Building Barefoot Wine: Michael Houlihan on Innovation, Storytelling, and Brand Success

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Mark Evans: Welcome to Marketing Spark, where we dive into the stories, insights, and strategies entrepreneurs, CEOs, and marketing leaders. Today, I have a special guest, Michael Houlihan, the cofounder of Barefoot Wines. And this episode has a backstory that I think you'll enjoy. A while back, I was listening to an episode of How It Works with Michael and his wife, Bonnie Harvey, and they shared their journey of building Barefoot wines from the ground up. I was inspired by their story and how they embraced creative grassroots marketing and turned Barefoot into a powerhouse brand. Their journey and insights were so compelling that I felt compelled to write about it on LinkedIn. Shortly afterward, I received an email from Michael himself thanking me for the post. In true marketer fashion, I took the opportunity to ask if he'd be interested in joining me on Marketing Spark to explore his journey, Bonnie's journey, and the lessons he and Bonnie have learned along the way. So here we are. I'm thrilled to welcome Michael Hulan to the podcast.

Michael Houlihan: It's great to be here, Mark. Thanks for having me.

Mark Evans: Why don't we go back to the beginning of Barefoot Wine? It's an amazing story story of how two people stumbled into entrepreneurship and created something amazing. What inspired you and Bonnie, especially at a time, and this is not that long ago, when traditional high end brands dominated the market?

Michael Houlihan: We weren't really wine people. We loved the wine country. We loved the rural style living. We were both urban refugees, if you will. Will the last person please lock the door? We are conservationists without a doubt. We love the country where we live. We have the Russian River. We have the beaches on the beautiful Pacific Ocean. We have the wine country itself. She moved here from Portland. I moved here from San Francisco, and we met here. And the the industry here is the wine industry. You you get sucked into it like a vortex. Whether they're your client or whatever you're doing, you wind up working with wine people. Bonnie was working with some wine people and she was straightening out their offices and overseeing their supplies. She noticed that they were owed about $300,000 from one winery that they hadn't been paid for in three years. She and I met about a year before this, and I was also a consultant in the wine business, but I had a history working with the government. I was not only not afraid of working with government bureaucrats, but I used to be one. I understand how to get things in their face and get them to take action and do things. That was my business. I was helping people with subdividing their property or refinancing with a government loan. Anyway, she comes to me one day, and I remember we've only been together for a year. And she says, I noticed that my client is owed $300,000 from this winery. Would you go over there and collect? I thought, jeez. I just met you, and you're asking me to go collect $300,000. It's like marrying the mob type deal. I said, okay. I'll go talk to him. I went over. When I got there, the guard stopped me. He says, I hope you're not here to collect money. He says, we just declared chapter 11 bankruptcy this morning. You can take your ticket and wait your turn. I already had a meeting, but that didn't help my positive attitude going into it. Sat down with these guys who were the secured debtors who are now on the board. I said, listen. Maybe we can work something out here. I know you don't have any money, but what if you gave us wine in bulk and bottling services to pay the debt? In other words, you can pay it with wine in glass bottles. We'll come up with the label. We'll come up with the compliance. We'll come up with the marketing scheme. We'll come up with the logo. Besides how hard could that be? How long could that take? I went back to Bonnie and I said, hey. I think I've got something for us here. It's a trade. She's well, that's not gonna pay any bills. But we gotta go out and market that now. You created another problem. We spent the next six months doing research. There are a lot of businesses you can go into. But if you go into alcohol beverage business, even in Canada, you have different laws in every province and in some states like Texas, every city. It's not just an easy sell. You have to understand how to do it without breaking the law. You also have to deal with supermarkets, and they all have their own protocols for how they will do business. You have to learn all those. And then there's different kinds of taxes and licenses and all that stuff. We worked for about six months, did all the research on that stuff. In the process, I went to a guy that I'd been to school with who is now a buyer for a major supermarket in California with about 200 outlets. He would give me a meeting at first and finally did as a favor to me. And he goes, okay. What do you want? I said, I've got all this wine and bottling service. I can put any kind of a label on it. Just tell me what you want, and we'll sell it to you. We'll clear the debt, and I'll pay our client. We'll be down the road. Plan a. But he looks at it. He says he says, nobody's ever asked me what I wanted before. So I'll tell you, he says, give me a salt and pepper act. He says, put it in a pig. Make it better than Bob and cheaper than Bob. I'm listening to this, and I'm writing it down as fast as I can. And I'm wondering what language is this. Is this some kind of jargon that's used in the wine industry? And later, I translated it because I had a friend who was in the industry, and, yes, it was jargon. So a salt and pepper act, that means one label with a red and a white wine. And then better than Bob, Bob was Robert Mondavi and then put it in a pig. A pig was the big fat magnum, the 1.5 liter, not the seven fifty milliliter, also known as a fifth. So twice the size. On my way out of his office, he says oh, and one more thing, says, the label, he says, make it visible from four feet away so she can see it when she's pushing her cart. Make the name the same as the logo and make the logo something that people can relate to. I wrote all that down. Now I know what I have to do. I have to come up with a brand that has the logo. It's the same as the name, Barefoot. Now bear it has to be visible from four feet away. It's a rather large Barefoot right on this label, four feet away. Well, she, which means a woman buyer is pushing her cart, right? In many states and in some places in Canada, you can actually buy wine in supermarkets. So it is a female buyer. 75% of the shoppers are females. So who is this woman? She's 37 years old. She's got two and a half kids. She wants to buy every week staples that are dependable. They have to be priced the same. They have to taste the same. This is interesting because wine doesn't always taste the same. Sometimes one image is different than another. So this gave us a completely different picture. So now if I hadn't gone and talked to my friend at the supermarket, I wouldn't have got that key access to market. They gave me a complete wine marketing and merchandising lesson in about thirty seven seconds. It's important

