In 2008 I co-founded Naked Wines with ten others and a slightly mad idea: that you could grow a drinks brand faster by partnering with businesses your customers already trust than by shouting louder than everyone else. Within five years, that approach had brought in over half a million customers.

The good news for your brand? The playbook still works — and it works just as well for a regional brewery or a mail-order cheese company as it did for a wine club. This is the first issue of The Pour, where every month I'll share one idea you can actually use to grow.

This Month's Idea

Stop buying customers. Start borrowing trust.

Paid ads put you in front of strangers. Partnerships put you in front of someone's existing audience — people who already opened their wallet for a brand that shares your kind of customer. A spirits brand teaming up with a premium glassware company. A coffee roaster inside a recipe box. The trust is already built; you just borrow it.

It's lower cost, higher conversion, and it compounds.

Got a growth challenge you're stuck on?

Reply to any issue and I read every email personally.

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Hopkins-Lefevre Marketing

Specialist growth marketing for food & drink brands

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Hopkins-Lefevre

Food & drink marketing

The Pour · Issue 02

The 9× channel hiding in your inbox

A quick confession. Last month I wrote to you about borrowing trust through partnerships — and it's true, that's how we built Naked Wines. But there's a second engine I leaned on just as hard, and I've never given it enough credit in these emails: email itself.

Here's what most drinks brands underrate. Email consistently returns many times more for every pound spent than paid social or search, comfortably the highest return of any channel. Not because it's clever, but because it talks to people who already chose you. Your list is the one audience you own outright. No algorithm sits between you and them. No bidding war. Just you, a glass of something good, and a reason to open.

So here's my news: alongside the partnership work, I now specialise in email marketing for food and drinks brands. I'm a Mailchimp Pro Partner and a Klaviyo partner, which means I build, run, and optimise the campaigns and automations that turn a quiet subscriber list into a reliable revenue line.

This Month's Idea

Your list is worth twice what you think — and it's working at half capacity.

Most drinks brands I meet are sending one newsletter a month to everyone, with no welcome sequence, no abandoned-basket nudge, and no win-back for lapsed buyers. That's not an email programme; that's a megaphone. The brands earning the best returns aren't sending more emails — they're sending the right email to the right person at the right moment. That's the whole game.

Got a list gathering dust?

Reply with its rough size and how often you email it — I'll tell you honestly if money's being left on the table.

Book a 20-min chat

Hopkins-Lefevre Marketing

Specialist growth marketing for food & drink brands

Catch up on past issues

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Hopkins-Lefevre

Food & drink marketing

The Pour · Issue 03

The emails that sell while you're on the beach

August is a strange month for drinks brands. Half your customers are on holiday, your team wants a break too, and the temptation is to let marketing idle until September. Resist it. August is the ideal month to build the machinery that sells without you — because the work you do now pays out for the rest of the year.

Last month I made the case that email is your highest-return channel. This month, the how. And it comes down to two words that sound technical but really just mean “stop treating everyone the same”: segmentation and automation.

This Month's Idea

A flat list is a leaky bucket. Segments and flows are the patch.

Segmentation is simply grouping people by what they've actually done — bought rosé but never red, opened every email but never purchased, spent £200 last year but nothing since. Once you can see those groups, you can speak to each one properly.

Automation is what makes that scalable. You set the rules once — when someone abandons a basket, send this; when someone hasn't bought in 90 days, send that — and the system does the rest, around the clock, while you're firmly out of office. It's the closest thing to passive revenue a small drinks brand can get.

Setting up your first automation?

Reply with the platform you're on and I'll point you to the one flow worth building first.

Book a 20-min chat

Hopkins-Lefevre Marketing

Specialist growth marketing for food & drink brands

Catch up on past issues

← All past issues

Hopkins-Lefevre

Food & drink marketing

The Pour · Issue 04

Christmas starts now (sorry)

I know. It's September, the leaves haven't even turned, and I'm saying the C-word. But here's the uncomfortable truth about food and drinks: the final quarter — October to December, the “golden quarter” — can account for a third or more of your entire year's sales. And the brands that win it aren't the ones who scramble in late November. They're the ones planning right now.

This Month's Idea

Your Q4 revenue is decided in September, not December.

By the time the festive rush arrives, your inbox real estate is a warzone — every brand your customer ever bought from is shouting at once. The brands that cut through warmed their audience up early, mapped their gifting campaigns in advance, and had their automations tested and ready before the traffic hit.

A good Q4 plan has three layers: an early gifting guide for the organised shoppers, a sequence of well-timed campaigns through November and December, and last-posting-date urgency emails that genuinely convert because the deadline is real. If you'd like a second pair of hands — and more than twenty years of doing exactly this — to map and build your Q4 programme, now is the moment.

This is the last Pour before the busy season.

If Q4 matters to your business, reply and let's grab 20 minutes before the diary fills up.

Grab 20 minutes

Hopkins-Lefevre Marketing

Specialist growth marketing for food & drink brands

Catch up on past issues