Today we’d like to introduce you to Kevin Mehra.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Kevin. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
I’ve always had an entrepreneurial spirit, even when I was a kid growing up in Canada. When I was a teenager, I created a coupon book featuring local deals that I sold for $20. It was called “The Key to Mission.” You could say it was one of the first early attempts at a Groupon-like concept. I went around the suburbs of Vancouver, where I grew up, and got restaurants and local businesses to offer deals to include in the book. That was really when I knew one day I wanted to start a business and work for myself.
I’ve been in the wine and spirits industry for nearly two decades. After I graduated from college, I started working for Phillips Beverage Company in the UV Vodka division. I was excited to work in the alcohol industry and threw myself into the job. I moved to Boston to launch the brand’s first markets outside of the Midwest. I helped rapidly build and grow its East Coast business, and was eventually promoted to Director of International Sales.
In 2007, I left Phillips to pursue my passion for entrepreneurship and started Latitude Beverage Company, an innovative wine company, here in Boston. In the early years, the company was really a bootstrap operation — I didn’t have many resources or an office space. For the first two years, I was the only employee and my office was my daughter’s nursery. Starting a business is tough — I was working double the hours for a quarter of the pay — but I was working for myself and I was confident about the business model. I knew I had something consumers would want.
After testing a few beverage ideas under the Latitude umbrella, I launched the 90+ Cellars brand and it has been my primary focus ever since. The team has grown to 75 people and 90+ Cellars is now one of the fastest growing wine brands in the U.S. I’m proud of the team and how much we’ve accomplished in just eight years. We love great wine but we don’t want to pay full price for it. We know our consumers want the same. That’s why we do what we do.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
It hasn’t always been a smooth ride, but it has been an exciting ride. When I first got started, I was calling wineries on my own to ask about their availability of wine. Before they started to get on board with the concept, a handful of them were unsure, and told me that I didn’t have a long enough history in the wine industry. We didn’t have the credibility yet, and we were a wine company in Boston, which wasn’t common. It was a challenge to start off and prove this model could work, and to build relationships and trust from the ground up.
As the company grew, we hit a point where we were exceeding our financial resources. We are a privately owned company and didn’t rely on major investments to get off the ground. There were situations early on when wineries would tell us if we wanted a specific wine that was in demand, we had to pay for the full supply up front. At the time, we didn’t have the financial resources to commit to that, but we didn’t want to miss out on the opportunities to get those wines. We were able to work with a local Boston bank that knew our brand to secure our first line of credit in 2012 and we’ve been profitable ever since.
The one other thing I’d say was a challenge was getting the infrastructure in place to catch up to our quickly-growing business. The growing pains of starting a company. After I was kicked out of my home nursery, we worked out of what was basically a closet at Harpoon Brewery. Eventually we moved to an office over the Brookline Liquor Mart and then once we outgrew that space, we landed in Brighton in the up-and-coming Boston Landing neighborhood. We also needed to invest in our back office infrastructure and put processes in place to support a growing business and team. We have since hired a team of leaders in our accounting, product development and marketing departments that has helped get the company to where it is today and set us up for future growth.
We’d love to hear more about your business.
90+ Cellars is a unique wine company based in Boston. We curate wines from highly-acclaimed vineyards and wineries around the world, and bottle those wines under our own labels for less without revealing the source producer of the wines.
The idea for 90+ Cellars started in the spring of 2009. The economy wasn’t in the best shape, demand for premium and super premium wine was down and inventories were piling up. I began reaching out to wineries that were scoring 90+ ratings (on the 100-point wine scale) from wine rating outlets such as Wine Spectator to ask if they had extra wine for sale. I found a handful of wineries that liked the concept and the 90+ Cellars label was off and running.
It was a simple pitch: we would put their “extra” wine in our bottles and sell it for less, without disclosing the source producer of the wine. Rather than discount their wines and risk negatively impacting the value of their brands, we found that wineries were willing to part with a percentage of their production for a reduced price. It’s a win/win scenario: wineries get to sell more wine and consumers get access to better wine at lower prices from 90+ Cellars.
While the landscape has changed quite a bit since 90+ Cellars launched, our mission and our ability to offer great wine has not. With VP and head wine buyer Brett Vankoski at the helm, we continue to seek out the best opportunities in the market and bring world-class wines to consumers for a fraction of the original source price.
What role has luck (good luck or bad luck) played in your life and business?
90+ Cellars is all about bringing great wine to consumers for less. For us, finding wine isn’t about luck. When we got started, we put in the work to scour the globe for the best opportunities in the market to make high-end wines more accessible. Over the last eight years, we’ve built strong, trusting relationships with wineries and vineyards around the world and because of those relationships, not luck, we are bringing world-class wines to consumers for a fraction of the original source price. Now wineries come to us when they have wine to sell. We were able to leverage our unique business model to expand our portfolio with four additional brands, including Lila Wines, our canned wine brand. It’s amazing to see how the company has evolved and I’m excited to see what’s next. I feel very lucky to be doing what I’m doing and to be part of such a dynamic and hard-working team.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.ninetypluscellars.com
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