rent layers. How did it all start and what does it involve? Kyla Kirkpatrick: I started 10 or 12 years ago now, originally in-house at LVMH and then I started my own business doing consulting and doing tours to France, I was sort of a gun-for-hire in the Champagne space.  I hit my 10-year anniversary and I thought, ‘I’m only as good as yesterday, my last tour and my last show’. I was completely at capacity. All of my shows and tours were selling out and at Christmastime, I was waist-high in Champagne. In my house in Brighton, I was working out of my garage and my partner said, ‘Kyla, you have turned our home into a warehouse’.  I had one part-time employee, but we were actually doing fantastically well financially. Then I thought, ‘I need to get this business to another level, where I have scalability and more importantly, I’ve got salability. I couldn’t sell Champagne Dame – it was a business that was completely around me and my personal brand. To create a new business, I needed a new identity and colour palette, something that was masculine. So I levelled out my appeal among consumers. It was very female-skewed – it was a 70-30 split of male to female customers with a natural female skew. I know there are plenty of men out there who love Champagne, but I needed a more masculine brand to attract that customer. So it took me two years of planning, a lot of blood, sweat and tears. Now I have two full-time jobs [at Champagne Dame and Emperor] and I still work seven days a week, 12 hours a day. I haven’t had a holiday this year. It’s pretty heavy-going, and I’ll probably be like that for two years. We launched Emperor two years ago to allow me to scale the business and to earn money while I was sleeping.  Emperor within itself is multifaceted. It is predominantly an online retailer specialising in Champagne. It has a Champagne club with a subscription side, which is fantastic because it’s non-seasonal – it’s monthly income and streams in every month. We also have an import division within the business, so we’re bringing in Champagne from France to supply our online site, but we also have a team within the market selling that on to restaurants and independent XXX. We have the Champagne truck, which is a marketing tool and revenue-generating and sells whatever Champagne we feel like. We lean towards our own imported products, and it is booked every weekend over Christmas – festivals… – it’s like an icecream truck. Being online, you want to have a touchpoint with consumers, but I don’t want bricks-and-mortar – it’s too expensive and restrictive. This is a way of getting a physical sale with a touchpoint while being incredibly mobile; we just pack up, and pull off at the end of the day. I have the one truck, but I’ve been toying with the idea of multiplicity in that space.  Champagne is my own interest area, and I know a lot of people find it surprising that I didn’t give up my banking and finance career just to drink champagne from 9am to 9pm, but it is a highly desirable part of my job. My interest is in the history, specifically relating to the links between World Wars I and II, Napoleon Bonaparte, the stories of the Champagne families, the links with Dom Perignon and Marie Antoinette. The history of the Champagne regions specifically led me to give up my career in finance so I could devote my life to this industry. I get to do a lot of research – we have 300 bottles online and I have to taste test all of them to give my thumbs up or down.  I do truly believe in my heart of hearts that being niche is good. There are enough general players in the market and we’re a specialist, with the best team, best range and best service. Champagne lovers are a nuanced buyer. It’s the most expensive wine in the world and it’s the most complicated wine in the world in terms of production technique and the way it’s made. It’s the most difficult to understand, and customers who spend the money on Champagne want to be treated in a certain way. They want education, respect and great service. We’re very specific in checking all those boxes for customers. We make sure every wine is luxury-wrapped, stored in the state-of-the-art, climate-controlled cellar that we built, and we bring the winemakers from France to educate our customers directly. If you pay top dollar, then why not be treated like a VIP client? IRW: In your time as an ambassador at LVMH, did you learn any business insights along the way? KK: I certainly learned a lot about the way wine is presented to the market and the romance of the story, and that always appealed to me. Moët does really well in terms of the balance between communicating the romantic side of the story with a very firm grasp on the commercials of the business. They never lost sight of how much distribution they needed, where they need to be presented and the economics of the business.  That was an interesting learning for me – the balance between delivering the communication around the luxury and desirability of the product and at the same time, driving a hard commercial deal.  IRW: It must be difficult managing so many different sides of the business all at the same time. KK: Without beating around the bush, the business is complex and it’s incredibly demanding and on most days, my head is like a ball bouncing around from revenue channel to revenue channel. We have offices in Singapore; we’ve replicated the model in Asia, and our growth plans are phenomenally ambitious; but we’re doing things that have never been done in the Champagne space and have so many great ideas that we want to capitalise on all of them.  So it is hard to buckle down and focus on only this channel or that one, but the beautiful thing is that each of our channels and diverse elements feed one another. We do events and we sell huge amounts of Champagne, or we’ll have an open day and we have a wholesale business that comes out of that. It does require an enormous amount of planning. We have team members who have specific areas of responsibility across each channel or aspect of the business, then I sit over the top, providing strategic direction with creative control and I’m also looking after the economics and funding. We have 11 people on the team now. It’s small but powerful.  IRW: What has the past year been like for the business? KK: The past 12 months has been great. Not without challenges, though. I often listen to other entrepreneurs or would-be entrepreneurs talk about how they’re going to start another business to give them freedom, and I feel like slapping them and saying, ‘What are you thinking?!’  