Why Storage is the Key to Your Wine Passion – Damon Raque Pt. 1

Forrest Kelly: 00:00:00

Welcome. Welcome to The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast with Forrest Kelly.

Damon Raque: 00:00:05

I am Damon Rocky, founder and managing partner at Bottle bank in Atlanta, Georgia.

You know, have been a wine collector and wine lover for several years, and when I decided to kind of take my life in a different direction, you know the old adage of follow something you're passionate about.

Forrest Kelly: 00:00:22

The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast

You've heard the term adapt or die. In business, you've always got to be able to pivot, know what your consumer want, wants, and then be able to give it to them quickly.

You can't become rigid in today's market. We've seen it with ride sharing. Nowadays you don't have to go to a hotel. You've got choices.

And in the wine business, Damon Rocky has listened and we get Bottle Bank. All right, Damon, give us that sizzling picture description of what Bottle bank is.

Damon Raque: 00:00:52

Bottle bank is a wine centric hospitality concept based in Atlanta. And we are wine centric because we love wine and we love the connectivity and we love the experiences that wine creates.

And so we wanted to create an environment where individuals that shared a passion could get together and spend quality time with like minded individuals and enjoy everything about wine and the way of life that surrounds it.

Forrest Kelly: 00:01:19

Did you create Bottle bank because your own wine collection was starting to take over your living room, or was it just an excellent excuse to taste more wine?

Damon Raque: 00:01:28

I'm going to say all of the above. It's kind of a funny origin story.

You know, I've been a wine collector and wine love for several years, and when I decided to kind of take my life in a different direction, you know, the old adage of follow something you're passionate about.

I called a sommelier buddy of mine and said, hey, I want to take you to lunch and kind of pick your brain a little bit and get your thoughts on some things. So we go to lunch. And I said, hey, you know, where do you see the biggest opportunity in the wine industry in the next five to 10 years?

And he looks at me and he says, storage. And I kind of looked back at him with a puzzled look and I said, storage? And he said, yeah. I said, well, that's kind of interesting.

I said, I get, you know, if you live in an apartment or a townhouse or a condo and you fundamentally don't have space, you might need the ability to store some wine. But people that are into wine and have a home, they typically have a cellar or a large wine fridge.

You know, why would people need to store wine outside of their home? And he Looks at me and he says, you built a house a few years ago, didn't you? And I said, yeah. And he said, did you put in a wine cellar?

And I said, I did. He said, let me guess.

He said, when you were designing it, trying to figure out how to rack it, you were thinking about capacity and how many bottles you'd want to store. And I said, yeah. And he said, at the end of the day, you probably said, you know what? I'm going to rack it at max capacity.

Thinking to yourself, you know what? I'll never need it, but better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it. And I kind of said, yeah.

And he said, let me guess, that was what, two, three years ago? And I shook my head, and he said, you're full. And I kind of laughed, and I just said, man, get out of my head, you know?

And he said, damon, they keep buying and buying and buying. And so I thought about it logically.

People that have a passion, if it's watches or wine or cars or shoes or handbags, you know, whatever a person's into, if they have the ability and kind of give themselves the excuse to buy more than typically, they will do it. So that kind of set me out on the journey, researching wine storage facilities literally all over the world.

And what I quickly realized was, you know, the large majority of them were just basic warehouses at 55 degrees with nothing experiential associated with it. So I'd always loved hospitality and kind of the connectivity of drinking wine, not just collecting it.

So we said, hey, what if we kind of create this environment where people can store their wine, but more importantly, they can drink it and share it with other people that love wine. And that's what we set out to do. So that was a long story of how Bottle bank came to be paid.

Forrest Kelly: 00:03:54

And I take my $100 that I want to put into savings. You know, big spender here.

I walk into the bank, I talk to a teller, and they take it, and, you know, then five minutes, hopefully, I'm done, I'm out the door. So Bottle bank is not that same experience. So I walk into Bottle Bank. What am I looking at?

Damon Raque: 00:04:12

We knew right off the bat that we did not want to be a traditional restaurant or wine bar. You know, there's people that do that. There's people that. And what's.

What's interesting is, you know, those models are typically based on volume and transactions. Like you had said.

You know, when you look at a traditional restaurant model, they're wanting to get you in, serve you and get you out so they can turn the table and have another wave of people that come in and experience a restaurant. And the more they sell, the more volume they do, the better the restaurant does. And we're calling our concept a wine lounge.

And we kind of highlight that word lounge because we want people to do the exact opposite. We want them to stay as long as possible possible. So we've been very thoughtful in terms of the layout and the design and the decor.

If you think about sofas and club chairs and again, kind of a living room type of environment where people want to relax and hang out for a couple of hours and meet new people and spend time with their friends and share bottles and that type of environment.

So it's, it's, it's a lot less volume driven and transactional, more so again, inviting people to stay and relax and hang out for a while and talk and enjoy wine.

Forrest Kelly: 00:05:24

The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast

Speaker C: 00:05:27

Don't forget my favorite part.

Forrest Kelly: 00:05:29

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