How Jess Druey Created Whiny Baby Wines and Launched a GenZ Phenomenon

A wine producer cracks the GenZ code

Jess Druey remembers standing in front of a wall of wine, utterly baffled.

Her date had offered to cook, leaving her to choose the wine. Jess went into Whole Foods — and realised she had no idea.

Most people would just grab something off the shelf.

Jess started her own wine brand.

Jess Druey, Whiny Baby

“You can Google anything now and just figure it out as you go,” she says. The search results told her that Cabernet and Chardonnay were the most popular wines, so she sourced some from the bulk wine market and created the Whiny Baby label.

Right from the start, Jess did things differently, from putting still wine into a sparkling bottle, to adding peel-off stickers.

Then she won Gordon Ramsay’s Food Stars, taking home the prize of $250,000, which she put into Whiny Baby. That also helped her get national distribution.

Founded in 2020, Whiny Baby can now be found on the shelves at BevMo, Total Wine and Target in 27 states.

Jess came on the podcast in February to share what she’s learned.

Here are 5 of her insights:

1. Social media is critical

For the product launch, Jess called on influencer friends who helped with photography and videography. Everything went on social media, plus she released two TikToks, which clocked up hundreds of thousands of views. Within weeks, her first run of wine sold out.

Before she does anything, Jess goes on social media and checks her ideas with her community. That’s how she created names like “Unwind White Blend” — she realised people weren’t looking for grape varieties, but for something to suit an occasion.

Jess also uses social media to find out when her wines have arrived in different locations, something she’s not always privy to.

“I went on social media and I said, ‘here’s all the new states where we’re supposed to be in hopefully this month,” and asked people to let her know when they saw them. Soon, people were texting her pictures. In turn, Jess goes to social media to announce that the wine has arrived in a specific location.

2. Take the consumer’s point of view

Although Jess is working her way through the WSET courses, she says her goal is to partner with wine experts, not to be the expert herself.

“I naturally continue to learn about wine, but I try to do it as a consumer, and not as someone in the industry,” she says.

What’s more important, she says, is getting out to see what people are drinking.

“As a business owner, you don’t have a lot of free time to do those things, but I have to prioritise it,” she says.

When she has friends around, she asks them to bring wine. When people started showing up with bottles of orange wine, she realised Whiny Baby needed one too.

Now she plans to run tastemaker dinner parties in college towns, to see what people are drinking and responding to.

3. Take brand loyalty seriously

Jess started as a digital content producer for Red Bull, where she learned the value of brand loyalty.

“You could not wear lime green, the colours of Monster [the competitor] in the office,” she said. “You always have to have the product facing a certain way.”

Jess says she also learned that a disciplined approach to marketing is what will turn a product into a lifestyle brand.

4. Keep costs under control

Jess is transparent about money — all too often she sees founders talking about their big successes, without declaring that they began with plenty of money.

She started Whiny Baby with the money set aside for her college. “I said, I’m dropping out, I’m moving to LA and I’d like to have the remainder of my college money.”

The first couple of times she asked, her family said no — “and you’re not going to become an actress!” — but they eventually gave it to her for Whiny Baby

“We’re talking like $15,000-20,000,” she says.

At which point, she got a rude shock. She went to an agency and asked for a website quote and was told $75,000.

Instead, “I found this girl on Instagram. She did all my branding, at such a low cost,” says Jess. That designer is still with Whiny Baby, as Jess wants people to grow with her.

5. Reach out

When she launched Whiny Baby, Jess had no idea how the industry worked, so she went to LinkedIn and contacted distributors. It quickly became clear that she didn’t have anything like the money a big distribution deal required, so she looked for a strategic partner instead.

She had heard about the McBride Sisters Wine Company via a podcast — it’s the largest black and female-owned winery in the US — and landed a meeting with them.

“We entered into a strategic partnership and have been in an incubation deal for the past two years,” she says.

Final Thoughts

Jess says that instead of the wine industry talking about how to reach GenZ consumers, they should spend time looking for GenZ employees.

“I went to a major retailer summit for the first time and I looked around and I was definitely the youngest person in the room.”

Worse, wine people ask each other how to solve the problem, instead of asking people in the relevant target group.

“Don’t go and hire these big branding agencies to make these flashy, cool campaigns. GenZ sees right through it,” she adds.

You can find the full episode here. And don’t forget to rate it!

Professor Edward Slingerland, University of British Columbia

Why do we drink alcohol?

Too much alcohol and you’re guaranteed to wake feeling sick and remorseful. So why do we do it?

Edward Slingerland says it’s because alcohol is the key to civilisation — a cultural technology that helped early humans forge larger cooperative societies, overcoming the limitations of small-group living.

Without it, we’d never have learned to trust strangers.

Prof. Slingerland is the author of the entertaining book Drunk: How We Sipped, Stumbled, and Danced Our Way to Civilization and he’s this week’s Drinks Insider podcast guest.

He reveals:

• Why so much thinking about the origins of alcohol is wrong

• How alcohol works as a form of social glue

• Why humans have been complaining about alcohol for centuries

• How alcohol helps drive creativity and novel thinking

• Why alcohol won against other intoxicants like cannabis

It’s an entertaining conversation that you can find here.