Mark Evans: for context here. The wine industry in The United States and Canada was dominated by European wines. The benchmark was French wine. US wines didn't, at the time, probably have as big a profile as they do now. You hadn't been a winemaker. I don't know whether you and Bonnie had thought about launching a winery. In many cases, some of the best success stories happen because entrepreneurs stumble into them, or they become accidental entrepreneurs. At what point did you realize that this was something that you wanted to do, not only to pay the debt, but because you were passionate about it and you thought, here's a huge opportunity to go after a particular market with a particular type of wine and see if we can make a success of that. When did that realization happen?

Michael Houlihan: It happened shortly after that meeting when I was given the keys to the kingdom because as this buyer was kicking me out, he was telling me exactly where there was a missing piece in the market. And so that's what really made me feel good. All of a sudden I thought, wow. There is a void. There is a gap. There's a place where we're not gonna be competed with. It's at the 1.5 liter size.

Mark Evans: Mhmm.

Michael Houlihan: And it's the house wine. It's the everyday drinking wine. See? So that's where he knew that the market needed more entrees. So that's when I began to feel good about it. But I didn't feel really good about it until about five years because I had to learn all the lessons that you learn in business. How do you build a brand? How do you expand a brand? Do you expand it too fast? Do you have to retrench? What about mistakes? How long do they take to undo and all of that kind of stuff? How do you hire people? How do you train people? How do you articulate what you want in terms that other businesses can understand? How do you write a contract? It goes on and on. So that took me some while to really get good at. After five years, I was pretty good at it because remember, we already had backgrounds in business consulting. It wasn't like we were strangers to the written word or to rules and laws and regulations. But it was an interesting journey, let's put it that way. The other thing I think that made me feel good was when we started to gain traction in the marketplace where we start we were starting to sell truckloads at a time. And some big organizations, like some of the larger supermarkets in The United States, were buying, like, four and five truckloads at a time. Once we had that kind of cash flow, we realized that we were a solid business.

Mark Evans: Let's wind the clock back because at that point in time, that's a lot of work, time, and effort that goes into it. But let's wind the clock back to the early days when you're a company that's got a new product positioned in a market that you think there's an opportunity, but you don't have a lot of money. One of the things that you discover is that there's a lot of community events looking for sponsorships. These are, you know, cheap and cheerful events where you may donate a few bottles or a few cases of wine. Do you discover that's where you can do some testing? That's where you can find whether there's an appetite for your wine? Talk about how that marketing opportunity emerged and what you learned from it, from seeing the positive reaction to Barefoot when you sponsored these events?

