February 19, 2025 • 20 mins
Tim Harford is joined by Ben Walter, CEO of Chase for Business and the host of "The Unshakeables" podcast, to explore the story of the trailblazing Widow Clicquot. Her namesake brand Veuve Clicquot revolutionized the champagne industry in the 19th century. Tim and Ben look at how she defied expectations and built one of the most iconic businesses in history.
This episode is sponsored by Chase for Business. For a full list of sources, see the show notes at timharford.com.
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Tim Harford here with a bonus episode of Cautionary Tales.
I have got an incredible story for you today about
a pioneering businesswoman who disrupted the champagne industry and in
so doing, changed it forever. This episode is sponsored by
(00:36):
Chase for Business, and I'm joined by Ben Walter, who
is the CEO of Chase for Business and those of
his own rather brilliant podcast, The Unshakeables. Ben. Welcome to
Cautionary Tales. Tim, thank you for having me. It's great
to be here. Well, it's great to have you, so, Ben,
what comes to your mind when I say the word champagne?
Speaker 2 (00:56):
You know, obviously celebrations. I suppose the other thing that
comes to mind from me is quality, don't cheap out,
because for any of us who've ever been drunk on
cheap champagne, you know that that's a one time affair
and you never do that again.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
I wouldn't know anything about that, I'm sure. So these
associations of luxury and possibly of excess come to mind.
What if I told you that all of this comes
down to a single rather remarkable nineteenth century businesswoman.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
I didn't know that. On our podcast, we've had a
number of incredible female entrepreneurs whove achieved quite a lot,
but hearing that it happened in the nineteenth century is
a whole different follow Axe.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
She is quite a character. Barb Nicole, Clico Pon Sardin.
She essentially created champagne as a category as we know
it today. And she also took a struggling family run
champagne house and she turned into a global empire. And
I should say it was partly about the way she
(01:52):
marketed things. She drove behavioral change around sparkling wine.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
I'm trying to picture what you have in your head.
This is the nineteenth century. Women I don't think in
France could have bank accounts at that time, and this
woman revolutionized an entire industry.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
It is an astonishing story, and Ben, I'm going to
tell you all about it, and I hope you will
give me some of your reactions to the story, because
I know you're a business expert. You've spoken to so
many entrepreneurs on your podcast, The Unshakeables. But before we
get to that, I need to say I'm Tim Harford
and you're listening to cautionary tales. Madame Klico was born
(02:52):
Barbnicole Ponsardan in seventeen seventy seven, so we're going back
a quarter of a millennium. She was the daughter of
a wealthy textiles industrialist, and she came of age during
the French Revolution, all of that turbulence and social change,
the Nsent regime disintegrating the middle class on the rise,
(03:14):
and when she was twenty one, she married Francois Clico.
He was the only son of her father's competitor, Philippe Clico,
and he was another textiles businessman. So the marriage was
effectively a business deal between the Clico and Ponsadin families.
And at this point, normally we'd tell a story about
(03:34):
Barbneicole becoming a wife and a mother. She would be expected,
like all married women, to live in the shadow of
their husbands. However, she and Francois ended up forming a
business partnership. She was fascinated by wine making, so was
her husband Francois. He was keen to grow his family's
(03:55):
small wine business, and so the young couple together set
about acquiring vineyards and learning all about the industry.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
These were two textile families right in New York. We'd
call it the rag business. So were they supportive of
them going into the wine business.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
Not really, no, they weren't. I meanp Clico wasn't keen
on his son's idea. He thought the textile business was
going perfectly well. The wine business was something of a distraction.
And you've got a bear in mind that Napoleonic Wars
are on the horizon, and with Europe ripped apart first
by revolution then by war, wine is not looking like
(04:32):
a profitable business because it's going to disrupt all of
the trade and all of the commerce. And of course
he was completely right. So Francois and Barbnicole's business started
to struggle, and in eighteen oh five things got worse.
Tragedy struck the family. Barbnicole's husband, Francois died. Now rumors
(04:53):
at the time were that his business was going so
incredibly badly that he had killed himself. That's actually unlikely,
much more likely he died due to typhoid fever. But
whatever the reason, he's dead. She is a widow. Her daughter,
le Montine is six years old, Barbnicole herself twenty seven,
(05:14):
and she is facing life as the widow clco or
as they say in France, la veuve clico.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
Aha. Now this is starting to sound more familiar. So
Philip took pity on her, I suppose, and decided to
back the business in the wake of the tragedy.
