Rubay Wines appoints Edge’s venture division Accelerate

The Accelerate division of Edge, set up to work with start-ups to scale up its businesses from concept idea through to launch and operation – has been appointed by wine industry disruptor, Rubay Wines.

Rubay Wines, a direct-to-consumer wine sampling business is the latest to join Edge’s start-up businesses following a competitive pitch. Edge will be responsible for brand architecture and design, the go-to-market planning as well as ongoing creative, media and customer acquisition work.

Edge originally conceived its Accelerate division working alongside pharma giant Sanofi to launch direct-to-consumer personalised vitamin play, Livvit – developing a new process and client structure to cater to the differing needs of this fast-paced and performance-based sector.

It then helped launch new online rental marketplace Releaseit as a sustainable solution to over-consumption with the “we don’t buy it, you shouldn’t either” campaign.  Edge has further built out if start-up offering, working with new property tech play, MyHomeVault, on brand design and go-to-market planning.

Says Fergus Stoddart, founding partner and commercial director, Edge: “Rubay is an interesting business backed by a very smart founder, Avron Rubin. Avron is introducing genuine innovation into the sector.  We are helping them bring a more interesting data driven approach to attract the millennial market to wine drinking.”

On the progress of Edge’s Accelerate offering, Richard Parker, executive planning director, says: “We’ve loved helping get these businesses up and running; it’s fun, it’s entrepreneurial and we get to use creativity to solve real-world problems in a meaningful way. It also makes us a better agency – pushing us to be nimble and smart with our time and resources, and respond to real-time, in-market feedback. These are hugely beneficial learnings that we can equally apply to our enterprise clients.

“As well as growing our capability and team, we’ve built a share portfolio across different categories, and diversified our income stream. We’ll be announcing a very exciting new joint venture partnership very soon.”

Says Avron Rubin, founder of Rubay Wines: “In comparison to craft beer, the level of innovation in wine marketing has been so slow so this opportunity has opened up to us.  We knew we needed some help taking it to market. We were looking for an independent agency who can do creative and media and approached the opportunity wholistically and with a strong commercial lens. We asked three agencies to pitch and Edge clearly fitted the bill – they shared my entrepreneurial values, understood start-ups and how to develop a go-to-market strategy for our new product that we could partner and scale together.  We are looking forward to sharing the new brand soon and a very new proposition that should attract millennial wine drinkers in their droves!”