Four years ago, Rob McMillan asked me to build a chart with all the DTC vendors, to coincide with the annual SVB Report. The first report was an interesting challenge and became a labor of love. With few exceptions and aside from the format improvements from Erica Gomez the changes over the subsequent years have been minor.
That was my expectation for 2020. Every year I write a theme for the year and 2020’s was “Digital Transformation (Why and How to Start NOW)”, which I presented in March in London, at the inaugural One Step Beyond conference. Little did I know that would be the last time I traveled or saw other humans or how prescient and necessary that presentation was. We had the confluence of the global pandemic and terrible fires, along with an American society divided by ideological and political differences, coupled with disinformation machines running on overdrive. While Rob and I had warned about the limitations of the tasting room model as the primary driver