Tannico is no longer (only) a site where you can buy wines, but a wine brand. Not some sort of Apple of wines, but “something more”, at least in the ambitions of the CEO, the 47-year-old Marco Magnocavallo. The 32 million euro capital increase recently subscribed by Campari, which in 2020 had acquired 49% of the company with the possibility of increasing up to 100%, aimed at the acquisition of the French rival Venteàlapropriété. The operation shifted the weight of the foreign market from 10 to 50% of Tannico’s turnover, up 87% in 2020 to 37.5 million euros.
The company founded by Magnocavallo together with Juliette Bellavita, Riccardo Zilli (now in BrumBrum, auto e-commerce) and Cristiano Pellegrino has thus become a leader in two key countries for its market. This is just the latest of the many steps towards the creation of a brand that Tannico has taken after starting to walk on our own feet in a “market in which we discovered inefficiencies and opportunities every year – said the CEO – Se da a on the other hand we are working on branding and storytelling on the other we are building a platform and an ecosystem to support a supply chain which is by its very nature very distant from the world of technology and traditionally poor in external contamination “.
Tannico has been an e-commerce for a short time. We are in 2011: after selling Blogo.it to Dada, blog network started in 2004 with his brother Francesco, Magnocavallo together with Andrea Di Camillo (co-founder of Vitaminic, Banzai and P101) launches a vertical accelerator for food and e-commerce, Boox, and through this it finances a startup, eBoox , for develop an e-commerce model for niches, taking advantage of the experience that Magnocavallo had gained with e-commerce at the beginning of the nineties.
“A Blogo for e-commerce”
The first three verticals are Shoppable, for home decor, Kidme, for clothing, and Tannico for wine. Kidme immediately realizes that it is wrong, while Shoppable is the one that is better. Tannic grows slowly, but at some point it starts running. So Magnocavallo decides to try the big shot: in addition to selling wines, today Tannico offers exclusive tastings in its winebar, manages a wine school in person and online, offers a marketing intelligence service to wineries, a technological and logistic platform to wineries, has a delivery service for restaurants, clubs and hotels that reduces stock and personal sommelier costs for the most demanding customers.
“If you say Tannico today no one thinks of the meaning of the word, but of our company”, said a proud Magnocavallo. Tannic is an adjective that has to do with grape tannins; a tannic flavor it is that dry sensation that some wines leave in the mouth: “Right from the start we wanted to build a brand, not an Excel sheet – this is the story – This is what allowed us to get the better of other wine e-commerce”. Tannico is a simple, Italian name that sounds good and free of words like wine, shop and online, perfect for a brand: “When you start thinking about your customers, your positioning and your values, then you go from an Excel spreadsheet to a brand”, is the memory of the transition.
No one in the Tannico team had any experience in the world of wine, which would make many investors turn up their noses. Only experts in communication, design and technology. A little risky: “Wouldn’t the opposite have been more risky?” Is the objection by Magnocavallo. We are in 2012 and e-commerce is one of the markets with the greatest potential: “We had the courage to go and talk to farmers in a new language, to make tastings without turning the glass, to traditionally bring a sales channel gradually to a completely different audience “.
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Courage is the key word in the history of Tannico, and of way of doing startup by Magnocavallo: “It means daring without necessarily taking a risk”. Now the goal is to keep growing: “We don’t think about exit or listing, but we want to build a solid company and I’d like to work on it for many years”. Under the hood of Tannico there are technologies of all kinds: software, such as artificial intelligence that manages inventory and orders by optimizing the storage of goods; hardware, for packaging; “Paper algorithms” through which the school draws the map of the taste of its customers.
However, it was not a walk in the park: “Every six months we have experienced a difficult or dramatically difficult moment – is the memory of Magnocavallo – Perhaps without previous experiences in some cases I would have thrown in the towel, but by now I know it’s part of the game“. One of the reasons for these crises were “too many ideas put on the table that forced us to chase time and put the whole team in anguish because even before concluding a project there was always a new one”. It is a problem that Magnocavallo admitted to having already had in Blogo, but “is part of my restless spirit, always looking for new stimuli “. What he has learned, however, is that the fundamental thing in doing startups is to be transparent: “To consolidate relationships, you must always say what you think”.
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