Speaker 1 (05:29):
Ben, I didn't bring you here to tell you a
story about people who felt sorry for this woman.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
No.
Speaker 1 (05:33):
No, he didn't take pity on her. He clearly saw
something in her, but he was at first just keen
to close the wine business entirely. I mean, the money
is in textiles, the wine business has been going badly,
why go ahead with this?
Speaker 2 (05:48):
But obviously that didn't happen in the end, right, I
mean there's a bottle of this stuff in my fridge
right now.
Speaker 1 (05:53):
Yeah, I'm very envious. Yes, I mean the the product's
world famous. She basically somehow managed to persuade him that
her idea was worth backing, or perhaps more likely, that
she was worth backing. He must have seen she was
in incredibly smart, incredibly driven, and she had some collateral.
(06:13):
She was owed inheritance, and she said, look, instead of
the inheritance, why don't you back my wine business? And
he put in the equivalent of maybe a million dollars today,
which says a lot about her. I think also says
a lot about Philippe, because, as you pointed out, earlier
women in France at the time couldn't even have a
(06:34):
bank account, and she is proposing that she is going
to lead this huge and untried business. And it's also
a male dominated business. So who are the players? I mean,
will we have heard of any of them? Chanle, Angrie Hide,
sec Jean Remy Moe.
Speaker 2 (06:49):
Have you heard of them? Those are certainly names that
sound familiar. Were they well known at the time. They
were very well known at the time. Moe in particular,
he had this celebrity romance with Napoleon and he used
to advertise his wine by distributing these postcards showing Mowe
and Napoleon exploring wine cellars together. Well, it's good to
know the romance. There's not a new funman.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
Absolutely absolutely. So this is the situation in which Barbnicole
approaches her father in law, Philippe. He said, okay, I
will back the business, but you've got to learn something
about wine. You've got to go and do an apprenticeship
and learn the trade four years figuring out how the
wine business works. She agreed. She went off. She did
(07:33):
her four year apprenticeship. At the end of the four years,
the business is still really struggling, and so she goes
back to Philippe, her father in law, and she asks
him for help yet again, and he agrees. Wow, and
so he must have really believed in her at some level.
He must have done. I mean, we don't know why,
but in any case, whatever it was that passed between them,
(07:53):
he backed her a second time. This is the point
at which Barbnicole decides she's going to have to take
a gamble. Possibly she realizes it if she doesn't make
it this time, it's really a case of now or never.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
Yeah, We've had a number of entrepreneurs on the show
who've told similar stories about being up against the wall
and then betting it all in black, so to speak,
because they have no choice. For example, we had a
woman who owns a company called Desi I Were her
name is Desi Perkins, and she went into a number
of places to pitch and couldn't get an answer and
was running out of cash and really went for it
(08:25):
and it came through. But you know, to go for broke,
it takes courage to do that.
Speaker 1 (08:29):
Yeah, I mean, suppose to some extent there's a degree
of survivor bias that we see the ones who took
the gamble and then the gamble paid off. But certainly
my own research suggests there is something about that crisis
that forces people to think differently and to explore new
ways of doing things. So that is something of a
catalyst for business transformation, I think.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
So what happened next?
Speaker 1 (08:52):
Barbnicole foresaw that the Napoleonic Wars were likely to come
to an end, and that when they did, that was
going to free up trade between France and its faux Russia,
and that meant potentially a huge champagne market in Russia.
And Barb Nicole was making a particular kind of champagne
(09:14):
that she was confident would sell very well in Russia.
It was incredibly sweet. Do you know so turn the
dessert wine?
Speaker 2 (09:19):
Ben? I don't.
Speaker 1 (09:21):
Is that similar to what they were drinking? Well, so
turn is very sweet. This champagne was sparkling like modern champagne,
but it was very sweet. It was actually twice as
much sugar even as a modern so turn. So this
is like drinking baileis or hot chocolate or something. I mean,
it's a very very sweet sparkling drink and the widow Clico.
(09:45):
She decides when the war ends, Russian's going to go
for this. She smuggles bottles of her best vintage, the
eighteen eleven vintage, to Amsterdam, knowing that if the war
does finish, they will be very well placed to be
shipped to Russia at that moment. So she's taking this
risk because if the war doesn't end, then she's not
(10:06):
going to get any return from this wine. But if
it does, she is perfectly timed to profit. There's sort
of three brilliant moves she makes at the same time.
One is really knowing her product market fit right. She
knows that this incredibly sweet drink fits the Russian palette.