Michael Houlihan: Back in the early days when, as you say, we fulfilled the format that we were challenged to fulfill. We gave them exactly what they wanted. They wouldn't buy it. Nobody would buy it. They wouldn't buy it because there wasn't any advertising behind it. And it was outrageous to put a foot on a bottle of wine in those days. They were all apologizing for not being French enough. It it was interesting. Then I get a call from a guy at a at a a fundraising event in San Francisco. He wants to raise funds for a community park to keep the kids off school after off the streets after school. And he wants money for swings and slides and sands, jungle gyms, and sandboxes. And he calls me up. He goes, hey. He says, you're a very wealthy winemaker up there in the wine country, and I only need $50,000 to complete this park. Said, do you have the right number? I don't have 50,000. I I I doubt if I have 5. I said, but I could give you some wine. You can use it as your fundraiser. Maybe it'll loosen some people up. They'll write a bigger check, or you could maybe you could you could auction it off and use the money to buy the slides and the swings and sandboxes. And he he begrudgingly took the wine because he was looking for cash, but he served it. We didn't hear from him again. About four or five weeks later, we noticed there was a big surge in sales in his neighborhood. This was in San Francisco when we first started. And so we wanted to know why and we realized, wow, this is the same neighborhood that we donated the wine to the fundraiser in. I wonder if the members that went to that fundraiser tasted our wine, recognized it and went out and looked for it in the stores that were in that neighborhood. And so we said, let's try it in another neighborhood. So we tried it in another neighborhood. They were trying to raise money there to clean up a creek. And so we provided the wine, but we also this time, we said, you gotta say what our name is, and you get, here's where you can buy it in your neighborhood and those kind of things, interpretive information. And boy, it weren't there too. And he thought, this is interesting because the reason the stores wouldn't take it, remember, was because we didn't have enough money for advertising. So he's like, well, maybe we've discovered a different way to advertise. And we did. We realized that we had given the members of the nonprofit a social reason to buy our product. It was stronger than a mercantile reason. So mercantile reason might be, oh, it tastes great. Oh, it's a low price. It's a gold medal winner. Those are all mercantile. But how about this? They helped us raise funds for our park. There are members. Mhmm. These are our brothers. Let's help them. And so we actually turned our customers into advocates. So it became the best form of advertising. Just imagine, here's your wine for sale in a neighborhood where you're sponsoring the nonprofit that's trying to improve the neighborhood.

Mark Evans: It's classic influencer marketing. In many respects, Barefoot changed the wine industry with its affordable, accessible approach. What was the strategic thinking behind positioning Barefoot as a casual, fun brand? And again, in context, as as you mentioned, the standard was French wine, very highfalutin', fancy, elitist brands and products. And you were coming at the market in a different way, in a new way. Right. Was that on purpose, or did it went to just what was the thinking? Did you realize this was the way that you were gonna break into the market?

Michael Houlihan: When the buyer said, so she can see it when she's pushing her cart.

Mark Evans: Mhmm.

Michael Houlihan: We did some research, and we found out that 75% of supermarket shoppers are women. So when the guy says, what's for dinner, honey? What he's really saying is take the money in the credit cards and go make all the branded decisions. So we knew that if we could give her what she wanted, that we would be the brand that she would look for and be a regular item. Now the high priced wines, that's Saturday night wine. You buy a bottle or you brag about the appellation, maybe the vintage. You talk about the winemaker. You sniff it, swirl it, talk about mid notes, say some things in French. That's fine. But there are six Tuesdays in the week, and we were Tuesday night. Why? Right. So we realized that there was a much bigger market in volume even though our price wasn't there. The volume was incredible if we could address it and create a loyal following, which we did. But yes, that was deliberate. We deliberately addressed a portion of the market that had adhered to Ford not been identified. You have to remember in those days, all the wine buyers were men in those days, and they didn't even think about the women. They just thought some guy's gonna be bragging about this wine, but better be from a special appellation or this or that. So that's how they were looking at it. It's very interesting the way it developed because we had a winemaker who really was in France. He studied over there. He studied winemaking, and he said what he loved was the leaders that were on the table of Vande Tape. They were easy drinking, soft on the palate, fruit forward, true to varietal character. And he wondered why we didn't have that just that much in The United States. See? Yeah. Everybody why don't we have a good $5 cigar? See, that kind of thing. Why don't we have a good $5 bottle of wine? I can tell you one of the reasons is it's very expensive to make it, and you don't make a lot of money on it. So you gotta be half whack to go into it, but then you have to be really driven to get the volume. It's not something you can do in the neighborhood. You have to do this internationally or not at all.

