In Gaining Ground, the very entertaining story of saving a family farm, author Forrest Pritchard tells of a funny old lady who commands him at a farmers market to never wholesale. It’s an interesting point. In the wine industry, when you wholesale, you sell your product at a lower price to distributors, stores or restaurants. They, in turn, mark up your product so they can also make a profit. As soon as you mark down your price, you need to make your money on volume. You may have to make sacrifices to quality in order to reach efficiency and volume.

One might ask, why ever get into the wholesale business? It is the compelling idea that you can sell more products to one customer (a grocery store) and maintain that one relationship. If you are selling to individuals, you have to maintain many individual relationships to equal the quantities you are selling to the grocery store.

So, I’ll ask you. How do you feel about wholesaling? If you do sell wholesale, how does your business model look?

– Rachel