Two is being aware of the macro effects of what's
going on around her, knowing the war is going to
(10:27):
end and that will open up trade. And then three
is having the guts to smuggle this stuff into Amsterdam
so she can get a jump on the competition. That's
quite a combination. Yes, the risk comes good. Madame Cleiko's
champagne makes it to Russia, beating her competitors, including Monsieur
Moey by several weeks. She gets influencer support nineteenth century
(10:47):
style two. The Cizar says that verve Click is the
only champagne he will drink, and of course, once he
says that the entire Russian court has to follow suit.
It's the perfect product. It is there at the perfect moment. That, though,
poses its own problems, because she suddenly got this massive
demand to make this kind of champagne, and at the time,
(11:10):
making champagne is extraordinarily difficult and the whole production process
is very inefficient.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
Yet tim when people are successful, that can suddenly bring
up a new range of challenges. We spoke to Melissa
Gaiardo who started a candle company called Benita Fierce Candles,
and when her sales took off, she didn't know how
to keep up with production. I mean, she had people
in her home just making candles as fast as they
could possibly make them because she had a moment and
she had to capture it. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:37):
I mean, this is exactly the problem that Barbney Cole faced,
and she realizes she has to do something to change that.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
But in this case, it sounds like she had to
become a bit of an engineer.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
Yeah, So all champagne has a sediment. It makes the
drink cloudy. That's not what people want. They want to
clear champagne. That's true now, it was certainly true at
the time. But to filter out the sediment is this
very time consuming business. What Madame Clico invented was called
a riddling table. So riddling is the process of getting
(12:11):
the sediment out. And this is a kind of wooden
frame with holes bored into it, allowing the bottles to
be suspended at different angles, so they're basically upside down
on a diagonal. And you put the bottles in this
frame and then these expert wine riddlers come up and
they give it a sharp quarter turn every now and then.
(12:33):
And every time you have this quarter turn, you're changing
the angle of the bottle and you're very gently disturbing
the sediment. You're not mixing it back into the wine.
You're letting it slip to the bottom of the bottle.
And of course, because the bottle is upside down, the
bottom of the bottle is the neck, so you've got
this sediment gathering in the neck and you can take
(12:54):
it out of the bottle easily. So this riddling contraption,
this riddling table, is the killer app that makes it
much much easier to get the sediment out of the champagne,
and her competitors absolutely cannot work out how she is
doing this, How is she making so much champaign so quickly?
(13:15):
Moway figured it out eventually, but it took him fifteen
years to catch.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
Up, you know, Tim, She was innovating in a physical
product that had been around a long time, and it's
interesting because that never stops. We interviewed someone on the
podcast as a company, Sabanto, that is changing the way
that you plant and harvest corn. We've been consuming corn
for thousands of years. He's developing automated tractors that can
(13:39):
plant and reap the crops. I think people fall into
a trap where innovation only happens in sort of the
advanced sectors of tech, and actually there isn't an industry
around that's not waiting around to be disrupted.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
Yeah. I think that's absolutely right, and the wine industry,
as Barbneicole showed, is clearly one of them. And one
of the things that Madame Clico did here was not
just invent the process, but keep the process a secret,
so she had real loyalty from her employees who presume
could have gone to one of her competitors and collected
(14:11):
some kind of reward, but none of them did, and
that may have been because she had this profit sharing system.
So they were all making money, they felt looked after,
and they did not betray her secrets. Well, she was
shrewd in a number of ways. Is this approach of
treating your work as well sharing the gains something that
you've encountered yourself.
Speaker 2 (14:31):
Ben, loyal employees are critical. I would just say that
loyalty and employment is only partially about paying ownership. It's
you know, particularly in today's world, it's about that plus
creating the right environment, making people feel valued and like
they belong and like they have purpose. So I think
the right compensation structure is important, but it's not the
(14:52):
whole ball game.
Speaker 1 (14:53):
Yeah, Listeners to our episode on the building of the
Empire State Building might recognize this. Paul Starrett, who was
in charge of that project, was in some ways an
incredibly generous employer. He paid the workers very well. The
conditions were great, it was great food safety standards were
very high. But at the same time he watched them
absolutely like a hawk. He had really really tough minded
(15:18):
site managers, cracking down on fraud and theft and so on.
So there was this sort of sense of like, I'm
going to absolutely insist on the best possible behavior, but
at the same time, I'm going to reward that.
