The holiday season is arguably the toughest stretch of the year for ecommerce brands. While profits are historically booming in Q4, that revenue doesn’t come easy.
On top of the surge in logistical to-dos — inventory, packing, shipping, customer support — there’s the added pressure to execute something bigger and better than the year before. Something that genuinely stands out.
Online shoppers have seemingly endless options when it comes to their holiday purchases, so brands have to get creative to retain current customers and win heaps of new ones.
After all, in a recent survey, more than 50% of online brands expect their customers to do more comparing before converting than ever before. And with behemoths like Amazon and Walmart making it tough to compete on price, at least one-third of ecommerce brands plan to win where the big guys struggle: upgraded customer experiences and curated offerings.
Clif Family Winery is one brand taking note of changing consumer trends and going all in on the factors that make it a unique and sought-after gifting destination. The crew at Clif has big plans for the 2024 holiday season, from product offerings to entirely overhauled customer experiences, and is set to make it their best season ever.
Caring About People Has Always Been Clif’s Secret Ingredient
If the Clif name sounds familiar to you, there’s good reason for that.
Kit Crawford and Gary Erickson co-founded CLIF BAR in the early 1990s and grew it to become a now-ubiquitous snacking staple. In 2004, after an inspirational trip abroad, the duo established Clif Family Winery to further explore and deepen the connection between food, wine, and land.
What started as a family endeavor of reviving 100-year-old olive trees and cultivating the land soon evolved into a bigger vision. In 2011, Clif Family Winery cut the ribbon on its St. Helena Tasting Room and opened the space to the local community and visitors alike to share a unifying passion for good food and wine.
The mission from Day One was to build a better future together. The once-small garden has grown into a full-blown farm, producing fruits and vegetables that meander into the menu of the on-site Bruschetteria Food Truck and jars of preserved jams, jellies, marmalades, and butters.
Clif Family’s commitment to the land has led them down a path of staunch sustainability. All ten grape varietals and every inch of the company’s 90 acres draped across Howell Mountain and Oak Knoll District AVAs hold both CCOF certified organic and Napa Green certifications. (Oh, did we mention Clif is B Corp certified, too?)
Beyond the brand’s dedication to being good shepherds of the land, it’s also unwavering in its care for the people who work for and buy from it. The team at Clif is guided by working toward a brighter future rooted in balance, respect, and collective action — none of which is possible without authentic care and consideration for all.
By making it a habit to put every detail of the business under the microscope and ensure it was doing right by the land and the people, Clif has been a beacon of just plain goodness. Since 2006, Clif Family has been selling its products online, introducing a whole new segment of folks to consider and cater to to the best of their ability.
With every evolution of its offerings, website, and customer support, Clif Family has kept the customer as the focus for all it does. It’s no surprise that for 2024, the team is ripping a page from their own playbook and upping the ante again. With intensely thoughtful gift curations and a renewed vision for the experience shoppers have online, Clif Family Winery looks to extend its long history of innovation, quality, and care through the 2024 holiday season.
Clif Family Winery Serves up a Refreshing Corporate Gifting Experience
After a decade of selling online, Clif Family Winery decided to expand its ecommerce offerings. In 2016, the team widened its focus from consumers simply shopping for themselves to include people shopping for tons of others — corporate gifters.
After all, Clif’s catalog is stuffed with products that are highly shareable, high-quality, and deeply memorable, which is exactly what gifters want in what they give.
“What makes Clif Family’s gifts so special is that we’re able to really share the flavors of Napa Valley with the recipients. Whether they’re a wine-drinker or food-lover, we have something for everyone through our sustainably produced gifts,” says Katie Taylor, the gifting sales manager at Clif Family Winery.
To bring Clif Family wares to the corporate gifting space, they had to get creative.
Corporate Gifting Technology Hadn’t Really Evolved
By 2016, the one-to-one direct-to-consumer online shopping model had already undergone heaps of innovation in general. From deep personalization to logistics to email marketing and beyond, no part of the traditional ecommerce funnel had been left unturned. In short, no matter what you wanted to do with your store, there was probably an app or tool ready to help you right out of the box.
Taking the leap to enable people to buy one-to-many gifts? That was a labor of love. No tools existed at the time to help streamline the process of buying one item and sending it to hundreds of different addresses. It was an inherently time-consuming task for the corporate client and the Clif team.
In the early days, corporate gifters were prompted to process one order per recipient on their list. If you’re in ecommerce, you know that this level of friction isn’t ideal, so the squad at Clif pivoted toward forms, passing along recipient lists, lots of emailing, and many hours in the thick of spreadsheets.
"Gifting orders were pretty much always high-touch and handled over the course of several calls and emails. Now, we can sell gifts while we sleep, which we see happen all the time!"
— Katie Taylor, Gifting & Subscriptions Sales Manager, Clif Family Winery
“Gifting orders were pretty much always high-touch and handled over the course of several calls and emails,” remembers Katie. But the team at Clif Family Winery saw the potential of their goods as gifts and wanted to find a way to bring this channel to life.
Luckily, they found Zest.
Clif Family Winery Finds Zest, the First Corporate Gifting Tool Built for Brands
Through a series of coincidences, Clif happened to hear of Zest through a former wholesale contact. “We weren’t really in the market for a gifting solution at the time, but we were hopeful that we’d one day find a way to make gifting easier for our clients and our internal team. We met Alex (Zest’s CEO) for a demo and immediately knew we had to sign on.”
Zest is the first-of-its-kind corporate gifting platform built for brands. All of the ease and convenience of shopping for yourself has finally been translated to the one-to-many gifting experience directly on a brand’s website with the power of Zest.
