We've literally been in your shoes (and spilled some wine on them). Our founder carried a wine bag through the streets of New York before building the infrastructure you're about to inherit.

Built by beverage industry insiders, Elysia & Co is the modern logistics partner who actually answers the phone, geeks out on alcohol law, and clears your containers
while the big players are still faxing invoices.

We handle the chaos so you can chase the dream.

mission - one of the things i feel proud of is that our mission has stayed the same - the game is built for big guys, unfair adv, we … xyz

allow clients to continue to fight the good fight, stay passionate and we take care of X

tim and i having so much experience in sales matters. built the biz around diva sales reps - boh / foh construct - sales is fluid, boh is rigid/ cutoffs etc… the chef and the maitre’d can have a beer together…wants the boh team to understand the sales rep is standing i nthe doorway of x in the rain in nyc before cutoff trying to code in the sale…have built so much of systems around sales rep ease…if you didn’t have that experience you He came from Wine Library in New Jersey, like he understood who we're selling to. Like how they want to be serviced, like how they want the order showing up on the door, how the documentation needs to work - just like that, sort of different lens and landscape. Then Marissa comes on board with her infinite experience. Oh came from domain select, who we all joke is domain neglect because they never paid their bills and I used to work for them. They're awful, they're awful. Because then he came to mine and was like, "I never wanted to be that way, right?" or "He doesn't have to be that way because guess why: we can be transparent. We can pay people on time. If we can't pay them on time, we can tell them we can't pay them on time so" each layer of Expertise that we've hired makes a huge difference and then again this freaking compliment from this woman that I'm interviewing today or this week. She's just like, "No I want this job because I want to learn from this woman who's like this industry beacon."

that’s why i bought vinosmith

Um the container side That allowed that true consolidation because freight boarders are totally unlicensed. And licensed entities aren't freight forwarders so how do you get to become both and sare that global buying power Global buying power that allows us to facilitate something when an importer is in need. Again when we started the business it was 2010; I wrote about this in my LinkedIn article. Times were tricky. Version: really high interest rates were high; people couldn't get loans. It looks pretty similar today so it was a tricky time in 2010. Having this consolidated container resource helped people spread out their cash flow and stop goods moving when they just didn't have access to cash. Again all those things were sort of time and circumstance and kind of built on accident because we, as a new business, just needed to fill one container. We just called our friends and they were like, "That worked; let's do it again." I know a lot of importers do that, just like friends band together. I had a guy call me on Monday. He actually read the newsletter where I referenced the LinkedIn piece and he's like, "Hey, I just got your newsletter. I've just been importing with friends for the last couple years and now I'm ready to take the next step." I've never heard anybody describe it that way but I did it too. I just consolidated with friends and then at one point we took a next step and turned that into a real bona fide service. when you’ve grown past working with your friends but you stilll want that same friendly version of it: that’s where we step in.

next: scale
I guess the next piece in the sale was just like the word of mouth, I think too, right? That word traveled fast and people started calling us, started referring their friends. Collective vision boomed and yeah I guess we just continued to invest in not just team members but again those other key differentiators. The technology side was huge. We spent a lot of time building that stuff. We spent a lot of time making the offerings more dynamic. We started just in New York. That's where we founded but then we branched to California and so we opened up all of our container consolidation lanes to Oakland. We built that and it hasn't stopped. A couple of years ago we started a lane to the Southeast and so now we're drumming up power to reach more Southern importers. Expertise in the more premium space and that white glove element and the air freight shipments and the things that have higher value and more complexity. Yeah I think just getting into getting in deeper with the things that are more complex. Kind of like the more complex it is, the more we shine because people stay away from that, right? They don't want to tackle things that are too complex or too prop to go wrong. They're just like, "There are too many variables; it's too complex, too much, too many reasons why it might go wrong." Basically we bet on the things that don't seem scalable and then we scale them. Tell me. Tell me about different skill sets you decided to bring on to your team to support some of that. You've been talking about the business scaling; tell me about the people scaling. The people scaling involves people with strong both import and retail backgrounds, both operational, legal, and financial backgrounds, but in the industry. If you know how to sell, you can sell anything. You just need to be trained on the product. It's just not true; I can't bring somebody on who's not been in the wine industry. They have to have had that experience. I can't just teach them; it's too complex. There are 50 states and three tiers and all those little micro nuances and metadata. I don't have the time to teach and so much of it is like storytelling and word of mouth and walking the streets and talking the talk. We definitely stay in those lanes. I am thoughtful around promoting from within, giving people a shot. We love grooming managers from the inside. I love even things like offshoring; we try to nearshore as much as we can because I don't want humans working at 2 in the morning on my teaching calls. I'd rather that they're in Central America instead of India, right? I don't know anything about that and that's a whole story that could come up. Oh god there's so much to tell later. Go ahead, there's so much, like building a thoughtful business.

“right relationship”

I think the other thing to point out in this section could be what I touched on in my article around right relationship. I remember having margaritas in New York with one of Hilla Brand's new CEOs. He's now moved on to a different role and we again were talking about servicing customers and the added complexity. He and I said something like, "Well we're in a unique position where we kind of choose who we want to work with. We choose the customers that we want to be in a long-term relationship with." He was like, "Oh what, basically scoffed at it, like what a pipe dream that can't possibly be scalable." I'm like, "Why not? Scales in the eye could be older too." It's like you and I chatted briefly recently about Kristi Frank, who started that small wine shop in Tribeca. Now she's up, yes, yes, so scaling.

At some point an independent bottle shop is only going to go to here and that's okay. What if that's true for me too? Scaling is again in the eye of the beholder. I would rather be in a right relationship and have clients so that I can "scale" to a place where I'm happy. Your clients are happy. Yeah. Yeah. It's just like the team is happy.

Saying no to the wrong business has always been a part of our ethos so that we protect ourselves. I don't have to artificially build a team that's "big enough" to service the scale because then I'm not in a right relationship with those employees. They're not in a right relationship with the customers and it definitely trickles down to vendor relationships as well like
vendors: We can rely on those partners and that does feel like the right relationship. It's super important to me. She has a financial wealth management company but she and a lot of this stuff, like again I get worked up about it because it's like I'm not just in the wine industry; I'm in the business. My whole EO ecosystem is so powerful to me and one of the things I was thinking about last night about Amanda Knox's story is how she couldn't get out of the news version of who she was. Like, "Oh she's the woman who was a murderer. Oh whoops now she's the woman who's wrongly accused and she's like, 'What if I'm neither of those women?' Oh God, what I mean, what a powerful symbolic statement of so many. We could fit so many things into that."

I was on a hike this morning with my husband and I was like, "You know because when you say, 'Oh I'm a businesswoman, I'm an entrepreneur,' those statements feel good when the business is going up and up and up and up but when the business is going like this or like this and you go, 'I'm a businesswoman,' it feels like shit." It's like at some point I need to not be the business. The business is gonna go like this. i doin’t have to pin my identity to the business…. It's successes or failures all day long because at the end of the day I just want to be in right relationship and feel worthy of love of my friends and family. Like the rest of it of course