Speaker 2 (15:30):
You know, success is the best retention tool there is,
and success gives you the right to be tougher because
people want to be in an environment of success and
they want a rise to the occasion. You talked earlier
about the fact that she basically established the category. I
mean she drove large scale behavioral and intentive change across
(15:51):
an entire continent. It sounds like, how did she do that?
Tell me more about that.
Speaker 1 (15:55):
I think it's a fascinating case study. So at the time,
Champagne itself was not the drink it is today, and
the Champagne region was not famous for sparkling wine. It
was famous for still white wines. So by reaching these influencers,
reaching the czar, by producing this drink that perfectly matched
(16:17):
people's taste, and by creating something that seemed luxurious but
at the same time was cheap enough to be affordable
because she had made the production process more efficient and
to make it available at scale, she creates this whole category. Suddenly,
this drink is something that the czar demands, and yet
the ordinary middle classes can afford it, and it basically
(16:39):
becomes the drink of celebrations everywhere. She established all of this.
By the time she died in eighteen sixty six, the
Widow Clico had a global empire. She was exporting her
wine as far afield as the United States. Sales had
reached seven hundred and fifty thousand bottles a year. That
is up from seventeen thousand bottles back in eighteen eleven
(17:01):
before her big breakthrough, and the brand is now so
well recognized. I think it's these second most popular brand
of champagne in the world. And if you go into
a bar in France, I understand that you can simply
ask for a glass of the Widow and people will
know that you want verve Clico Champagne.
Speaker 2 (17:21):
Tim What's interesting about that is we think that hyperscaling
is a modern phenomenon. You look at the likes of
Apple or Amazon or Google or some of the other
more recent startups that have gone global with their impact.
And while the time scales might have been longer, this
was maybe fifty or sixty years as opposed to five
or ten. The impact even back then could be global
(17:43):
in scale, in terms of how far reaching some of
these insights and innovations can be.
Speaker 1 (17:48):
Yeah. Absolutely, it's partly about developing the product that people
want to drink. It's partly about the marketing, but it
is also about the production. You've got to be able
to make this stuff. You have to get all of
these things right. And that's what she did.
Speaker 2 (18:01):
Yes, and aspiration and luxury is a timeless phenomenon.
Speaker 1 (18:05):
Something else timeless is the motivational business quote. And I
actually have a motivational business quote from wido'click. I rather
like this one. This was a letter she wrote to
one of her grandchildren, and she commented, the world is
in perpetual motion and we must invent the things of tomorrow.
(18:25):
One must go before others, be determined and exacting, and
let your intelligence direct your life. Act with audacity.
Speaker 2 (18:36):
What an incredible woman. I hope that aspiring female and
frankly male entrepreneurs can hear this story because the woman
was groundbreaking in so many ways. I don't speak French.
I didn't know what the word for meant, so I
kept waiting for tim to tell me that she married
mister viv and it turns out she did it all
on her own. And I think that's fantastic what she
was able to accomplish as a woman in early nineteenth
(18:57):
century France. I mean, I'm just bowled over by that.
I think about innovation, resilience, scale, grit vision. You know,
these are things we talk about all the time in
business circles, and she had them and spades and pioneered
them to something that has stood the test of time
and more ways than one.
Speaker 1 (19:14):
No, Ben, I will drink to that. Ben Walter, thank
you very much for joining me on Cautionary Tales.
Speaker 2 (19:21):
Thanks so much for having me, Tim, What a great story.
Speaker 1 (19:25):
This episode was sponsored by Chase for Business and I
was talking to Ben Walter, who is the CEO of
Chase for Business. You can of course find the Unshakeables
wherever you get your podcasts, and there will be a
new episode of Cautionary Tales in this feed very shortly.
For a full list of our sources, see the show
(19:46):
notes at Timharford dot com. Cautionary Tales is written by
me Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright, Alice Fines, and Ryan Dilly.
It's produced by Alice Fines and Marilyn Rust. The sound
design and original music are the work of Pascal Wise.
(20:07):
Additional sound design is by Carlos San Juan at Brain Audio.
Bend A Dafhaffrey edited the scripts. The show features the
voice talents of Melanie Guttridge, Stella Harford, Oliver Hembrough, Sarah Jupp,
messaam Monroe, Jamal Westman, and Rufus Wright. The show also
wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg,
(20:29):
Greta Cohne, Sarah Nix, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody, Christina Sullivan,
Kira Posey, and Powen Miller. Cautionary Tales is a production
of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded at Wardore Studios in London
by Tom Berry. If you like the show, please remember
to share, rate and review. It really makes a difference
(20:50):
to us and if you want to hear the show,
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plus
Pushkin. Tim Harford here with a bonus episode of Cautionary Tales.
