Wine can be a cut-throat low margin business. There are also many “trophy wineries” launched by rich people who made their money in something else and then buys or creates a winery just for fun and life-style, without really needing to worry about profitability.
It is all the more impressive then when someone launches into wine and over a couple of of decades manages to build it up to a hugely successful business. There are not that many examples actually.
Someone who did it is Takis Soldatos, founder, owner and CEO of Oenoforos.
Oenoforos is a wine production and (mainly) wine import company in Sweden. They sell some 50 million bottles of wine each year thanks to a focus on the right market niche, a clever strategy and talented management. And no doubt a bit of luck too.
Read more on this in Per’s article on Forbes: How He Became One Of The Most Successful Wine Entrepreneurs In Scandinavia.
Here is the introduction:
Today: “I produce 30 million bottles of wine”, Says Takis Soldatos, founder, owner and CEO of Oenoforos, a wine importer and wine producer.
Yesterday: “I started in the wine business a long time ago working for a Greek wine entrepreneur and moved to Sweden to market his wines.”
So how do you go from the one to the other?
For Takis the first step was to create his own wine import company around 1997. But it was not plain sailing from there. He started, as many do who enter the wine business, with selling the famous brands, famous “châteaux”, from the famous regions. “I was selling mostly expensive stuff from classic regions like Bordeaux, Burgundy, Tuscany, Piedmont…” But there’s a lot of competition in this segment, not least from “hobby importers” of which there are plenty on the Swedish monopoly market and not an easy market to be in.
You can see an interview with Takis Soldatos in the video below.
Read all of Per’s article on BKWine on Forbes.
