343 | Testing High in Luxury Market | with Allison Luvera & Lauren De Niro Pipher

Allison Luvera and Lauren De Niro Pipher are the Co-Founders of Juliet Wine, where they’re redefining boxed wine with award-winning California varietals and eco-conscious cylindrical packaging that challenges the category’s decades-old perception. Allison is an award-winning brand builder with a dual BS in Finance and Marketing from Boston College, an MBA from The Wharton School, and WSET Level 2 Certification in Wine. She’s also a founding member of the Alternative Packaging Alliance, a coalition of high-end boxed wine brands dedicated to advancing sustainable packaging in the wine industry. 

Lauren brings nearly two decades of sales, business development, investor relations, and design expertise from leading roles at Virgin Galactic, Uber, and Douglas Elliman, along with a BS in Culture & Communications from NYU and a Sustainability Certification from Cambridge University’s Judge School of Business.

Before launching Juliet, Allison built a career leading brand strategy, design, and storytelling for premium products, earning a reputation for transforming overlooked categories into high-value lifestyle experiences. Lauren honed her skills in building relationships, scaling sales, and translating brand vision into tangible growth. Together, they’ve created a brand that blends “affordable luxury” with modern consumer expectations and a design-first approach that stands apart from traditional boxed wine.

In this episode, Allison and Lauren share how they spotted an opportunity to reimagine boxed wine, why they launched DTC first to prove product-market fit, and how they tested seven price points to find the sweet spot before expanding to retail. They also reveal how early customer data shaped their go-to-market strategy and helped secure high-quality retail partners who understood Juliet’s unique value.

In This Conversation We Discuss:

• [00:40] Intro
• [01:07] Highlighting sustainability as a core advantage
• [01:58] Reimagining a category for modern consumers
• [03:46] Meeting evolving consumer demands head-on
• [05:21] Sourcing partners to match product vision
• [06:55] Reframing consumer perceptions of boxed wine
• [09:03] Prototyping early to speed market entry
• [09:20] Testing multiple price points before scaling
• [11:47] Episode Sponsors: Electric Eye, Heatmap, Zamp
• [15:44] Adjusting pricing after early market feedback
• [17:33] Making decisions to drive progress forward
• [19:21] Proving product-market fit to win distributors
• [20:48] Proving demand before pitching big retailers
• [21:10] Meeting online customers where they are 
• [22:38] Boosting AOV with strategic bundles

Resources:

• Subscribe to Honest Ecommerce on Youtube
• Eco-friendly and delicious luxury boxed wine drinkjuliet.com/ 
• Follow Allison Luvera linkedin.com/in/allisonluvera 
• Follow Lauren De Niro Pipher linkedin.com/in/iamldp 
• Schedule an intro call with one of our experts electriceye.io/connect
• Clear, real-time data built for ecommerce optimization heatmap.com/honest 
• Fully managed sales tax solution for Ecommerce brands zamp.com/honest 

If you’re enjoying the show, we’d love it if you left Honest Ecommerce a review on Apple Podcasts. It makes a huge impact on the success of the podcast, and we love reading every one of your reviews!

Transcript

Allison Luvera

You've got to make the calls. You've got to make the decisions. It's not always going to pan out the way you think it will or you want it to, but that's all part of progress.  

Chase Clymer

Welcome to Honest Ecommerce, a podcast dedicated to cutting through the BS and finding actionable advice for online store owners. I'm your host, Chase Clymer. And I believe running a direct-to-consumer brand does not have to be complicated or a guessing game. 

On this podcast, we interview founders and experts who are putting in the work and creating  real results. 

I also share my own insights from running our top Shopify consultancy, Electric Eye. We cut the fluff in favor of facts to help you grow your Ecommerce business.

Let's get on with the show.

Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Honest Ecommerce. Today, I'm bringing to the show not one but two amazing founders. I've got Lauren and Allison. They're joining me from Juliet, a brand reimagining boxed wine. Juliet carries award-winning California wines, innovative eco-friendly packaging. Welcome to the show. 