I have got an incredible story for you today about
a pioneering businesswoman who disrupted the champagne industry and in
so doing, changed it forever. This episode is sponsored by
(00:36):
Chase for Business, and I'm joined by Ben Walter, who
is the CEO of Chase for Business and those of
his own rather brilliant podcast, The Unshakeables. Ben. Welcome to
Cautionary Tales. Tim, thank you for having me. It's great
to be here. Well, it's great to have you, so, Ben,
what comes to your mind when I say the word champagne?
Speaker 2 (00:56):
You know, obviously celebrations. I suppose the other thing that
comes to mind from me is quality, don't cheap out,
because for any of us who've ever been drunk on
cheap champagne, you know that that's a one time affair
and you never do that again.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
I wouldn't know anything about that, I'm sure. So these
associations of luxury and possibly of excess come to mind.
What if I told you that all of this comes
down to a single rather remarkable nineteenth century businesswoman.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
I didn't know that. On our podcast, we've had a
number of incredible female entrepreneurs whove achieved quite a lot,
but hearing that it happened in the nineteenth century is
a whole different follow Axe.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
She is quite a character. Barb Nicole, Clico Pon Sardin.
She essentially created champagne as a category as we know
it today. And she also took a struggling family run
champagne house and she turned into a global empire. And
I should say it was partly about the way she
(01:52):
marketed things. She drove behavioral change around sparkling wine.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
I'm trying to picture what you have in your head.
This is the nineteenth century. Women I don't think in
France could have bank accounts at that time, and this
woman revolutionized an entire industry.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
It is an astonishing story, and Ben, I'm going to
tell you all about it, and I hope you will
give me some of your reactions to the story, because
I know you're a business expert. You've spoken to so
many entrepreneurs on your podcast, The Unshakeables. But before we
get to that, I need to say I'm Tim Harford
and you're listening to cautionary tales. Madame Klico was born
(02:52):
Barbnicole Ponsardan in seventeen seventy seven, so we're going back
a quarter of a millennium. She was the daughter of
a wealthy textiles industrialist, and she came of age during
the French Revolution, all of that turbulence and social change,
the Nsent regime disintegrating the middle class on the rise,
(03:14):
and when she was twenty one, she married Francois Clico.
He was the only son of her father's competitor, Philippe Clico,
and he was another textiles businessman. So the marriage was
effectively a business deal between the Clico and Ponsadin families.
And at this point, normally we'd tell a story about
(03:34):
Barbneicole becoming a wife and a mother. She would be expected,
like all married women, to live in the shadow of
their husbands. However, she and Francois ended up forming a
business partnership. She was fascinated by wine making, so was
her husband Francois. He was keen to grow his family's
(03:55):
small wine business, and so the young couple together set
about acquiring vineyards and learning all about the industry.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
These were two textile families right in New York. We'd
call it the rag business. So were they supportive of
them going into the wine business.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
Not really, no, they weren't. I meanp Clico wasn't keen
on his son's idea. He thought the textile business was
going perfectly well. The wine business was something of a distraction.
And you've got a bear in mind that Napoleonic Wars
are on the horizon, and with Europe ripped apart first
by revolution then by war, wine is not looking like
(04:32):
a profitable business because it's going to disrupt all of
the trade and all of the commerce. And of course
he was completely right. So Francois and Barbnicole's business started
to struggle, and in eighteen oh five things got worse.
Tragedy struck the family. Barbnicole's husband, Francois died. Now rumors
(04:53):
at the time were that his business was going so
incredibly badly that he had killed himself. That's actually unlikely,
much more likely he died due to typhoid fever. But
whatever the reason, he's dead. She is a widow. Her daughter,
le Montine is six years old, Barbnicole herself twenty seven,
(05:14):
and she is facing life as the widow clco or
as they say in France, la veuve clico.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
Aha. Now this is starting to sound more familiar. So
Philip took pity on her, I suppose, and decided to
back the business in the wake of the tragedy.
Speaker 1 (05:29):
Ben, I didn't bring you here to tell you a
story about people who felt sorry for this woman.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
No.
Speaker 1 (05:33):
No, he didn't take pity on her. He clearly saw
something in her, but he was at first just keen
to close the wine business entirely. I mean, the money
is in textiles, the wine business has been going badly,
why go ahead with this?
