Wine Library TV: a liquor store's daily wine show lifts family sales from $4M to $60M

Vaynerchuk ran the family's Springfield, New Jersey liquor store, which he had renamed Wine Library and pushed online since 1997. Wine felt stuffy and elitist, and the store needed a way to reach drinkers who found the subject intimidating.

Turn the family liquor store's expertise into a daily video show: short, unpretentious wine reviews filmed in the shop and published online every day.

In February 2006 he asked a staffer to buy a Canon camera, set it up and hit record; the daily show had him taste and review wines in an informal, in-your-face style, answering viewers and building the audience through blogs, forums, Twitter and Facebook. He published nearly every day, with the episode count passing 800.

Store revenue grew from about $4 million to $60 million a year by 2008; the show drew roughly 90,000 viewers a day, hosted celebrity guests, and made Vaynerchuk a national wine expert and an early social-media guru.

In February 2006, Gary Vaynerchuk — then the 30-year-old operator of his family's Springfield, New Jersey liquor store — asked a staff member to run to Best Buy, buy a small Canon camera, set it up and hit record. The result was Wine Library TV, a daily video blog about wine with the tagline 'changing the wine world'.

The show was deliberately unpretentious: Vaynerchuk tasted wines on camera, spoke his mind, answered viewers and treated wine as something anyone could enjoy rather than a stuffy ritual. He published an episode almost every day, and built the audience by joining blogs and forums and connecting on Facebook and Twitter — an approach that stood out in 2006.

By 2008 the show had helped raise the store's annual revenue from $4 million to about $60 million, and it drew roughly 90,000 viewers a day with more than 800 episodes, featuring guests from Wayne Gretzky to Digg founder Kevin Rose. Wine Library had earlier been among the first liquor stores on the web and the first to buy AdWords on the word 'wine'.

The store's growth turned Vaynerchuk into a national wine expert and later a bestselling author and founder of the agency VaynerMedia. Wine Library TV ran about 1,000 episodes until 2011 and became one of the most-cited early examples of content marketing.

Publishing expertise daily made the store a destination before it was a pitch — value first, sales second.

The informal format removed the intimidation that kept new drinkers away from wine.

Being early with daily video in 2006 meant almost no competition for viewer attention.

Personality and consistency created a moat that bigger production budgets could not easily copy.

A small retailer can out-market bigger competitors by publishing its expertise daily where customers already look, at a cost competitors ignore — personality and consistency beat production budget.

Wine Library TV ran until around 2011, eventually passing 1,000 episodes, and became a launchpad: Vaynerchuk wrote the bestseller Crush It!, appeared on national television, co-founded VaynerMedia, and became one of the internet's most recognizable marketing voices. For Wine Library itself the show was the digital engine that took the family business from a local liquor store to a multi-million-dollar operation — and a template for retailers turning their own expertise into media.