Allison Luvera

Thanks for having us. Excited to be here. 

Lauren De Niro Pipher

Thank you. Yeah, excited to be here. 

Awesome. So obviously, you've got some amazing boxed wine just for the audience for those that aren't aware. Do you want to give us the elevator pitch? 

Lauren De Niro Pipher

Yeah, absolutely. SoJuliet is the first luxury boxed wine. So we offer 6 varieties of California wine, made in a low intervention style. So we use no artificial additives, no synthetic pesticides. All of our wines are award winning. They come in a beautiful patent pending cylindrical container that is eco-friendly. 

It reduces the carbon footprint by over 50% when compared to glass bottles. The wines are clean tasting, fruit forward, great expressions of all of the grapes. It also keeps the wine fresh for four weeks after you open it. So perfect if you just want to enjoy a glass at a time or if you'd like to take it with you, beach, boat, pool, picnic, park. Also great for parties, greatest gifts. We have a lot of value propositions we're proud of.  

Chase Clymer

That's amazing. And not only that, it is delicious. My wife enjoyed the samples you shared over. So thank you for that.  

Allison Luvera

Oh, we'd love to hear that. Glad she enjoyed it. 

Lauren De Niro Pipher

I'm so glad to hear that. 

Chase Clymer

Now, take me back in time. Where did the idea of getting into the box wine market come from what was going on in your life? 

Allison Luvera

Yeah, I can jump in with that. So I mean, this was the pandemic time. So as you can imagine,  people were drinking a lot of wine, there wasn't much else to do. And I actually have a wine and spirits background. So I've previously worked at Pernod Ricard working on brands like Perrier-Jouette Champagne. And so I was actually at my parents' house during the pandemic and they had some box wine in the fridge. 

And I remember drinking the wine and just thinking to myself, wow, this is such a cool experience. This is like wine on top in a fridge. You know, you can have one glass at a time, not worry about having to throw out a half drink bottle a day or two later. And yet, it just wasn't the style of wine that I wanted. It wasn't the quality of wine that I wanted. And it didn't look like it had the design aesthetic that, you know, that I'm looking for with products that I generally purchase. 

And so Lauren and I are old, old friends. Both lovers of wine and we've been wanting to do a business together for a while. And so we just got talking about, you know, what if we re-imagine boxed wine? What if we created something that really transcended the category and that created a more luxurious experience? And, really was that affordable luxury that we love in a lot of the other products that we purchased.

And so yeah, so we got to ideating around what that could look like and what we could do from a wine perspective, what we could do from a packaging perspective, from a brand perspective.  And the idea for Juliet was born. 

Chase Clymer

That's amazing. And I love that it came from  you experiencing a product that you enjoyed and realizing like this hasn't been innovated upon, this hasn't been improved. And that's something I'm seeing a lot in the direct consumer industry is they're just finding stale product categories and being like, how can we differentiate this and do it better?  Another episode to listen to if  any listeners out there want to see something more like this was I did an interview with Laundry Sauce and they were reimagining laundry detergent for men with better smells. And I was like, yeah, why has no one ever done that? So a lot of it, if you're stuck in that  place where you want to maybe start your own business, you don't need  the next Facebook idea. You can just say there's something that exists that you can probably do better. 

Allison Luvera

Absolutely. I mean, not only do better, but to make it more relevant for the modern consumer. I think there's been just massive shifts in what consumers are looking for in the brands and products they love over the past 5 to 10 years. And these more traditional categories,  sometimes the big incumbents in the different consumer spaces, they're not always equipped to evolve fast enough to keep up. 

And so I think that creates a great opportunity for brands like ours. But just like you said, there's so many other great brands doing something similar. Whether it's Fishwife or Touchland with hand sanitizer, there's a lot of great examples of this happening. Just to meet the evolving demands of the consumer these days. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. So you've got this idea, we're going to make a boxed wine better. What do you do?