Speaker 2 (05:48):
But obviously that didn't happen in the end, right, I
mean there's a bottle of this stuff in my fridge
right now.
Speaker 1 (05:53):
Yeah, I'm very envious. Yes, I mean the the product's
world famous. She basically somehow managed to persuade him that
her idea was worth backing, or perhaps more likely, that
she was worth backing. He must have seen she was
in incredibly smart, incredibly driven, and she had some collateral.
(06:13):
She was owed inheritance, and she said, look, instead of
the inheritance, why don't you back my wine business? And
he put in the equivalent of maybe a million dollars today,
which says a lot about her. I think also says
a lot about Philippe, because, as you pointed out, earlier
women in France at the time couldn't even have a
(06:34):
bank account, and she is proposing that she is going
to lead this huge and untried business. And it's also
a male dominated business. So who are the players? I mean,
will we have heard of any of them? Chanle, Angrie Hide,
sec Jean Remy Moe.
Speaker 2 (06:49):
Have you heard of them? Those are certainly names that
sound familiar. Were they well known at the time. They
were very well known at the time. Moe in particular,
he had this celebrity romance with Napoleon and he used
to advertise his wine by distributing these postcards showing Mowe
and Napoleon exploring wine cellars together. Well, it's good to
know the romance. There's not a new funman.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
Absolutely absolutely. So this is the situation in which Barbnicole
approaches her father in law, Philippe. He said, okay, I
will back the business, but you've got to learn something
about wine. You've got to go and do an apprenticeship
and learn the trade four years figuring out how the
wine business works. She agreed. She went off. She did
(07:33):
her four year apprenticeship. At the end of the four years,
the business is still really struggling, and so she goes
back to Philippe, her father in law, and she asks
him for help yet again, and he agrees. Wow, and
so he must have really believed in her at some level.
He must have done. I mean, we don't know why,
but in any case, whatever it was that passed between them,
(07:53):
he backed her a second time. This is the point
at which Barbnicole decides she's going to have to take
a gamble. Possibly she realizes it if she doesn't make
it this time, it's really a case of now or never.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
Yeah, We've had a number of entrepreneurs on the show
who've told similar stories about being up against the wall
and then betting it all in black, so to speak,
because they have no choice. For example, we had a
woman who owns a company called Desi I Were her
name is Desi Perkins, and she went into a number
of places to pitch and couldn't get an answer and
was running out of cash and really went for it
(08:25):
and it came through. But you know, to go for broke,
it takes courage to do that.
Speaker 1 (08:29):
Yeah, I mean, suppose to some extent there's a degree
of survivor bias that we see the ones who took
the gamble and then the gamble paid off. But certainly
my own research suggests there is something about that crisis
that forces people to think differently and to explore new
ways of doing things. So that is something of a
catalyst for business transformation, I think.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
So what happened next?
Speaker 1 (08:52):
Barbnicole foresaw that the Napoleonic Wars were likely to come
to an end, and that when they did, that was
going to free up trade between France and its faux Russia,
and that meant potentially a huge champagne market in Russia.
And Barb Nicole was making a particular kind of champagne
(09:14):
that she was confident would sell very well in Russia.
It was incredibly sweet. Do you know so turn the
dessert wine?
Speaker 2 (09:19):
Ben? I don't.
Speaker 1 (09:21):
Is that similar to what they were drinking? Well, so
turn is very sweet. This champagne was sparkling like modern champagne,
but it was very sweet. It was actually twice as
much sugar even as a modern so turn. So this
is like drinking baileis or hot chocolate or something. I mean,
it's a very very sweet sparkling drink and the widow Clico.
(09:45):
She decides when the war ends, Russian's going to go
for this. She smuggles bottles of her best vintage, the
eighteen eleven vintage, to Amsterdam, knowing that if the war
does finish, they will be very well placed to be
shipped to Russia at that moment. So she's taking this
risk because if the war doesn't end, then she's not
(10:06):
going to get any return from this wine. But if
it does, she is perfectly timed to profit. There's sort
of three brilliant moves she makes at the same time.
One is really knowing her product market fit right. She
knows that this incredibly sweet drink fits the Russian palette.
