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August 3, 2016
Habits

Alpha Box and Dice launch subscription service

Alpha Box and Dice want to improve your life.

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  • Words: Johnny von Einem
  • Pictures: Josh Geelen

For all the scientific flip-flopping around the health benefits of consuming one or two glasses of wine per day, there is a universally understood (if not scientifically measurable) truth known to the wine drinking community: it will improve your life.

Remarks

You can find more information about the Life Improvement Plan at the Alpha Box and Dice website.

With the benefit of a bottle of wine, meals taste better, conversations are more interesting, and cold, wintery nights spent on the couch watching Netflix with your cat become far less sombre affairs.

How thoughtful, then, that Dylan Fairweather and his crew at the consistently quirky winery, Alpha Box and Dice, have devised the Life Improvement Plan.

It’s a direct-from-the-source wine subscription service delivered to your door. In an age where you can subscribe to get monthly deliveries of things to help in the event of an apocalypse or regular consignments of boxed up patches of grass for your dog to piss on, Alpha Box and Dice’s program seems both practical and relevant.

Under the Life Improvement Plan, every six weeks, a six-pack mixed selection of AB&D wines will arrive at your door, and thereby your life is immediately improved.

“We were inspired a little bit – in the nicest way possible – by religious groups and the way they do things and the way they advertise things,” Dylan says of the service’s brand position, while smiling.

“We really wanted to run with the subscription idea really based on a convenience factor. People come down to the winery, they love it and they have such a great time, and then they’re always wanting deliveries, but we don’t do pre-done mixed packs on the website itself.

“We were looking at ideas of doing pre-done mixed packs but changing it up all the time, and… from there it’s sort of turned into this subscription, consistent, convenient delivery.”

Though the specialty of Alpha Box and Dice is the product of the vines, the Life Improvement Plan will also showcase brands from other industries that share AB&D’s philosophy.

“We actually threw some Evo Haircare Salty Dog Beach Spray in with the last pack, [and] in this pack there was a bottle of a little sister project that we’ve got out of the Barossa from Palmetto Wine Co.,” Dylan says.

“It’s looking at the needs of the customer a little bit more in-depth, and then exposing them to not only our wines, but… things that we found around the industry that we’d like to promote.”

As much as this service is about providing convenience, it’s also about maintaining a personal relationship with customers, which is a large part of the Alpha Box and Dice cellar door experience.

“Cellar door is always the most important thing there is to us, and giving people just a great personal experience when they walk in there is absolutely key, so why not try and resonate something online as well that gives that option,” Dylan says.

“It’s me writing out the emails that get sent out to people that remind them when their deliveries are coming, or chasing up any delivery issues,” brand manager, Lachlan Aird says.

“It kind of has that face-to-face contact [where] they know we’re not just taking their money and sending out wine… It’s a bit more rewarding on our end as well.”

So it’s an internet subscription, with a little bit of old-world customer service. That sounds nice. But what may well be even nicer is finding wine on your doorstep every six weeks without having to do anything to make it appear there.

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Lachie and Dylan: Improving lives.

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