Lauren De Niro Pipher

Well, I'll be very honest. The first thing I said to Allison was, oh my gosh, do we get to buy a vineyard? Which we didn't and that is not how it works. But I got really excited. Part of my background is in property and so that was the first thing that my mind went to. So we immediately set out to find great winemaking partners in the region of California that we were hoping that we could find partners in based on the house style of wine that Allison and I both wanted to achieve, which is more of an old world style wine. Our wines are all from the central coast of California. 

And then we were also simultaneously working really diligently on creating a brand that we thought could really stand up as an iconic brand someday and have the tenets and the creativity and the staying power of some brands that we admired more than any others.

We wanted it to appeal to a modern woman, but also be something that would be enjoyed by men everywhere. And we really hit the nail on the head, I think, when we converted the traditional box, which is rectangular in shape or cubicle in shape in some manner, and took that and redesigned it and reimagined it, I should say, as a cylindrical container. I think that was really the unlock. And then that, combined with the branding, is really what sets us apart. 

Chase Clymer

How long was it from this idea sticking to where you had that, like, aha moment? It doesn't have to be a box. 

Lauren De Niro Pipher

Allison, I think from the beginning of the conversations until the aha moment around the box was pretty. It was just a couple of months, maybe. It was really maybe 3 months. Because then it took us almost 18 months of working with product engineers in order to create this new packaging format.

Allison Luvera

Yeah, it was pretty quick. I think we realized very fast that if we were really going to transcend the category, really going to differentiate ourselves on shelf and just visually, you know, be very, very different from  the brands that were out there today, that we had to, we had to have our own sort of signature take on the packaging.  

It really didn't feel sufficient to just slap a beautiful design on an off-the-shelf rectangular box. To us, it wasn't going to be powerful enough to achieve that perception change that we really knew we had to achieve. Because people, consumers in the US especially, have a very distinct perception of what boxed wine is. Chase, what do you think of when  you think of traditional boxed wine?  

Chase Clymer

Oh, college and the game slap the bag.

Allison Luvera

Totally, exactly. I mean, that's a classic answer. And sometimes people will say like, oh, like my grandmother had it in her fridge, whatever it might be. And so, you know, we were up against it at the beginning, like this perception change, how do you make people stop thinking about slapping the bag and start thinking about a very elevated experience with beautiful, high quality wine and a gorgeous package that you're proud to share with your friends. 

And, we just felt like we had to differentiate more than just the design of the box. It had to be the actual shape. It had to be visually. There's just no question that this is something totally that stands apart on its own. So it was a pretty, pretty fast realization that we came to. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. And then so 18 months, that was from like, all right, we're doing this to. You got a prototype in hand? Or where was that? Where did you end up? 

Lauren De Niro Pipher

We had prototypes far sooner than 18 months. It was about 18 months from start of, we have this idea to, hey, we're launching in the market. 

Chase Clymer

Yeah. And let's talk about that. Great transition. Thank you. You really set me up nicely there. So yeah, what was that go-to-market strategy? How did you make noise and try to get some first customers that weren't your friends and family? 

Allison Luvera

So our go-to-market strategy was to launch primarily direct-to-consumer first. So we knew that ultimately long term wanted to be a retail brand, a wholesale brand in the alcohol industry that is the best path to profitability, but it's also really where consumers typically like to buy their alcohol. And so that was our end game, but we really felt strongly that we had to launch in the direct-to-consumer channel first with a brand-owned Ecommerce store so that we could get our proof of concept to really evaluate if we had product-market fit.

Juliet is very unlike anything that had existed before, not only from a price point perspective, but from the shape of the box. It was a very different proposition to what was out there. So we didn't really have a lot of historical case studies to go off of telling us that this would work. And we wanted the customer data. We wanted the early revenues. We wanted to test different pricing scenarios. So we tested six or seven different price points to see what had the highest conversion rate.

