The FlorVino
Marketing Plan

FlorVino does not have a persuasion problem. Nearly everyone who tastes the wine buys it. What it has is a doorway problem, and a proof problem.

The doorway problem is that 1.6 million people walk past that address every year and most of them never know what is inside. The proof problem is that flower wine sounds like a novelty until someone gives you a reason to take it seriously.

Both are solvable this quarter, and both answers already exist inside FlorVino. Four years of competition medals, and a 5.0 rating across 398 Google reviews. Neither is being used.

This surprised me, and it changed the whole plan. Before writing a single post I went looking for where people who walk into a place like FlorVino actually come from. It is not Instagram.

Social media matters. It is just not first, and building the plan as though it were would have put the effort in the wrong place.

The last number is the one that changed my thinking most. Reviews are usually the hard part, and FlorVino has already won that fight. The problem is that nobody outside Google can see it.

Good news on the second piece: the Google listing is confirmed claimed, so FlorVino can already reply to every one of those 398 reviews, control which searches it appears in, and post to the listing. At roughly twenty new reviews a month, that is twenty guests who took the trouble to write something. Replying to all of them is free reach nobody is using yet.

Every public review of FlorVino says the same three things in the same order. I had never heard of this. They gave me a taste. I bought bottles.

That is the whole business model, and it happened by accident. Someone standing outside offered a stranger a taste, and the stranger became a customer in fifteen minutes.

The plan below is mostly about making that happen on purpose, more often, and making sure the people it happens to leave a review and post a video afterwards.

Three posts a week. Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday. The days never move, so nobody has to decide anything. Two of the three are short video.

Every post is one of four things, and if an idea does not fit one of them it does not run.

Fifty one posts are already written out by date, each with the layout to use and one line of direction. Your designer builds eight templates once at the start, and after that every post is swapping a photo and a headline.

Small things, found while researching. None of them are hard and the first two are costing money right now.

• The phone number and email in the footer are wrong on every page. The number reads 2010 instead of 210, and the email is spelled florvine rather than florvino. Every page on the site is publishing a number nobody can call.
• The website and the printed price sheet give different discounts. The site says ten percent off a six pack, the printed sheet says twenty. One of them is wrong at the counter.
• The Jasmine page shows the Peaches tasting notes. It describes peach blossoms and a semi sweet palate under a wine the Wines page calls a dry white.
• The wine club has no published price or terms, so nobody can see what they are joining before they click. That is the channel that carries most of a winery's direct revenue.
• Galveston is closed, and the listing platforms have not been told. Your event page correctly says bookings closed, but Viator still has a live Book Now button for a tour at 2127 The Strand, TripAdvisor still carries a Galveston tasting room listing, and Peek has a Galveston experience page. Someone can pay for a tour at a room that does not exist: a refund, a one star review, a chargeback. The only item here that can cost you money today rather than slowly. Delisting is already moving, see Where things stand.
• The shop still spells Gloria as Glory. You settled this today. The product link reads /product/glory/ and the awards sheet says Glory, while the label on your own home page and the tasting form say Gloria. Both need changing so the medal card, the shelf talker and the shop agree.
• The Texas Wine Lover listing is unclaimed. Free, five minutes.

The two shows are the most distinctive thing FlorVino sells. They are the reason a visit is an evening rather than a fifteen minute pour. I checked the page today and it cannot be bought from.

• The calendar embedded on the shows page is empty. September is a bare grid. I checked it two ways, through the page itself and through the calendar feed behind it, and both come back with nothing scheduled between now and mid October.
• The winemaker dinner still reads "July 4th or by appointment." It is September first. That line has been stale for two months on the page that sells your highest ticket item.
• Neither show has a price, a length in the buy flow, or a booking button. The three buttons on that page all say Our Story and all go to the same page. There is no way to give you money for a show.
• The site says live music every Friday and Saturday night, and none of those nights appear on the calendar either. Google is currently carrying an event listing that your own site is not.

This is the cheapest fix in the whole plan. Twelve Friday and Saturday nights, two show times, and the dinner dates go onto the calendar once, and the page starts doing the job it was built for. Nothing else in this document beats putting dates on a page that already gets traffic.

I had Spirit Hills filed as a competitor. It is not. It is the same family, and that changes the strongest thing FlorVino has.

Here is what is public and checkable today. Hugo Bonjean runs Spirit Hills in Alberta, the CBC describes the family as coming from a long line of French winemakers, and their winery makes wine without grapes from dandelions and wild roses. Spirit Hills' own site puts the family's arrival in Alberta at 1997. Three of your six wines carry names that Spirit Hills has been selling for years: Dande, Wild Rosy and Yeehaa.

None of that is on the Our Story page. The page names the Bonjean family and calls it a nearly forgotten craft, and then gives no date, no place and no person. It says "years of blooms and batches" and "season after season." A reader finishes it knowing nothing they could repeat to a friend.

That is the proof problem, in one page. The medals answer "is this any good." The family answers "is this a gimmick," and it answers it harder than a medal does, because thirty years is not something a novelty brand can fake. It is also the difference between a press pitch that lands and one that does not. A new flower winery opening downtown is not a story. A family that has made wine without grapes for three decades, now pouring on Alamo Plaza, is one.

