Three hundred sixty-five days of vino shared in Spanglish. It has been a year since we announced Latinas Wine Club Inc., and what a challenging ride it has been.
So the first anniversary, uh, and what is next?
Bless The Social Media
You know the story. After taking some days to internalize what happened last summer with the Black Lives Movement and when the pandemic hit the hardest in New York City, I woke up one day and put those ideas to work. I created the Latinas Wine Club Instagram profile.
In a matter of weeks, I connected with Erlinda, we spoke over the phone a couple of times. I knew we were into something. I have not told you yet that I bought the website, registered the company, and asked for many favors from my fabulous design team about revamping the logo and the merchandise. We tried to spread the message wide and clear.
Fast forward, during this year, we hosted 15 virtual classes and three in-person events. We had approximately eight ambassadors. We started with five partners, and we are continuously evaluating our strategy. We appreciate all your likes, your shares they are vital to spreading the word. We continue to provide great content for you to share with your Amigas, hermanas, familia, and beyond.
But, Let’s Keep It Real.
We have worked many hours and invested so many meetings discussing the strategy. We might not have been the most transparent in sharing the journey, but we want to do that more often on the Facebook Group. As in any startup, we face tradeoffs, but we have been paying attention to your feedback and what you want to learn and see from Latinas Wine Club.
As much as I believe in digital grassroots, I know I had the vision to take our wine club to the next level, growing our membership base and improving the first version of the Wine School platform. However, the upcoming Wine School release will require that we invest strategically and bring more people to our team (Hey Cynthia!).
If the pandemic has left me one lesson, it will be this: the power of knowledge-based communities. According to Gartner, a knowledge-based community is a group of people who engage in knowledge-sharing activities supporting a shared work/interest. In this regard, Latinas Wine Club is a knowledge-based community interested in leveraging our knowledge of wine as consumers or aspiring wine professionals.
For this reason, let’s keep it real. We are still a minority in wine, and we still struggle to prove ourselves even in the tasting room, in the wineries or restaurants that we work or even that we order wine. Is still hard to get that wine sales job that we have been looking for for quite some time and don’t even mention the corner office. Therefore, we will invest more time in sharing the stories on the blog, on Youtube and Instagram features on how we, as Latinas, are breaking into the wine and hospitality industry to help us learn from each other’s experiences.
Beyond The Hashtag
We started as an Instagram page, but we evolved rapidly. The Wine School is a technological educational platform, and we craft all our content, but we want to provide a safe space to share our thoughts and experiences. Unfortunately, that is not possible on Instagram or our website yet. In the meantime we are using Facebook Groups, and hopefully, we can integrate it more into the second release of the Wine School. If it’s true that the creator economy is here to stay, even by being solo content creators in our wine niche, we need the communities to succeed and much more when you are the only people of color in the room.
I wear the mission of Latinas Wine Club on a sleeve. But are you feeling empowered and elevated? Is this content going to deliver empowerment? Those are the things that are driving me the most when I create for Latinas Wine Club. That drives my decision-making and even the inspiration when I have to write partnership proposals or IG captions.
Please feel free to reply, send a DM, or send us a voice message to WhatsApp about how we can help you more with your vino journey.
