Are you someone who would like to enter the 2025 Wine Buyers Awards? This is the information you need to give your entry a turbo boost.
There are, essentially, five key themes that come up time and time again; things that our judges are looking for, which the previous years short-listed candidates are mostly doing and our winners were all doing.
View them as elements to focus on in your career, and to make sure you include in your 2025 entries:
First of all, Commercial nous. Do you have it? And more to the point, can you demonstrate that you have it? Can you prove that you know why you are doing something – whether that’s listing or delisting a product, running a promotion or changing a marketing strategy?
Secondly, you need to really understand your audience. It could mean visiting stores regularly, checking out the competition or learning from data. How do you combine that knowledge with your personal passions.
Thirdly, relationships and interpersonal skills. How do you deal with people? There’s no single right way here, obviously, but what’s your philosophy with your team and suppliers, and, if relevant, with your customers. Why does it work and, again, how can you demonstrate that it does.
Fourthly, Passion. Without question our judges need to see it in the entry. It’s WHAT you’ve done and how. But again, they need to see tangible proof that this really matters to you. Simply saying ‘I’m passionate about what I do’ isn’t enough. You need to be able to point to things that you’ve done that prove this is the case.
Finally, Creativity. What have you done that’s different? It could be restructuring a wine list or introducing an innovative stock management system. This isn’t necessarily an essential. It’s a ‘nice to have’ not a ‘need to have’. But if an entrant introduces something that hasn’t been done before, they tend to score a lot of Brownie points.
Basically, the Wine Buyers awards is about finding excellence in the field. If we assume that all of the entrants are technically capable of doing the job, we were looking for those people who go above and beyond that.
Who has mastered the basics to such an extent that they could change and adapt their role to significantly improve what was there before them.
Wine Buyers Awards winners are people who are moving their role, their business – and the industry as a whole, forward.
Good luck with your entry.
Deadline is January 10th 2025
