California, Here We Come...
The Story of Working Girl Wines

Note: A story update at the end ...

My name is Kathy Charlton and I own Olympic Cellars Winery together with two other women, Molly Rivard and Libby Sweetser. Our winery is small by anyone’s standards, producing 3,200 cases in 2004, up from around 1,500 cases in 2001 when I took over the operations. The increased production is due to the Working Girl Wine series, which was first released in the fall of 2003.

Our winery is open 362 days a year and one of us is at the bar every day. It didn’t take long for us to realize that a lot of our customers were intimidated by not only walking into a winery tasting room, much less knowing what they wanted to taste and then if they were pronouncing the “varietal name” correctly. I’m already falling into “winery speak” and should have said … pronouncing the label name correctly.

We knew early on that we wanted a second label that was fun, that our customers could relate to and was that “every day wine for every day friends”. This is where the “women focus” came in. Obviously we were three women…Three Working Women! So our brainstorming, wine blending and label design obviously appealed to us and we hoped to all women that look forward to sharing a glass of wine at the end of the work day with friends and family.

I also come from a corporate background…25 years at Texas Instruments. So I brought a lot of that triple A-type personality to the table. I knew that to survive as a very small player in the wine industry we needed to focus on a niche market. We couldn’t compete on price, there was no way economies of scale would kick in and like any industry, major acquisitions were taking place making it even harder to compete. So we played to our strengths, we are women, we know what we like so we created the Working Girl wines and self proclaimed them the “Official Wine of Working Women”.

I didn’t tell you that we are located on the North Olympic Peninsula in Washington State. I have to say it is paradise after 25 years in Dallas (sorry Texas, but it’s true). The last couple of years have been a wonderful ride. What we hoped for came true in our small piece of the world. There was a real emotional connection to the Working Girl Wines. And, from the beginning these wines supported our charity of choice, a local women’s health clinic. We write a check every month based on the sales of the wine and other branded items. We love to say that Working Girl Wines are Created by women, For women and Support women. It is our vision that these wines will create a national donation network in support of women and families in local communities where the wine is sold. We’re calling it the Three-Tier Donation Network (just like our three-tier distribution system) whereby the manufacture (me), the distributor and the retailer contributes to their local community.

We’re about to go big time, it is exciting and scary but California here we come – what better place to test a brand. In May we will begin our first out of state distribution of the Working Girl Wines.

December 11, 2005: Six months have passed since we started selling wines beyond our winery door. And, I'm still wearing the same pink flannel Lucille Ball Grape Stomping pajamas as I sit at my home-office computer updating this website. Well, the best-laid plans don't always work out as choreographed and new roads open up. We thought California would be our first and main state of distribution outside of Washington. When our press release hit the wires, distributors from states we hadn't even considered contacted us about Working Girl Wines. Texas (where I worked all my life), New York (Molly's home state), Missouri (my home state), Florida (grandparents)..... so many connections! We're now in 15 states, who would of thunk! Happy Holidays