Two is being aware of the macro effects of what's
going on around her, knowing the war is going to
(10:27):
end and that will open up trade. And then three
is having the guts to smuggle this stuff into Amsterdam
so she can get a jump on the competition. That's
quite a combination. Yes, the risk comes good. Madame Cleiko's
champagne makes it to Russia, beating her competitors, including Monsieur
Moey by several weeks. She gets influencer support nineteenth century
(10:47):
style two. The Cizar says that verve Click is the
only champagne he will drink, and of course, once he
says that the entire Russian court has to follow suit.
It's the perfect product. It is there at the perfect moment. That, though,
poses its own problems, because she suddenly got this massive
demand to make this kind of champagne, and at the time,
(11:10):
making champagne is extraordinarily difficult and the whole production process
is very inefficient.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
Yet tim when people are successful, that can suddenly bring
up a new range of challenges. We spoke to Melissa
Gaiardo who started a candle company called Benita Fierce Candles,
and when her sales took off, she didn't know how
to keep up with production. I mean, she had people
in her home just making candles as fast as they
could possibly make them because she had a moment and
she had to capture it. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:37):
I mean, this is exactly the problem that Barbney Cole faced,
and she realizes she has to do something to change that.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
But in this case, it sounds like she had to
become a bit of an engineer.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
Yeah, So all champagne has a sediment. It makes the
drink cloudy. That's not what people want. They want to
clear champagne. That's true now, it was certainly true at
the time. But to filter out the sediment is this
very time consuming business. What Madame Clico invented was called
a riddling table. So riddling is the process of getting
(12:11):
the sediment out. And this is a kind of wooden
frame with holes bored into it, allowing the bottles to
be suspended at different angles, so they're basically upside down
on a diagonal. And you put the bottles in this
frame and then these expert wine riddlers come up and
they give it a sharp quarter turn every now and then.
(12:33):
And every time you have this quarter turn, you're changing
the angle of the bottle and you're very gently disturbing
the sediment. You're not mixing it back into the wine.
You're letting it slip to the bottom of the bottle.
And of course, because the bottle is upside down, the
bottom of the bottle is the neck, so you've got
this sediment gathering in the neck and you can take
(12:54):
it out of the bottle easily. So this riddling contraption,
this riddling table, is the killer app that makes it
much much easier to get the sediment out of the champagne,
and her competitors absolutely cannot work out how she is
doing this, How is she making so much champaign so quickly?
(13:15):
Moway figured it out eventually, but it took him fifteen
years to catch.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
Up, you know, Tim, She was innovating in a physical
product that had been around a long time, and it's
interesting because that never stops. We interviewed someone on the
podcast as a company, Sabanto, that is changing the way
that you plant and harvest corn. We've been consuming corn
for thousands of years. He's developing automated tractors that can
(13:39):
plant and reap the crops. I think people fall into
a trap where innovation only happens in sort of the
advanced sectors of tech, and actually there isn't an industry
around that's not waiting around to be disrupted.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
Yeah. I think that's absolutely right, and the wine industry,
as Barbneicole showed, is clearly one of them. And one
of the things that Madame Clico did here was not
just invent the process, but keep the process a secret,
so she had real loyalty from her employees who presume
could have gone to one of her competitors and collected
(14:11):
some kind of reward, but none of them did, and
that may have been because she had this profit sharing system.
So they were all making money, they felt looked after,
and they did not betray her secrets. Well, she was
shrewd in a number of ways. Is this approach of
treating your work as well sharing the gains something that
you've encountered yourself.
Speaker 2 (14:31):
Ben, loyal employees are critical. I would just say that
loyalty and employment is only partially about paying ownership. It's
you know, particularly in today's world, it's about that plus
creating the right environment, making people feel valued and like
they belong and like they have purpose. So I think
the right compensation structure is important, but it's not the
(14:52):
whole ball game.
Speaker 1 (14:53):
Yeah, Listeners to our episode on the building of the
Empire State Building might recognize this. Paul Starrett, who was
in charge of that project, was in some ways an
incredibly generous employer. He paid the workers very well. The
conditions were great, it was great food safety standards were
very high. But at the same time he watched them
absolutely like a hawk. He had really really tough minded
(15:18):
site managers, cracking down on fraud and theft and so on.
So there was this sort of sense of like, I'm
going to absolutely insist on the best possible behavior, but
at the same time, I'm going to reward that.
Speaker 2 (15:30):
You know, success is the best retention tool there is,
and success gives you the right to be tougher because
people want to be in an environment of success and
they want a rise to the occasion. You talked earlier
about the fact that she basically established the category. I
mean she drove large scale behavioral and intentive change across
(15:51):
an entire continent. It sounds like, how did she do that?
