REthink Wine Blog

Dear Inertia Friends and Family,

It’s been an incredible last two years at Inertia, with almost 100% growth year on year. We’ve seen the realization of our industry-wide compliance solution, REthink Compliance, as well as the take off of our Direct-to-Trade initiative. Our partnerships have grown, and - most especially - our management team has grown.

You’ve heard me talk about our “All Star” team of executives – seasoned professionals who bring extensive experience in all facets of direct sales, marketing, product development and technology applications – and now I’m excited to announce our biggest addition yet.

On May 20th, Ted Jansen will join our management team as Chief Executive Officer. Ted joins us from Expedia.com, where he led the company’s North American initiatives. Ted is a multi-talented executive with significant experience in on-line luxury product marketing. Most recently from Expedia.com, he also spent over 7 years on the management team with Walt Disney and over 5 years leading ecommerce and retail initiatives for both Disney and online luxury travel companies.

At that time, I will move into the Chief Strategy Officer role, leading both business development and product development initiatives. I will also retain a seat on the board, ensuring that I will continue to be very engaged in leading Inertia to its end goal: To Help our Partners Sell More Wine Direct.

How did we get here?

The concept of using technology to disrupt an antiquated and dysfunctional supply chain and instead offer a high margin, high velocity parallel distribution channel is something we eat, breathe, and sleep every day at Inertia. Our goal is to build a transactional platform that allows wineries to interact and with customers in a cost efficient, scalable manner. And by doing make the direct channel one of the most viable and profitable channels in the wine industry.

To truly be the “change agent” we see ourselves becoming, I looked at some of the most successful innovation companies out there: Google, Yahoo, eBay, Microsoft… Every one of these companies demonstrated a similar story: the founder(s) built a company that had great success, but in order to bring it to full scale, each brought in an experienced CEO and worked hand-in-hand with them to ensure the scalability and success was achieved.

Based on the continued growth we’ve seen in our own business, I decided it was time to bring ourselves to the next level, as well.

We recently announced the dates of our annual Client Appreciation Symposium in July. At this Symposium, each of you will have a chance to meet Ted, in both our presentations, as well as during our Client Appreciation Party and Golf outing. I encourage each of you to attend for the great content, as well as for the opportunity to meet Ted and many of the other great new people we have added to the team.

I feel blessed to have such a passionate, devoted team as well as a wonderful group of partners that are all oriented to help the wine industry Sell More Direct.

I look forward to this exciting new time in our future… I hope you join me in that excitement.

This entry was posted by Paul Mabray on Monday, May 12th, 2008 at 6:31 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.