Mark Evans: You sold Barefoot to Gallo in 2005. The obvious question is, what was it like for you and Bonnie? The two of you had worked hard for nearly a decade building Barefoot from scratch into a high volume popular brand. I'm sure the deal was exciting. Whenever the thing that you build, somebody wants it and they want to pay a lot of money for it, it must be very exciting. What was your experience, or how did you feel post acquisition? Did you enjoy jumping off the bandwagon after so much hard work, or did you miss the action and being an integral part of the winemaking business?

Michael Houlihan: It's a great question. Let me just answer this way. We never wanted to be in the wine business. We were both people who made mistakes right, and that's w r I t e. When we made mistakes, we'd write them down. And we took notes all the time. So we had, like, manuals and policies and procedures. Everything was written down in our business. So we were not only performing the business, but we were looking at it as a laboratory for how businesses run altogether. What are the general principles that businesses have with each other? And in that process, we were so glad to have made the sale to such a group as Gallo because they were smart about merchandising. They realized that it was all about shelf presence in the stores. And they really policed that shelf presence and enforced it. And that's what we did. We couldn't do it to the level that Gallow did because they had thousands of people more than we did. But we had enough to press it in the stores where we were. They were able to scale the brand and they actually hired us as brand consultants to help them with things like teams that were dedicated to the brand and things like worthy cause marketing. And we're happy to say that they took it and made it the number one brand in the world. And so for us, we couldn't have made a better sale because we were in the business consulting business in the first place. After we sold, we're still in the business consulting business, except that now we've been through a real life adventure of building a world class brand for twenty years. It's one thing to sit there and talk and pontificate and debate about business principles, but it's quite another to go into a supermarket and see it or go into a warehouse and see it or talk to a trucker or talk to a producer or a grower. It's an education that you can't get in school. So we took that knowledge and we were encouraged by people who worked at Gallo and also our former employees and many of our customers and suppliers. Write a book. Why don't you guys write a book about this? So we wrote a book and we're pretty much finished with it. And it was so boring, we threw it right in the garbage. Okay. That's awful. And so then we said, nobody's gonna listen to this. So we decided to rewrite it and we wrote it as a business adventure story, a white knuckle rocket ride where you're not sure if they're gonna make it from chapter to chapter, but becomes a real page turner. And we weren't so interested in prescriptive text like, here's the three things you gotta do, the five things to never do, the 20 things your customer wants from you. You start talking to people like that, they're gonna fall asleep in item number two. And we said, how about the guy walks into the store in a rainstorm, and he gets blown around the parking lot because he's holding on to this piece of foam core like cardboard that's five feet by five feet, and he has a four foot high purple foot on it. It's like a big square rigor. He's being blown in the storm down south, and then he gets hit with buckets of rain. He still shows up in the store. Right? He still wants to make the sale, but he all he can hear is wet mop up front over the microphones because it is a mess, and you have to really want to do it. It's a moniker for the whole idea of the barefoot spirit, which is it's one thing to have a great product. It's quite another to understand how to sell it. And then it's really quite another to do what you have to do to make that happen because you have to do things that are apparently humiliating. See? But they they certainly are not what you expect.

Mark Evans: Was the book a way to transition from running barefoot to life after barefoot? Did it give you a chance to look back at all the experiences and the lessons that you had learned over the years and internalize them and then share them with the world? Was that the biggest value of the book, or were there other things that you were hoping to do that the book would help you launch into?

