Sex and the City star Sarah Jessica Parker, a director of NZ's Invivo Wines, with company co-founders Rob Cameron (left) and Tim Lightbourne at the New York Mets stadium.
Every time Tim Lightbourne of Invivo Wines hears Sex and the City star Sarah Jessica Parker in full flight about his company’s sauvignon blanc he has a “pinch me” moment.
“In the last 18 months, I counted over 30 meetings that Sarah Jessica Parker has come to ... not only in New York but all around the States. She will get up and present for us in a buyers’ meeting, presenting our brands and talking confidently about the industry,” Lightbourne says of the New York icon who has lent her name to the wine range Invivo X, SJP.
Five vintages in since the 2019 collaboration agreement was inked, Lightbourne says Parker, or “SJP” as she’s known, is hands-on, tasting and blending each new vintage and attending business meetings as a director of the New Zealand winemaker.
“I mean, I just sit back and think, ‘this is a pinch me moment’,” says Lightbourne, who with old Auckland school friend, winemaker Rob Cameron, founded Invivo in 2008.
SJP’s passion for her namesake product seems to be paying off.
Invivo says a recent consumer study in the US, New Zealand’s biggest wine export market, concluded Invivo X, SJP is now the fastest-growing New Zealand sauvignon blanc in the premium category there.
Keen to bring younger consumers to wine, the company tracked the buying habits of 3406 US wine drinkers over six months this year using Kiwi firm Tracksuit. The study found the SJP range had more awareness among younger wine drinkers than other established brands in the category, and that 64% of SJP drinkers were aged 25-44. In comparison, its competitors averaged around 31% of this age range and were weighted more towards 45-65-plus years.
SJP isn’t Invivo’s only star-spangled ambassador.
In 2014 the company launched a sauvignon blanc with TV superstar Graham Norton after learning he was a big fan of the variety and Invivo’s product. This collaboration has expanded into a multiple-award winning range, which includes rosé, prosecco, prosecco rosé, shiraz, malbec, three Irish gins and an Irish vodka. (When Invivo first approached SJP, she’d already sampled its wines through Norton.)
Invivo’s marketing division says new sales data from Nielsen UK shows the Invivo GN (Graham Norton) sauvignon blanc was the fastest-growing major New Zealand wine brand to June over a 12-week survey period. Nine glasses of GN New Zealand sauvignon blanc were consumed per minute, Nielsen found. (Nielson defined “major” as the fastest-growing brand in the top 25.)
Invivo’s marketers say across Britain and Ireland, 37 glasses of GN brand wine are consumed every minute, according to sales intelligence for eight weeks in May and June this year.
More good news was that GN Prosecco is now the No 2 Italian prosecco in New Zealand and GN He-Devil Malbec the No 2 malbec in this country.
Based at Te Kauwhata, in one of New Zealand’s oldest wineries, Invivo has, since its crowdfunded early days, expanded its wine operations to Australia, Italy, France and Argentina.
The collaborations with SJP and Norton are testament to Invivo’s reputation for marketing creativity and attention-getting stunts.
Lightbourne says the company simply has to do things differently to stand out.
“We can’t talk about 100 years of winemaking history because we don’t have it. We can’t talk about family generations of winemaking – Rob and I are mates from school. We don’t have any of that.
“It’s about doing things that are creative and innovative, not just here but on a global scale.”
Recent publicity stunts have included launching the world’s first winery airline – for 24 hours – taking wine fans from Auckland to Queenstown return; taking over New York’s Mets stadium for a day for a wine range blending session with SJP (this has also been done with Graham Norton at Auckland’s Eden Park).
But the marketing budget is small – a single digit percentage of annual revenue, say the co-founders, who between them own 40% of Invivo. The company has 800-plus mainly small shareholders from various crowdfunding capital raises. SJP and Norton are shareholders.
Cameron and Lightbourne believe the wine sector will “course correct” over the next year or two after a “challenging” period.
The horticulture devastation of Cyclone Gabrielle last year, this year’s smaller harvest, an over-supply of wine in export markets, inflation-driven cost hikes and global reports people are drinking less wine have soured the years since the soaring wine sales of Covid lockdowns.
New data from industry organisation NZ Wine suggests Invivo has good reason to be positive.
May 2024 wine exports were 30% or 4.7 million litres up on May last year at 20.9m litres, while exports to the US improved 53% and to Australia by 104%.
In May, sauvignon blanc exports were 17.5m litres, up 25% from the previous May, with the variety accounting for 84.5% of export volume.
February-June exporting was the biggest volume ever, pipping the previous record of 2020, while June export volume was the second largest for that month in 10 years.
Lightbourne says: “We buy a lot of data and what we’re seeing is that people are trading up. They’re drinking slightly less but they’re drinking more premium wines. And with the New Zealand wine they’re [already] drinking, they’re moving up categories to $15 and over.”
Wine drinkers are increasingly looking for transparency about where and how their wine is grown, he says.
“That bodes well for us because we run vineyards, we have our own winery and our own bottling line.”
With younger generations drinking less alcohol, how are Invivo’s future sales looking?
“It’s a good question and something we discuss internally quite a bit,” Cameron says. “It’s hard to predict but what I’d say is that wine is something that once you discover a bit about it, you tend to stay with it.
“This is a big part of how we built our company, to really make wine accessible and understandable, so there are no barriers to discovering the joy of wine and the passion many people have for it.
“I think a lot of people just come to it a little bit later. I think it’s a long cycle with wine. But it’s a natural product and it’s been around forever.”
Invivo earlier said it was on track to achieve gross revenue of $24m in FY24 and ebitda of $1.6m.
How’s that going?
The pair say they don’t have final numbers and, anyway, they’d prefer to keep them close until shareholders hear the information first at the company’s annual meeting in Auckland in October.
Pressed, they say “it’s been a positive year for the brand’s sales”.
Meanwhile, are they looking for more big-name collaborators, or, given their interest in a new generation of consumers, maybe a young celebrity, especially for the US?
“It was really interesting for us to learn we are resonating with the younger consumer ... what we identified with the SJP brand and from some work on her Instagram followers is that she actually has quite a young following. Sex and the City is super-successful with young viewers on various platforms watching it for the first time,” says Lightbourne.
“Invivo X in the US is really starting to fire. It’s taking a lot of our resources and it’s a massive opportunity for us. We’re also spinning off into other countries like Canada and South Korea right now.
“So we’re busy with what we have. We’re finding tremendous success with our current collaborations ... if there’s an opportunity in a different region of the world, potentially Asia, we would look at it but right now our focus is on our current two partners.”
Of course, collaborations with SJP and Norton come with a price tag, which the co-founders wouldn’t discuss, but the “tremendous upside” far outweighs the cost, they say.
After all, not only are the stars backing Invivo products with their names and reputations, they’re opening doors to networks and consumer circles other wineries can only dream about.
Andrea Fox joined the Herald as a senior business journalist in 2018 and specialises in writing about the $26 billion dairy industry, agribusiness, exporting and the logistics sector and supply chains.
'I can imagine people being outraged that TVNZ signed a deal with me.'