“It was a no-brainer and truly solves every gifting pain point we’d ever heard from our clients and gifting industry colleagues.”
Pain points like…
…buying gifts going to multiple addresses in one single transaction
…removing the friction and barrier to entry for gifting
…giving recipients the ability to pick from several gifts via the Choice Gifts feature
…sending gifts digitally via email or text message
suddenly vanished.
“We’ve found that corporate gifters are often afraid they might send someone a gift they don’t enjoy. Choice Gifts is a perfect remedy for that gift anxiety as it allows the recipient to select a gift that best suits them!”
Best of all? Zest empowers Clif Family Winery to give its corporate customers an easy, hands-off buying experience that is exactly what they want without adding any extra work to the team’s plate.
Internally, the biggest change has been the efficiency of gift orders. “Zest’s ability to communicate with our commerce platform has eliminated so much back and forth for our team.” All of the fulfillment and billing information that used to live across several platforms and spreadsheets now lives in one central hub. “And we don’t have to rely on super tedious email chains to keep up with the status of a gift order anymore!”
2024 Holiday Gifting: Clif Family’s Plan to Continue Innovating
The 2023 holiday season was Clif Family’s first with Zest in its tech stack. Launching an entirely new customer experience with clients who’ve grown accustomed to lengthy back-and-forth processes right before the holiday rush is not for the faint of heart.
But Clif’s dedication to pushing boundaries for the sake of making things better for everyone washed away any hesitation. The promise of fast and frictionless experiences for corporate customers was enough to encourage the team to dive in, and dive in they did.
Changing the Way Online Gifting Is Done
“Last year was our first holiday gifting season with Zest, and we received so much wonderful feedback from our clients and wine club members!” reports Linzi Gay, president at Clif Family Winery.
Alongside the baked-in ease of Zest’s multi-ship ordering capabilities, the Clif team is excited to fully leverage one of the platform’s latest beta features — Concierge Orders.
While the core Zest-powered storefront enables corporate gifters to flow in and purchase tons of ready-to-ship gifts, there are customers who come through looking for bigger customizations. Concierge Orders lets the team at Clif intake these orders as they typically would, but instead of falling back on the spreadsheets and emails of yore, they can customize, process, invoice, and track these über custom corporate gifts without leaving Zest.
“This year, we should be able to process 100% of our gifting orders through the Zest platform instead of having to take custom orders offline.”
Removing friction for customers and the Clif team means orders can be placed and prepped faster than ever, putting the Clif team eons ahead of its relatively sluggish competition.
Streamlined Tech Makes Time for More Curated Gifts
One of the biggest benefits of tapping any new tech is the time it puts back in your schedule. Sure, loads of apps promise things like “XX hours saved every day!” but with Zest, it’s a true claim.
Without having to scroll through email threads, navigate spreadsheets, upload recipient details, monitor tracking info, manage wrong addresses or damaged goods, endlessly follow up with every single client (even for small orders), the Clif team sincerely has gained back countless hours.
What was once lost to the endless list of administrative tasks is now making room for the team to innovate new products, new looks, and new experiences that add serious gas to their corporate gifting channel.
Alongside an entirely new, on-trend aesthetic that reflects the company’s bold energy, they’re also talking about gifting in a new way to their customers.
Talking about gifting felt outdated and stodgy with their old processes of forms, phone calls, and emails. There wasn’t a way to talk about gift order cutoffs or say “Fill out this form and we’ll get back to you!” without feeling a bit archaic.
But this year, the language is changed. “One of the best things about Zest is that it allows us to talk about holiday gifting and timelines in a totally different way. For instance, no date is too late with the ability to send e-gifts instantly!”
This holiday season, corporate gifters who shop with Clif have the uniquely modern ability to buy as many gifts as they need, complete with personalized gift notes and designs, in just minutes versus the days or weeks it would take historically.
Constant and instant access to Clif’s corporate catalog means the team “can sell gifts while we sleep — which we see happen all of the time!”
Reframing the corporate gifting process from lengthy and involved to fast and hands-free is a game-changer for Clif and its clients. However, the squad’s ability to innovate its gift offerings this year is even more impactful than the words on their site.
“We’ve got some great new additions to our product line this year,” says Katie. “We’re launching our brand new Napa Noir Chocolate Bar, which was made in partnership with our fellow Bay Area B Corp TCHO Chocolates. The bar features wine barrel-aged cacao nibs, and Clif Family Cabernet Sea Salt. It will be featured in several curated gift sets and will be available for custom gift sets, too. We are also launching our Somm Seasonings line in partnership with Burlap and Barrel and our new Napa Nash Hot Sauce later this year!”
Clif has always shucked the norm and the idea of “doing things because that’s how they’ve always been done,” and it’s paying off. Modern technologies, branding, and abilities not only position the brand as a leader in specialty foods, but as a go-to gifting destination that meets the needs and wants of today’s shoppers.
And when your brand checks every mark for modern shoppers? Well, let’s just say that Clif should be prepped to ship a heckuva lot of gifts this holiday season.
A Winning Strategy: Holiday Gifting Experiences Made With Real People in Mind
Clif Family Winery is a seasoned ecommerce vet. The company was built to improve the lives of people through thoughtful products and actions, and that mission never once wavered as it changed with the times and started selling online.
It’s no surprise that the team heard the challenges of its customers and its employees when it came to corporate gifting and took them to heart. In lieu of continuing on with old processes, the team took action to make things better.
Better gift-buying experiences.
Better in-house processes.
Better gift varieties for shoppers.
Change can be overwhelming, but it was worth the risk to change how things have always been done if it meant doing better by everyone, especially during the holiday shopping season.
And in the end? All of this “doing better” is a clear path to Clif Family Winery having its best holiday season ever.