Good news, most of this is answered. Seven generations, Alberta then Texas after Covid, and you are fine saying it out loud rather than keeping it quiet. The one piece still open is where in France the family started, see Where things stand. That is what turns this into the specific version instead of the vague one, and it rewrites the Our Story page, the press pitch and half the September posts.

Easy to fix now, awkward later, and it is smaller than I first thought.

FlorVino should still not describe itself as the world's only flower winery, or the first. A winery in Oakland has made wine from hibiscus, rose and lavender since 2018, with coverage in Wine Enthusiast and the San Francisco Chronicle, and there are others in Los Angeles, Brooklyn and England. Spirit Hills is off that list now, but the rest of it still turns up in one search.

The home page currently opens with THE WORLD'S MOST UNIQUE WINERY. That is the line I would change. It invites a fact check and it says nothing. The lines already in the footer and on Our Story are stronger and all of them are true. Crafted from wildflowers, never grapes. A nearly forgotten craft, revived by the Bonjean family. Where we want scarcity, Texas' only flower winery holds up.

The sommelier quote is a smaller problem than I flagged before. An earlier version of that page had the Eric Beaumard line praising Spirit Hills by name. Since that is the same family, the honest fix is a wording change rather than pulling it: praise for the family's flower wine, not for a specific bottle it may not have been about. Worth settling before it goes on a poster.

Five numbers, once a month, no dashboard.

• Google reviews. It sits at 398 today and runs at about twenty a month. The QR code already does this, so the job is holding the 5.0, not chasing volume.
• Sends on video posts. Whether people are forwarding it to a friend, which is what Instagram rewards.
• Saves on the wine carousels.
• Reach and followers, both platforms, against the month before.
• How many people at the bar say they saw us before they came in. Crude, and the most honest number in the list.

One target beyond that: at least one real press feature by December 31.

Worth saying plainly: there is no baseline yet. Nobody has recorded FlorVino's reach or follower numbers, so the first thing I do is capture where we are starting from. Otherwise none of the above means anything in January.

Updated 7 September. Everything below was read straight off florvino.wine and out of your own store that day, not carried over from an older note. Two emails went to you the same afternoon covering the urgent parts.

The wine club, and this is the money one

The club is the only thing FlorVino sells that pays every month instead of once, and it works. The 6-pack takes payment right now at $167.76 every three months. But the club is advertised cheaper than it actually charges, on every tier.

Three more on the same pages

• The merch discounts are attached to nothing. The join page offers 5, 10 and 20 percent off merchandise across the three tiers. There is no merch product in the store and no merch category, and the separate Shopify store is frozen and will not open at all. Those lines should come off until there is something to discount.
• The Shipping policy page is not a shipping policy. It carries the club membership terms under that heading. The real shipping terms sit inside a collapsed tab on a product page.
• The Wine Club 6-pack product page carries the Peaches tasting notes word for word.

Two things still open

Galveston delisting, you said go

You approved chasing this down. Four sites are confirmed with a live Galveston listing, checked on 7 September. The fourth site that was previously unnamed is Expedia.

These are third-party platforms, so closing them needs your own login on each. Send access, or forward the confirmation email from when each was first listed, and HazelPiper will draft the takedown request.

Worth a look from whoever runs the store

The catalogue holds 130 products. 89 of them are copies of Florvino Winery Tour and Tasting, 60 priced at $25 and 29 at $20. Another 13 are duplicate Meet the Winemaker, Flower to Glass Adventure, Time with Hugo and Access Pass entries, most showing $0.00.

Still on the original list

• One hour on the six wines. Which flower, where it comes from, one surprising thing about how you handle it, what you would say about it at the bar.
• One filming session. Three short clips of guests tasting for the first time, one good photograph of each flower.
• The six pack discount. You said 10 percent online and 20 percent in person. The store and the club pages do not agree with that or with each other, so it is folded into the club pricing question above rather than sitting on its own.

The A frame and the window poster are front one in this plan, and they are the only thing in here that reaches somebody who has never heard of flower wine. Both are already designed at print size. The only thing missing is which way you want them to read.

Three directions below. They are genuinely different, not the same idea in three colours, so picking one is a real choice. Say a letter and I will build both pieces to it.

What I would run, and why

C on the A frame, A in the window.

The A frame sits closest to the moment somebody decides whether to come in, and for most people price and value is the biggest factor in that decision. Your own best review is somebody walking past on their way to the Alamo, being offered a free tasting, staying for six wines and buying bottles. That already happens by accident. The A frame is how it happens on purpose.

The window is a different job. Somebody reading a window has already stopped, so they have time for a scoreboard. That is where four years of medals earns its place.

B is the stronger direction for the feed and for a press pitch, and I would rather not spend it on the sidewalk.

Two small things before anything prints

The one thing I still cannot measure

Nobody knows how many people walk in on an average day, or how many of those buy something. Without those two numbers there is no honest way to tell you afterwards whether the sign worked.

A rough count over one normal week is enough. Until then I will use bottles sold per day at the till, compared week to week from the day the A frame goes out, and I will call it a rough guide rather than proof, because it cannot separate the sign from the weather or the parade.

Nothing else on this page has changed.