Humble Grape

Overview

Humble Grape was founded by James Dawson in 2009 with just one site. Over the past decade it has grown to six distinctively quirky London venues that each act as a wine shop, wine bar and kitchen. Last year, Humble Grape also purchased two Vivat Bacchus sites. We are also now running the in-house marketing for those two additional sites under a different brand.

Historically the business has had an in-house marketing team, but this was not proving successful for them. Post pandemic, the team needed a marketing and PR agency they could rely on to help them grow the business back to a pre-covid operation.  

Where we come in… 

Since July 2021 we’ve been running the in house marketing team. Within this we’ve been in charge of everything related to marketing - the website, collateral, local marketing support, PA and hotel concierge reward schemes, brand partnerships, third-party sites, booking platforms, photography, PR, overseeing a complete re-brand and new site opening support.  

RESULTS

E-marketing

We created a regular schedule of e-newsletters to be sent out once a week focusing on key topics and drivers for the business. Through these mailers we’ve driven online wine shop sales, restaurant bookings and event ticket sales.

Average open rate: 38.9% 

Organic database growth from 13,500 to 17,717 (4,217) 

Events

Marketing calendar around monthly wine tastings and events at two main sites. These are pushed through social media, e-newsletters, in-bar collateral, media, and local partnerships. As a result events are consistently selling out.

Social Media

We took over the Humble Grape Instagram, LinkedIn and Facebook accounts, bringing across more of the key message and ethos of the business and injecting more fun and irreverence into the accounts. 

Through regular content, inviting in relevant and top influencers to review, partnerships with like-minded brands and local business we have organically grown the Instagram account from 8,000 followers to 13,500.

Crouch End launch

In December 2022, Humble Grape opened its sixth restaurant and wine bar in Crouch End. We supported with the launch of the newest restaurant including drafting and issuing trade and consumer teaser releases. Once opened we also drafted a press pack about the restaurant highlighting its key USPs and ethos, wine producers and special dishes. From this we booked in a host of local and national publications to visit and review - including the Evening Standard, Sunday Brunch, London on the Inside and The Nudge.

We held a local business and neighbour event to introduce Humble Grape help to the local community and highlight the offering. We helped with invite design and issuing, briefing for teams, creation of collateral for the event, event management on the night. This event reached capacity with attendees now becoming regular diners.