We did initially launch primarily in direct-to-consumer. And in terms of getting our first customers, think that's where  Lauren and I both have backgrounds in sales and marketing. So I think that that experience really  helped us right off the bat because we were able to execute a lot of different  tactics to pull in those first customers, whether it was paid media, email marketing, organic social.

We had a whole host of influencers that were sort friends of the brand or friends of ours, people we knew through our networks that were helping to promote. And we also, you know, we invested in a PR team. So I remember like a huge moment for us around launch was when, you know, vogue.com exclusively announced our launch. So we definitely leaned into the marketing tactics right off the bat in order to really make a splash and make sure that we had those first customers where we could then analyze the data and make sure that we were on the right track from a product market fit perspective.  

Chase Clymer

“I have been in business for nearly 20 years, and very few companies I have hired in that time have performed as well as Electric Eye. They have knowledgeable staff, and our project was delivered on time and on budget. Electric Eye has exceeded my expectations, and I look forward to working with them again.”

That is a direct quote from one of our clients at Electric Eye. 

Electric Eye is a Shopify Plus partner that has helped over 100 brands migrate, redesign, and optimize their stores since 2016.

If you'd like to increase your conversion rate, average order value, and revenue per session, we are the true Shopify experts you've been looking for. 

Right now, we're offering a free diagnostic to qualified brands that reach out and mention the podcast. Visit electriceye.io today to schedule a call and send us a message. Find out why we have over 50 5-star reviews in the Shopify Partner Directory. Again, that's electriceye.io.  E-L-E-C-T-R-I-C-E-Y-E.io 

You’re investing in paid traffic, email, influencers, you’re doing everything. But your store’s still not converting like it should.That’s the hidden cost nobody talks about.

If you don’t know why people aren’t buying, you’re constantly losing money.

“Whenever conversion rate optimization comes up with brands, the first thing I ask is what they’re using for analytics and behavior tracking. Heatmap.com is my go-to recommendation because it’s the only platform I’ve seen that connects user behavior directly to sales. That kind of visibility is critical for ecommerce brands trying to grow.”

That’s why we tell every client at Electric Eye to install Heatmap.

It shows you what’s working and what isn’t, using real behavior data tied directly to revenue. You get live heatmaps. Session recordings. Funnels. And attribution down to the specific product page.

This isn’t just another analytics dashboard. It’s a revenue optimizer.

And right now, Honest Ecommerce listeners get the hookup, 14-day free trial, The Ultimate 150-Point CRO Checklist, and free setup by us. Electric Eye will drop the code and configure it for you.

So don’t waste another dollar guessing. Visit heatmap.com/honest and start seeing what your customers see. Because clarity truly equals revenue.

Let's be real. Sales tax is a nightmare. You didn't start an Ecommerce brand to stay up late googling tax laws or stressing over whether you filed in the right state. If you're still trying to DIY your sales tax, or worse, using a tool that leaves most of the work on your plate, you need to check out Zamp.

Zamp is a fully managed sales tax solution built specifically for Ecommerce brands. That means actual experts handle everything. Registration, filings, remittances, all of it. Brands like Tushy, Glamnetic, and David are already using Zamp to get sales tax off their plate. Some Zamp customers spend as little as 2 minutes a month thinking about tax. Imagine that.

No confusing pricing tiers, no surprise fees, just one flat rate to make the entire mess disappear.  And yes, it works seamlessly with Shopify, BigCommerce, QuickBooks, and more. So if you're tired of sales tax headaches and want to stop risking penalties or audits, go to zamp.com.slash.honest and get 3 months free. That's Z-A-M-P-dot com slash H-O-N-E-S-T https://zamp.com/honest. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. And in those first months in launch, obviously, you had some big wins with that Vogue feature. Any missteps along the way? Any mistakes that you want to let our audience maybe avoid in the future?  

