Simon’s story
Most of my business life has been spent using sales skills, learned at an early age in one way or another. What I have always wanted is to be involved with a product or service that is demonstrably better. And this thought brought to the front of my mind what happened at a lunch that I attended in the Seward Room at the Royal Automobile Club in Pall Mall.
The guest of honour was Georg Riedel, a tenth-generation descendant of the founder of the business, Riedel, which sells wine glasses to the world. I was there partly because I am fascinated by the apparent strength of the German economy and I like a good lunch!
The German economy has a sound base of what they call the Mittelstand. They are serious mid-sized businesses, large enough to be significant yet small enough to be flexible, dynamic and creative.
So, what has all this got to do with pricing and better products? Well, Riedel has grown because its product is positioned as being demonstrably better. Let me tell you just how Georg demonstrated that.
As is the tradition at such lunches, it started with wine served in the room, giving the twenty or so guests a chance to meet the star of the show, Georg. I chose red as did most of us. The red was OK but nothing startling. After about 35 minutes, our host, Colin Cameron, invited us to sit down to what is traditionally a two-course meal. The wine was served but not by the waiting staff; they had vanished. Instead, Georg went around the room pouring from what was a most unusually shaped decanter.
We all wondered what was going on. Had the RAC over-committed itself and run out of waiters? Unlikely. Anyway, we got on with the main course. Once finished, Colin invited the guests to relax and introduced Georg for a question-and-answer session, some questions being asked by us. All very relaxed and interesting.
Colin paused the audience once more to allow Georg to speak. He looked around the table and then asked, what did we make of the red wine served with the main course? It was venison, by the way.
We started to say complimentary things like ‘smooth’, ‘interesting nose’, ‘good after-taste’. Georg then asked how it compared with the red wine served with before lunch. We all agreed, noticeably better. So, what was the wine served with the meal?
Georg told us. It was the Club’s house Burgundy, which was exactly the same wine as that served before the food. The difference was that it had been poured from the exotic decanter used by Georg when he poured the wine. The penny dropped. That was why he had served the wine rather than the waiters. The Riedel decanter required a knack to use it properly. Its effect on the wine has been dynamic. Definitely a product that was better by design. And Georg explained how that was done. Riedel employees spend hours with vignerons, talking to them about how best to deliver their product, wine, from bottle to mouth.
He explained further. “We do not regard ourselves as glass manufacturers. Instead, we describe ourselves as tool makers. Our objective, to create the best tools to get wine from bottle to mouth. And because our products are demonstrably better, we can charge higher prices and our customers are happy to pay the premium.”
It took ten generations of Riedel brains and persistence to design and improve and improve again to the point that, this century, they were able to take the American market by storm.