Tell me more about that.
Speaker 1 (15:55):
I think it's a fascinating case study. So at the time,
Champagne itself was not the drink it is today, and
the Champagne region was not famous for sparkling wine. It
was famous for still white wines. So by reaching these influencers,
reaching the czar, by producing this drink that perfectly matched
(16:17):
people's taste, and by creating something that seemed luxurious but
at the same time was cheap enough to be affordable
because she had made the production process more efficient and
to make it available at scale, she creates this whole category. Suddenly,
this drink is something that the czar demands, and yet
the ordinary middle classes can afford it, and it basically
(16:39):
becomes the drink of celebrations everywhere. She established all of this.
By the time she died in eighteen sixty six, the
Widow Clico had a global empire. She was exporting her
wine as far afield as the United States. Sales had
reached seven hundred and fifty thousand bottles a year. That
is up from seventeen thousand bottles back in eighteen eleven
(17:01):
before her big breakthrough, and the brand is now so
well recognized. I think it's these second most popular brand
of champagne in the world. And if you go into
a bar in France, I understand that you can simply
ask for a glass of the Widow and people will
know that you want verve Clico Champagne.
Speaker 2 (17:21):
Tim What's interesting about that is we think that hyperscaling
is a modern phenomenon. You look at the likes of
Apple or Amazon or Google or some of the other
more recent startups that have gone global with their impact.
And while the time scales might have been longer, this
was maybe fifty or sixty years as opposed to five
or ten. The impact even back then could be global
(17:43):
in scale, in terms of how far reaching some of
these insights and innovations can be.
Speaker 1 (17:48):
Yeah. Absolutely, it's partly about developing the product that people
want to drink. It's partly about the marketing, but it
is also about the production. You've got to be able
to make this stuff. You have to get all of
these things right. And that's what she did.
Speaker 2 (18:01):
Yes, and aspiration and luxury is a timeless phenomenon.
Speaker 1 (18:05):
Something else timeless is the motivational business quote. And I
actually have a motivational business quote from wido'click. I rather
like this one. This was a letter she wrote to
one of her grandchildren, and she commented, the world is
in perpetual motion and we must invent the things of tomorrow.
(18:25):
One must go before others, be determined and exacting, and
let your intelligence direct your life. Act with audacity.
Speaker 2 (18:36):
What an incredible woman. I hope that aspiring female and
frankly male entrepreneurs can hear this story because the woman
was groundbreaking in so many ways. I don't speak French.
I didn't know what the word for meant, so I
kept waiting for tim to tell me that she married
mister viv and it turns out she did it all
on her own. And I think that's fantastic what she
was able to accomplish as a woman in early nineteenth
(18:57):
century France. I mean, I'm just bowled over by that.
I think about innovation, resilience, scale, grit vision. You know,
these are things we talk about all the time in
business circles, and she had them and spades and pioneered
them to something that has stood the test of time
and more ways than one.
Speaker 1 (19:14):
No, Ben, I will drink to that. Ben Walter, thank
you very much for joining me on Cautionary Tales.
Speaker 2 (19:21):
Thanks so much for having me, Tim, What a great story.
Speaker 1 (19:25):
This episode was sponsored by Chase for Business and I
was talking to Ben Walter, who is the CEO of
Chase for Business. You can of course find the Unshakeables
wherever you get your podcasts, and there will be a
new episode of Cautionary Tales in this feed very shortly.
For a full list of our sources, see the show
(19:46):
notes at Timharford dot com. Cautionary Tales is written by
me Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright, Alice Fines, and Ryan Dilly.
It's produced by Alice Fines and Marilyn Rust. The sound
design and original music are the work of Pascal Wise.
(20:07):
Additional sound design is by Carlos San Juan at Brain Audio.
Bend A Dafhaffrey edited the scripts. The show features the
voice talents of Melanie Guttridge, Stella Harford, Oliver Hembrough, Sarah Jupp,
messaam Monroe, Jamal Westman, and Rufus Wright. The show also
wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg,
(20:29):
Greta Cohne, Sarah Nix, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody, Christina Sullivan,
Kira Posey, and Powen Miller. Cautionary Tales is a production
of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded at Wardore Studios in London
by Tom Berry. If you like the show, please remember
to share, rate and review. It really makes a difference
(20:50):
to us and if you want to hear the show,
add free sign up to Pushkin Plus on the show
page on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot Fm, slash
plus
Hosts And Creators
Ben Walter
Kathleen Griffith
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