🍷 Background

In our relatively short lifespan, Garçon Wines have had an interesting background. Known initially for bringing to market ‘flat’ wine bottles, Garçon Wines quickly pivoted to becoming a sustainable packaging supplier to other wine businesses while simultaneously wholesaling third-party wine brands. The packaging business line has since been spun off under a new business and name, Packamama.

Now, Garçon Wines are focusing on building our own wine brands of the future that appeal to both today and tomorrow’s (adult) consumer through prioritising sustainability and convenience. We look to the success of challenger food & drinks brands and see potential to greater unlock this in wine. Our sustainable wine brands will be resonant, engaging and purposeful, designed for specific consumption occasions, and will use the format for which we grew to be known - eco-flat bottles. As a next step, we plan to raise investment to reinvigorate our Letterbox Wine® brand and bring two additional wine brands to market, Soliloquay and Down For.

🚀 The role

We are looking for the candidate who would want to take on the lead management role at Garçon Wines. This will be one of the first and potentially the most important role within this relaunched business. This is an exciting opportunity to kickstart the growth of what we envision to be a consumer-driven, customer-centric and forward-thinking wine business. This is not a comfortable management job at a FMCG giant. It would be a challenging, hands-on and cross-functional role at a start-up that has an uncertain but enticing potential upside. Though it will naturally be hard work, it should be fun and professionally rewarding. If that motivates rather than daunts you, read on.

💪 About you

Our optimal candidate sits at the intersection between having solid professional experience and a hunger for professional success. Experience and success in sales, branding, financials, leadership and hard work are crucial. Much of the role will be sales-orientated, so if you have experience in BD or National Account Management, even better. 

Your previous experience:

• We’re looking for someone with public evidence of growing brands in the wine, FMCG, CPG, beverage, or grocery space

• Or who has been part of a core team in a challenger start-up that has successfully launched and sustained a consumer brand in market

• Extra points if it had a core sustainable focus

• Tasks like building a distributor network, pitching to retailers, negotiating better store placement, knowing when to pull the trigger on stock creation and handling financial statements are all second nature

If you have demonstrable evidence of the following, you could be who we’re looking for:

• Start-up ready: You’re entrepreneurial in your way of working even if you’ve never been an entrepreneur, and may have aspired to start, build or own your own business
• Responsibility and accountability: You’re ready to take on responsibility and ownership at the highest level as the lead management role
• Determination and hard work: You demonstrate the determination and resilience that’s needed to build a business from the ground up and don’t shy away from the relentless hard work to make this happen
• Commercial acumen: You have commercial acumen that’s second to none, ideally stemming from senior experience within Sales and/or Marketing and/or Strategy
• Numbers and financials: You have unrivalled Excel skills and are totally at ease with numbers whether that's pricing, P&Ls, financial forecasting
• Uncertainty and ambiguity: You can comfortably navigate uncertainty and be confident in your decision making in the unknown
• Dynamism: You can put ideas into action with a fail-fast attitude that means you aren’t afraid to try new things to see what works
• Sales-savvy: You love making a sale and are keen to get out there to hunt, nurture and grow big accounts to get our brands into the world
• Leadership: You have past evidence of guiding, motivating and inspiring a team, are self-aware, and are able to rally people around you
• Management: You are at ease with decision-making, sensible risk-taking, problem-solving, prioritising, delegating and attention-to-detail. You know how to let a team to do their thing efficiently and effectively, and when to step in and help
• Professionally street smart: You have above average common sense and can navigate potential difficulties and complexities of the business world
• Personable: You love engaging with people, at all levels of seniority and in all walks of business, with the communication skills to back this up 
• Empowering and empathetic: You’re capable of helping shape the culture of a fledgling business to make it the type of organisation that teammates love working at and others are queuing up to join
• Brand believer: You strongly believe in the power and appeal of brands to both drive commercial success and make a positive difference in the world we live in
• Passion for planet and people: You may be done with the corporate life and are passionate about making the world a more sociable and sustainable place
• Wine: You love wine or as a minimum have an above-average interest in it