She Raised $3.5M For Her Brand New Business

Allison Luvera was working in fashion, with a dream to move into the wine industry. Instead of just working in the wine business, she ended up reinventing it.

When Allison started doing research, she realized there was a huge gap in the market for a high-end box wine and created Juliet, a boxed wine reinvented for luxury.

Juliet is no standard boxed wine. The wine is delicious and the packaging is gorgeous—definitely not your run of the mill boxed wine. After dreaming up the idea, the product took 18 months to create. A lot of that time was spent working on the proprietary cylindrical packaging.

Instead of a big splashy launch for her business, Allison and her co-founder focused on a six month “soft launch” to test the market and validate the assumptions they had. They were guessing on things like how much consumers would pay and where they should be finding new customers. By keeping their operations really lean they were able to learn a lot without spending a ton. Within those six months the Juliet team also started investing in PR.

“We have paid about $10,000 a month on a retainer [for PR] since we've launched. We felt we had an uphill battle in terms of de-stigmatizing the category that we're in. We really wanted social proof. We wanted to be able to say Vogue and Wine Enthusiast are covering our brand, and they think what we're doing is cool.”

All the while, Allison was fundraising on a rolling basis, first taking in investment from friends and family, eventually raising $3.5M. Wondering how to raise $3.5M when your business is still brand new or even pre-launch? Scroll on to see Allison’s strategy.

Allison took investment from her network before they had product with just a pitch deck showing their idea. After a few months they were far from their goal and Allison started to worry. Once they had product and started showing traction, things started to pick up in a big way. Now their investors include big players like Jonathan Neman (CEO & Founder of Sweetgreen) and Lauren Bosworth (CEO & Founder of Love Wellness).

“[PR] ended up being a really great traction point to take back to investors that we had either had a conversation with but they were still on the fence or new investors to say, we've launched and we're getting all this attention in the press and people really think what we're doing is interesting.”

The funding allowed Allison to grrow her team, with the first hire being a social media and content manager. As a consumer brand, Allison knew they would have to put out lots of content and wanted to be able to manage that in-house. From there they built out a sales team covering the US.

Now only a short year since launch, Allison and the team at Juliet are absolutely crushing it! They’re in over a hundred stores across the US, have been featured everywhere from Vogue to Fast Company, and with new product launches coming soon they’re just getting started!