Michael Houlihan: That's a great question too. Two answers. One is, yes. The book helped us launch our business education career and our career as business consultants. Because now people were hiring us to help them with distribution management and hiring and how you pay people and all of those kinds of nuts and bolts things. But on the other hand, because of the book, we were speaking all over the world. We spoke at 60 schools that teach entrepreneurship, including Europe and Asia. And here we are talking to young people who are very keen on getting into business. And they would like to know what it's like from the Ground Floor. We don't go in there with the silver spoon in our mouth on the ivory tower. And as a matter of fact, we go the exact other way. We go in there and we say, listen. This really knocked us on our butt. Here's the biggest mistake we made. We thought this was it. But no. The real story was this, but we were too proud to admit it or we were too stubborn to admit it. And here's what happened as a result. Once that started to happen, we realized that people really wanted story. They didn't wanna be told about business. They wanted to experience a story where they would learn about it by entertainment basically and following the story. And that's how we got into business audio theater. So we took our book. We noticed about seven years ago that everybody was showing up for these talks we were giving all over the world. They were all wearing earbuds like what's with the buds all of a sudden? Everybody overnight. And, oh, I'm listening to a podcast. Oh, I'm trying to improve my business, or I'm listening to war and peace. The thing's so thick I can't sit still for it, and I gotta keep moving in my day. So we looked at each other. We said, we have to do that. So let's do an audiobook. So we did an audiobook, but we didn't like it just like the print book. And we turned it into a business adventure story into, like, twenty five minute segments like podcasts. We married the idea of an audiobook with a podcast but introduced Hollywood. And so we brought in actors and sound effects and music, and it's like a nineteen forty five radio show. So it's exciting and you can listen to it when you're biking or hiking or working out and when you want to. It's not sit down, we're gonna show you a film about our company and it's not here's a book about our companies. Here you go. This is free. Enjoy it. See what you think. And so now we're doing it for others. And we just got one done. It was it was rated top 20 business books in the world for a doctor out of Harvard who was really the guy who pioneered interstate enterprise telemedicine. And so it's his story. And his group was just rated by the Joint Commission. That's like the good housekeeping seal of approval for the medical industry as the fastest neuro response group in the country after listening to this.

Mark Evans: Clearly, you have a love for entrepreneurship. You've gone through the battles and the wars, and you've come out the other side very successfully. These days, entrepreneurship is the new black. Everybody loves the idea of being an entrepreneur. It's a very sexy thing to think about. A lot of people jump into it. It's not for everybody. Having been an entrepreneur since 2008, I can tell you that there's more than enough ups and downs. What do you think the biggest mistakes that entrepreneurs make today? What's your advice on how people can avoid these mistakes?

Michael Houlihan: Good question. I would say the number one biggest mistake that I see is an oversimplification of the sales and distribution process. You can't just come up with a great idea and the world is going to knock down doors and beat down walls just to get to you. That's not going to happen. Even if you sell it online, you're going to have to advertise. You're gonna have to put money into it. You're gonna have to figure out a way to get influencers to talk about it. You're gonna have to spend an awful lot of time, much more than you make for the first few years just promoting it. That's the biggest mistake they make is they underestimate what it takes, even a great idea. I I like to say if you were selling bars of gold at the supermarket for $3.99, you'd still have to merchandise them. You'd still have to bring them out from the backroom so people could see them. You'd still have to put a sign on it that said this is pure gold. It's worth $45,000,000. It's only $3.99 today. It's crazy, but it's true because we have such a limited attention span. So I think that would be my first piece of advice is do some research on how it is that your idea or process or device or product is gonna actually get marketed. How's it actually gonna get delivered?

Mark Evans: Yeah. In my world, b to b SaaS, it's so easy to get into the business these days that there are dozens, if not hundreds, of competitors in every single vertical. But the reality is if we build this, they will come approach to running a business. They don't realize that sales and marketing are such a key part of the business, that you cannot have a product and expect people to beat down your door. It really is about spending the time to drive brand awareness and make people aware that your products exist and they need it. It brings me back to another question that I wanted to ask you about Barefoot, which was built in the era before digital marketing. If you had to do it all over again, if Barefoot was a brand that was being launched today with all the digital marketing tools at your disposal, how would your approach to building the Barefoot brand change? What would your strategic and tactical approach be to taking a brand, building it, getting people to have affinity for it, spread the word, all the things that brands have to do today?

