Helping wineries run better businesses w/ Ashley Leonard, InnoVint

Drawing on her background in winemaking and Silicon Valley, Ashley Leonard, Founder and CEO of InnoVint, has developed a modern platform that tracks everything from the vineyard to the bottle.  From getting granular with COGS to automating TTB compliance, InnoVint gets the winery out of spreadsheets and into a modern, cloud-based, mobile-centric system. This system is designed to accomplish InnoVint’s mission: Helping wineries run better businesses.

Detailed Show Notes: 

InnoVint overview - mobile-driven winemaking platform, tracks and manages all winemaking options, and automates compliance

• >600 winery clients (~80% of wineries still using Excel)
• 92% of clients in North America, 8% International
• Mission: helping wineries run better businesses

TTB requires reporting for producers >500 cases

4 products

• Grow - vineyard tracking platform from the winemaker’s lens; phenology dates, yield estimates, applications, harvest scheduling, historical trends
• Make - winemaking from fruit reception to bottling; work enablement platform with digital work orders
• Finance - tracks all costs associated with making wine, final COGS; the finance team applies overheads
• Supply (2025 launch) - case goods management, inventory tracking, integrates with DTC platforms & distributors, has allocations as a planning tool

Has open APIs; integrates with TankNet and VinWizard for winery automation, receives data back for actions taken; integrates with quality control labs (e.g., ETS) and can take action more quickly

Core benefits

• Key differentiator: profitability per SKU and true COGS/product (w/o Innovint, calculated once per year)
• Efficiency, working smarter, better decision making, and more transparency
• Reporting to be able to manage quality
• Some wineries use data to track carbon footprint (e.g., water use, weight of glass)
• Reduces the risk of an audit

Compliance reporting (e.g., TTB 5120, export reports) - Gloria Ferrer went from 3 people over 2 days to 15 minutes for 1 person

Larger wineries tend to have more tangible benefits

• Domaine Chandon saved $75k annually by making the workflow paperless
• Patz & Hall saving 40 hours/month

Onboarding

• 5-step self-serve process (vineyard sources, lots, volume, vessels, current inventory) takes a couple of days for small wineries
• Premium package for larger wineries includes team training, and full data migration takes 2-8 weeks

Pricing - SaaS model

• Scales based on size (production) and complexity (# of locations) of the winery
• Not user or usage-based
• Implementation ~$1-2k
• Subscription starts at $2,400/year for a boutique winery for Make

Marketing - “has tried it all”, tries to add value to the end user

• Does a lot of speaking engagements/webinars on being a healthy winery
• Manages The Punchdown, a free digital community that is a peer-to-peer exchange
• Referrals from clients are the most effective marketing
• Launched the State of the Wine Business Health Report (2024) - surveyed with >500 participants
• To reach wineries that don’t go to conferences - LinkedIn/social, co-marketing, financial webinars
• Paid advertising sometimes works, but it's not a top lead generator

Barrier to purchase - resistance to change, case studies help overcome (e.g., Domaine Carneros saw what Chandon was doing and bought the product)

The product roadmap includes Supply module, AI applications, and embedded tools

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