On January 10, 2019, we incorporated Croatian Premium Wine Imports, Inc. Three years we’ve been living this company (seemingly 24×7). We started with the Komarna winemakers, whom Mirena knew from her home town of Metković in the Dubrovnik-Neretva County of Dalmatia. Their passion for the art and science of making beautiful wines hit the spot and we caught the bug. We met wine judges and wine business experts who soon became friends and who taught us a lot about this business. We talked to owners of boutique wine stores, somms, chefs and wine writers, and inhaled every bit of information we could.
We knew we could leverage our business and entrepreneurial skills to create the best possible representation of Croatian wines in the very complicated, saturated, and competitive US market. We worked with other importers in the US, Canada, EU and Australia to create a buzz. We partnered with leaders in the wine business and with Croatian institutions – from the Chamber of Commerce, the Croatian Embassy and Consulates in the US, the Croatian Tourist Board in the US, and the Croatian professional organizations and communities. And we particularly like working with all our customers who believe in Croatian winemakers as much as we do. Yet, we never lost sight that while having a higher goal of representing the best of Croatian wine, we actually need to run a business.
We have accomplished a lot despite the elephant in the room — we started a business just before the pandemic.
Today, three years later, we did what we, as long-time mentors in the high tech entrepreneurial ecosystem, urge all startups to do – we grew quickly and reached positive cash flow in the third year – and now we are happily shipping 80 indigenous Croatian wines across the US.
Short sentence, but… a lot of legal, regulatory, licensing, sales, marketing, financial, shipping, logistics, reporting, and administrative work needed to happen. Whew!!!
And, we are now on a mission to create a new category — Croatian wines in the US wine scene.
Will you join us in this next phase?
Mirena and Win, proud Cofounders