Lauren De Niro Pipher

I'll be honest. When we first launched. We, as Allison already referenced, we did test out several different pricing. And we did come out of the gate at a higher price than we're at now by a significant margin. And we were seeing a positive reception to that price at first. And then when we started testing our very first retail stores, it was in a particularly affluent market in New York. And so it was also supporting that higher price. It had a four in front of it per unit. 

And given the quality of the grapes that we'd used when you actually did the math on what it would have cost to drink, because each magnum, I don't know if we've mentioned, sorry, each magnum contains two full bottles worth of wine, traditional bottles worth of wine. So it's approximately 10 glasses. And based on the mathematics of it, this was still a great deal when you thought about the quality of the wine you were getting and the fact that it wasn't gonna go bad for a month. 

So we did a test at a higher level and that was, I don't know, that was a misstep, was really, it was a learning. And then we realized quickly, we both had the feeling that we should go lower. And so then we were able, thanks to our D2C channel, to execute a pretty sophisticated price test to see what was the sweet spot. So that was interesting for us. But I don't think it was detrimental because it all took place in the very beginning. 

But I will say something that Allison had said back then, and I always remember, is we can always lower the price, but you can't raise it. So better from a strategic perspective, I think, go out higher and then can come down if you need to to adjust for the market. 

Chase Clymer

Yeah. And  I like what you said there. While it was a learning experience, it wasn't necessarily a mistake. I think a lot of young founders are scared to make choices that could be learning moments if you want to think of it positively. But it's just like I think that making decisions is how  businesses grow. It doesn't matter if it's right or wrong. You'll learn from it. It's just not making a decision is how you fail.  

Allison Luvera

100%. Couldn't agree more with that. 

Lauren De Niro Pipher

That's very well said. Yeah.

Allison Luvera

I actually really don't, this is one of my weird pet peeves. I don't even like acknowledging the word mistake or the word failure. Cause I just kind of don't believe in it. Like I think that's part of your role as a founder or a leader in any company. You've just got to, you've got to make the calls, right? You've got to make the decisions. It's not always going to pan out the way you think it will or you want it to, but that's all part of progress. 

And so I do think like people get, you know, aspiring entrepreneurs, I hear this as well. Like, there's a lot of anxiety around what if I make a mistake or what if my decision doesn't pan out the way I want it to, what's going to happen then? 

And I think as an entrepreneur, you have to be very action oriented. And you can't have that fear. Like you have to just know,  it's not all going to work out the way I want it to, but I trust in myself to continue to find a way forward. And this is all part of that process. You know, progress is not a straight line. It's full of ups and downs and that's totally okay. And that more often than not can actually be a helpful part of the process. 

Lauren De Niro Pipher

Yeah. As I like to say, fail fast. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. 

Lauren De Niro Pipher

Just pivot. And that's part of the beauty of being in an organization like this where it is a startup, you don't have the bureaucracy of a larger corporation, and you can take those chances. And then if you see that you're going in the wrong direction, just acknowledge it and pivot quickly. 

Chase Clymer

Now pivoting conversation. You said at the beginning, do you launch D2C to learn about the product to get some more data before you really tackled that wholesale channel. But these days, you're in dozens, if not hundreds of stores. How has it changed? 

Lauren De Niro Pipher

Well, it's changed really significantly. In the first half of this year alone, we've tripled our door count. So we are now on shelves in Costco, Whole Foods, Harris Teeter, Safeway, Pavilions, Total Wine & more. We're now distributed at retail in nine states. It's about to be 10. We're in a host of really beautiful independent stores in all of our retail states. As Allison said to begin with, that was always the focus of where we saw the brand going eventually. 

We just knew that the amount of time it takes to secure the distributor partners that we wanted to have at a really high quality who are gonna be supportive partners and really understood the incredible value of our brand. It just takes time. And you have to get out there and show product market fit and show that you're building a community and that you have a loyal customer base before these big established distributors are going to take you seriously as a new brand that's truly innovating a category. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. Yeah. You already answered my question before I asked. It was just like, well, how do you get in these big box stores? And you're like, you got to put in the work. You got to show that people want it. 