Michael Houlihan: I would evolve some of the things that we did in the nondigital world into the digital world. For instance, we were the official wine of the Surfrider Foundation pretty much from the time they only had three chapters until they had over hundreds in lots of countries. But gaining that credibility, that many people who are interested in saving the surf, saving the beach, cleaning up the ocean, stopping the pollution of the rivers, those people seeing us as supporting them maybe on their website or writing blogs or taking their message to places that they get to is how I would do it today. It's basically the same old idea. It's just that now you work by promoting their message online. So you find groups that resonate with what it is that you stand for and what it is that you're doing. See? And those are the groups that you help and the way you help them is you promote them on your website and through your newsletters in the hopes that their members will have a social reason to buy your product and to also advocate for it. So that's what I would do today. So same philosophy.

Mark Evans: It's in the sphere of influencer marketing or advocate marketing. The other way to look at it, it's almost like a one to many approach. You try to embed yourself into communities, and communities these days in the B2B SaaS world are everything. Everybody talks about community, but what you did in the early days and what you would probably do today is you embedded yourself in communities and became partners with them or allies as opposed to what you said earlier. It wasn't a transaction relationship. It was a partnership.

Michael Houlihan: That's one of the things I do miss about the time period that we had barefoot is we were able to meet and work with and see groups being successful. Everything from education to conservation throughout The United States and Canada and even in Europe. So that was something that is higher on the scoreboard than just how many cases you sold.

Mark Evans: Final question. Curious about projects or focus areas that you and Bonnie are exploring these days. What gets you excited? What makes you wake up in the morning and tackle new projects or new business initiatives?

Michael Houlihan: You just have to look out the window. The climate is changing regardless of what some people believe or say. Fires are happening. Floods are happening. Winds are happening. Droughts are happening. And there's a tremendous opportunity right now for products and services that address and mitigate and even reverse the effects of climate change. For instance, there are so many houses that exist in The United States and Canada that are close to forests. And these houses were built twenty, thirty years ago. How do you protect them for fire? What can you go buy that will do that? There's a whole line of products for people to go into. We're very excited about that. What about floods? How do you get away from a flood? How do you protect your house from a flood? Those are the kinds of things we're really excited about. So there are some major trends going on right now, but climate change is the existential change and threat of our time. And no matter what we say in ten years, it will become very obvious that it was even now. It's obvious to me. You just have to look in the newspaper. But the thing is the businesses right now who get involved because insurances are gonna go away. Government assistance is gonna go away. So it's gonna come down to the individual homeowners to protect their homes. What kind of products and services are they gonna buy to do that? And this is the real challenge to today's entrepreneur. You wanna have a business where there's a real demand? This is it. The demand's only gonna get greater. The question is, what do you have to help out? How are you gonna address them? How are you gonna solve their problem?

Mark Evans: If people want to learn more about what you and Bonnie are doing, where do they go? What do they read? Where do they get more information?

Michael Houlihan: We're all over LinkedIn. We have a a couple of great websites out there. One is called the barefoot spirit, b a r e, foot spirit. On that site, you'll find over a thousand articles we've written on all aspects of business. If you are in the CPG world, we have a site for that, and it's called consumer brand builders. Our new business that we have, which is called business audio theater, you can go to www.businessaudiotheater.com and see what we're doing there. It's exciting. You can listen to samples of some of the stuff we did. It's top rate Hollywood stuff. Of course, there's our books, the Barefoot Spirit and what have you. Look for us, Michael Houlihan, Bonnie Harvey. We're easy to find. Product is our basic business is called the Barefoot spirit. That's the spirit with which we executed the Barefoot brand. It's what we took out

Mark Evans: of it. It's what we've been discussing today. Thanks, Michael, a terrific conversation. I appreciated the opportunity to talk to you. I also wanted to thank everybody for listening to this episode. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe and leave a review. It really helps others to discover the show. If you're a b to b SaaS company looking to accelerate your growth, overcome marketing challenges, or refine your strategy, I'd love to help. As a fractional CMO and strategic adviser, I work to create tailored marketing plans that deliver results. You can contact me through LinkedIn or visit my website, marketingspark.co, or you can email me at mark@markheavens.ca. I'll talk to you soon.