Virgin Wines boss credits ‘really encouraging’ performance of value brand for return to profitability

Wright said there “wasn’t another D2C player” in the value wine category and said the brand had been performing strongly, due to customer demand for “value and quality” which “are obviously still very important” in the current market.

“We thought [when we launched Warehouse Wines] that there was an opportunity to gain market share by getting into that sort of £6.99 or £7.99 a bottle market. And that’s very much proved to be the case since we launched it.

“We are close to 10,000 customers now, going from strength to strength”.

Virgin Wines CEO Wright was talking after the brand had delivered a return to pre-tax profit of £1.7m in the year ending June 28, 2024. The retailer’s group sales remained flat at £59m.

The retailer also recently announced a partnership with Ocado earlier this month. While it’s still early days, Wright said he was confident the partnership would be highly successful for both brands.

“All we’ve got to go on is very initial, early sales data. But that sales data is ahead of our expectations at this very early stage. We’re three weeks in, so I think it would be wrong to assume too much from initial data.

“But I think both Ocado and ourselves see this as a long-term partnership and one that can really grow to be quite valuable”.

Wright said the retailer had also invested in a new warehouse management system in 2022 which had helped drive down costs and customer returns and refunds by 50%.

“It’s allowed our pick and rates to go up, which means that our warehouse staff are more efficient that they’ve ever been. It also means that accuracy of our pick and pack has gone up as well.”