Lauren De Niro Pipher

Oh, yeah. 

Chase Clymer

You got to come with the receipts and be like, no, they want to see us in those stores. 

Lauren De Niro Pipher

Yeah. Getting into the chains is a lot of work. Yep. It's not for the faint of heart. But if you believe in what you're doing, and you have almost a blind level of confidence that the market is there for your product, I think you can do it. 

Chase Clymer

Amazing. Now, is there anything that I didn't ask you about today that you think would resonate with our audience? 

Lauren De Niro Pipher

So in addition to being primarily focused as a retail wholesale brand, we still have a very robust D2C channel. And we don't want to forsake that. We don't want to forget about that. So while we're focused, most of our attention, I'll be honest, on supporting our retail partners, we're still looking at what our online customers want. 

So we have subscription customers. We also took notice of the fact that whenever we ran promos, this doesn't sound like rocket science, but this doesn't necessarily happen all the time. Whenever we ran promos, we would see a much higher cart value.

So the AOV is rising whenever we're offering a lower price. So in order to simplify that for ourselves, for our marketing team, and for the customer, we recently did a little update on our website and we decided to launch what we call a bundle bar. So now, more than always, or often doing these flash sales for different holidays, Mother's Day, Father's Day, et cetera, 15, 20% off, et cetera, now you can just always go online and shop.

And depending on how much bulk you're buying, you'll be able to get a discount of up to 25 % off, which was previously the highest discount we would ever offer year round, other than Black Friday, Cyber Monday. So I'm saying all that just as that, like we saw something, we saw where our customers were at, meeting them where they're at, giving them what they want, meeting their needs is always going to be a huge priority for us as a company, even though that's no longer the primary focus in terms of channels of the business.

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. Volume pricing with bundles is just bundles in general. The more perceived value to the customer, they work so well once you get them right. And I see a lot of younger brands struggling with. 

Heck, some of them just don't have bundles at all in their DTC store, which is mind boggling to me. like this is the easiest way to raise AOV.  It makes your shipping 2 or 3 things for the same shipping costs in the same box. It's a no-brainer. It's just sitting down and thinking about that strategy and thinking about what the customer wants is oftentimes the hard part. 

Lauren De Niro Pipher

Agreed. 

Chase Clymer

Now, we've talked a lot about wine. Obviously, it's amazing. You guys have won best in class with the wine. Now, if I'm listening to this, and I am a wine drinker and I want to check out the product, where should I go? What should I do? 

Allison Luvera

Go to our store locator. So yeah, we have a store locator on www.drinkjuliet.com. You can see all the stores we're in, in the states we're currently distributed in.  And if we are not at a store or a state  near where you're located, then you can purchase us online there. We ship to over 40 states direct to consumers. So that's definitely the best resource. 

Also just encourage everybody to follow us on social media, Instagram, TikTok, sign up for our email because any, know, we're growing really fast. We're expanding really fast. We've got new stores, new states, you know, all the time. And so the best way to stay abreast of the latest in terms of our expansion is to just follow us on social media. And we're very active about giving the updates there. 

Chase Clymer

Awesome. Allison, Lauren, thank you so much for coming on the show today. 

Allison Luvera

Thanks for having us.This was great. 

Lauren De Niro Pipher

Thank you so much. Yeah, such a nice conversation. Thank you.  

Chase Clymer

We can't thank our guests enough for coming on the show and sharing their knowledge and journey with us. We've got a lot to think about and potentially add into our own business. You can find all the links in the show notes. 

You can subscribe to the newsletter at https://honestecommerce.com/ to get each episode delivered right to your inbox. 

If you're enjoying this content, consider leaving a review on iTunes, that really helps us out. 

Lastly, if you're a store owner looking for an amazing partner to help get your Shopify store to the next level, reach out to Electric Eye at electriceye.io/connect.

Until next time!