This isn’t about freedom; this is about a desire to achieve something greater than whatever you may have been able to achieve working for someone else. We had done so much in 12 months that it does absolutely astound me. We really have moved so far. We can see how much we’ve done by the repeat levels of our customers, how full of praise our customers are and our recognition almost anywhere in the world. We’re not just being watched by people in the wine space in Australia, but everyone in France, and people in America.  We are really turning Champagne retail on its head – nothing like this has been done before. That’s really reassuring and it shows a lot of the hard work we’ve put in hasn’t gone unnoticed. We did just under a million in our last financial year with Emperor, which was our target and we’re looking for $2.5 million this financial year.  IRW: You’ve received quite a bit of external funding lately. How is that progressing? KK: We have raised about $1.8 million to date, about half a million came through through our Equitise campaign earlier in the year. Raising capital is an essential part of the growth of any business and most businesses fail within their first three years, not because it’s not a great idea, but because they’re under-capitalised. I see that being the greatest risk for us. It’s not that we don’t have the market size or we have our branding or pricing wrong, it’s about having the right amount of capital to penetrate the markets, trial and build continuance from customers.  I have had a few significant offers, but I’ve turned two down because the terms weren’t right at this point in our journey. I have another offer on the table at the moment and I’m reviewing it. We’ve attracted a lot of interest from investors and I think you’ll see something come up very soon which will give us the power to grow faster in Australia and globally. The idea with the investor is that we won’t need to go back to the table.  When you’re a CEO and you send a lot of your time raising capital, it can be a major frustration. It is my job to capitalise the business and it does fall in my lap, but I have so much I want to achieve that I just want to knuckle down and spend time in the trenches with my team here and in Singapore, growing our business.  IRW: What would you like to specifically do with the investment? KK: The investment is to build a bigger brand presence in Australia with more marketing, activations and events. I wouldn’t rule out making a play for a bigger Champagne house to import so we’ve got something that can really fulfil our growing needs for supply. And of course, the third most important element is rolling our Champagne out globally. Our plan is to grow into South Africa, New Zealand, LA, New York and other parts of Asia. The ultimate goal is to have a global network of Champagne lovers.  We’ve been looking at buying a chateau in Champagne, a centralised club house where people can meet other members, and drink Champagne that’s not available to other people and have a genuine immersive experience within the region. That’s the dream and we’re making it a reality. We closely missed buying a chateau last month, but we’ll get there, don’t you worry! IRW: How would you describe the alcohol and beverage market in Australia? KK: The data says it’s growing. There’s still a very strong short-term purchase where someone will typically enter a store to buy wine and the data is saying 80 per cent of those purchases are consumed within six hours. Being a little more premium in our offering, our customers are usually planning an occasion so they can enjoy something special, so it’s not so immediate. Champagne is not so last-minute in terms of the consumption purchase, but it is growing. The comfort level of consumers buying online is great. I think the benefit of Emperor is we came out of the gates as an online Champagne channel – we’re not trying to just tack on online, where there’s a level of distrust from the consumer, wondering whether we can pull it off or not, or whether it’ll take a long time [to arrive]. We were built to ship Champagne in a fast, secure, reliable state. We offer next-day delivery in almost every state, we have virtually no breakages, all our stock is handled well, We’re geared for online sales and distribution. It can be harder for traditional retailers to go the other way, but I do think it’s growing. Online purchases across all categories are up.  The Champagne sector in Australia over the last six years has had quite a phenomenal increase year-on-year. Last year we did see it flatten out, after we’d seen a 24.5 per cent in Champagne sales in 2017, that was a really big jump in sales in Australia. I haven’t seen the results of 2019. My sentiment is that it’s still fairly flat, but that’s still relative. We’re the number six export market in the world.  There’s an expectation from consumers that when you walk into a party or a function, you’ll be served Champagne, it won’t be just some white bubbly. It’s a strong market and many of the Champagne partners globally are looking to Australia as a significant player within the industry. We’re having more imported so the diversity of brands available to consumers is growing. Emperor has been facilitating that, we have a request for importation once a week, which is a lot, because we have such a unique model. We sell online, we sell to high-net-worth individuals, there’s the truck and no one else is doing that ,which is widely appealing for many partners.  IRW: Your business started with you as the face of the business. How do you see the personal branding side of Emperor evolving as you scale?KK: The way that I see it is like Richard Branson versus Virgin, although I don’t put myself in the same ballpark. He uses his personal brand to give confidence around the consumer, then he hands it over to his team, walks away and carries on to the next project. I’m not walking away from Emperor, but I have used my level of trust and authority in the market to give Emperor a great jump start. The Emperor brand will always grow far bigger than what Champagne Dame could possibly allow it to grow, but to be honest, many customers don’t know who I am and I love that. I think it’s amazing that Emperor has the right brand, positioning, product mix and offer that we are attracting Champagne lovers not just in Australia, but England, America and South Africa. So personal branding is a great way to give your business a jump start, but it can never be relied upon for long-term growth.