaster ride of highs, lows, and everything in between. For those who’ve ventured into the daunting realm of starting a business from scratch, the challenges can be both surprising and humbling.

Despite these hurdles, Riches quickly pointed out that there is a silver lining to every dark cloud that hurtles by. She also admitted her resilience had been tested in ways she never anticipated.

“The number one thing I’ve learned in the last four years is it’s hard to go from nothing to something,” she said. “I used to work in a big wine company – Naked Wines – and we grew that business over the time I was there from £60 to £100 million, and I thought that was amazing. But going from nothing to £1 million is so much harder, and it’s a real lesson; something can be so important to you and consumes every waking minute, but if you walk out onto the street, no one cares. I’m just trying to wrap my head around that and then realising or starting to understand how to make people care, how to build a brand that people feel something about, even if that feeling is, ”Oh, my God, I’m never going to buy that product in a million years”.

As a business owner, her sleepless nights are haunted by a trifecta of entrepreneurial anxieties: financial fragility, supply chain snafus, and the skyrocketing costs of wooing potential customers. The spectre of running out of cash is a constant companion, as is the delicate dance of international supply chains or the quest for consumer attention becoming a costly pursuit. These intertwined worries conspire to keep her wide-eyed at 2 am, pondering the precarious balance of building a brand in an unpredictable world.

“We’re a startup food and drink business, and we’ve chosen to go down the investment route and take investments from angels and venture capital. So, there have been times I’ve worried about running out of money. That’s number one, but thankfully, we’ve just closed a big fundraiser.

“I worried about the war in Ukraine breaking out and realising how international supply chains are, and how all of us are so sensitive and how everyone who buys stuff is going to be impacted by the price of cardboard, shortages of different types of plastics or whatever, and realising that these big world events can materially change the cost of everything that we buy. I think that was quite shocking.

“And then I guess the other thing is just the marketing cost. My role at Naked Wines was marketing director, but I’ve seen it firsthand. It’s not just unique to startup businesses that it’s becoming increasingly expensive to acquire customers because of the price of digital marketing and it’s much harder to target people and a much busier marketplace. So yeah, I think running out of money, not being able to afford the product or product shortages, and the cost of marketing will be the three things that consume my 2:00 am waking brain.”

Navigating the complexities of packaging can be a make-or-break aspect of any burgeoning business. For Laylo, the journey began with finding suppliers who believed in their vision as much as they did. Little did they know two industry giants were willing to take a leap of faith in their startup. Now, as they scale and their annual packaging spend grows, the foresight of Smurfit Kappa and DS Smith to invest in their vision has cemented lasting partnerships.

“For our packaging, our primary supplier is Smurfit Kappa, and then we work with DS Smith on our outer packaging,” Riches continued. “And I think that the common thing that unites those two is that in the early days, they were willing to drop their minimum order quantity because they believed in us, and they believed in the vision that we had for the company and even at a point where we bought just 2000 litres. It’s interesting that they’re big companies and were willing to make that choice when many smaller-scale businesses could have grown with us. We’re now on a decent scale, and it would be quite a big contract – we spend a lot of money on packaging annually. I think it is a bit of a shame that some of the smaller ones didn’t take us. When we were initially scanning the market, they perhaps didn’t take the opportunity to support the underdog.”