YouSaid · the spoken record

Bonnie Harvey

lines on the record: 93
first: 2024-09-16
most recent: 2024-09-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Michael and I had been out at a late dinner, came home and walked in the door and I said, Michael, I know what the label looks like. And I said, quick, I want you to go to the blackboard that we had in the kitchen where we'd walked in. And I said, you've got to draw a foot. And I said, I can see this big red or green gold foot on the label would certainly get people's attention. It doesn't look like anything else out there on the shelf. It's easy to remember. Barefoot's the name of the wine. It's also”
2024-09-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Barefoot Wine: Bonnie Harvey and Michael Houlihan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was chosen because another thing that Don Brown had said during Michael's meeting was that he wanted to see the label with the name the same as the logo. And he wanted her to see the shopper when she was four feet away. And I had an inspiration of what the label would look like”
2024-09-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Barefoot Wine: Bonnie Harvey and Michael Houlihan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he'd put it in a big jug and put a screw top on it. And there was some people in the Bay Area that enjoyed his wines. And it had been off the market for 12 years when Michael and I had started. And we thought this was a nice friendly name, barefoot. And of course, barefoot is the way that grapes were originally crushed, so it definitely had something to do with grapes. So we purchased the rights to use the name Barefoot Bynum and we bottled under that name for the first year. We drop the name Bynum. It was too confusing for everyone, of course. So then we just called it Barefoot Wines.”
2024-09-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Barefoot Wine: Bonnie Harvey and Michael Houlihan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the reason was because they were worshipping the French pretty hard. They thought they were second-rate winemakers to the French, and the French were the ones. If you wanted wine, you had to get French wine. And so it took Americans a long time to develop their own pride in what they were doing. And in those days, they were trying to copy the French as much as they could. And so the idea of a wine that didn't have a number on it was just unheard of. That was just sacrilege. You couldn't do that.”
2024-09-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Barefoot Wine: Bonnie Harvey and Michael Houlihan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Nobody was doing it on the scale that we were imagining. We didn't have any real competition other than Robert Mandavi, but his had an appellation on it and it had a date on it.”
2024-09-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Barefoot Wine: Bonnie Harvey and Michael Houlihan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, but it sounds like Michael, the insight you had was we need to focus on making a consistent flavor no matter what year the grapes are grown, no matter what the weather was like that year, what the wind was like, or when the grapes were harvested, like it doesn't matter. All we're going to focus on is a consistent flavor every time you buy this wine. Was anyone else doing that at the time at all”
2024-09-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Barefoot Wine: Bonnie Harvey and Michael Houlihan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's absolutely correct. The profile was fruit forward. Low acid, easy drinking, soft on the palate, and mimic the taste of the grape. So when you taste a cabernet sauvignon, it tasted like the cabernet Sauvignon grape.”
2024-09-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Barefoot Wine: Bonnie Harvey and Michael Houlihan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, so Tuesday night won, which meant that you didn't have to create a vintage. You didn't need to use grapes from a specific year. You could just use whatever pressed juice was available and blend it. And presumably that would give you an opportunity to get really inexpensive bulk wine.”
2024-09-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Barefoot Wine: Bonnie Harvey and Michael Houlihan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would say that's technically correct. They cared about it on Saturday night. They cared about it when they brought a bottle of wine over to a friend's house. But if they were having hamburgers on Tuesday, they didn't care about it that much. So there was a market that we saw that had been unaddressed everyday drinking wine market. So what are people drinking every day, not Saturday night, but Tuesday night?”
2024-09-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Barefoot Wine: Bonnie Harvey and Michael Houlihan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So at this point, most wine had a year on it, it would say, nineteen eighty three or 1981. And also, it would say where it's from Sonoma County or Russian River or wherever it was from, right? What you're saying is that that only appealed to a very small percentage of consumers that actually most people who wanted to buy wine didn't care about any of that stuff.”
2024-09-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Barefoot Wine: Bonnie Harvey and Michael Houlihan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She was buying it like a staple, like sugar, like bread, like meat. She was buying wine as one of the ingredients that she needed for her week's worth of Food. And so we started to interview women and we found out that what they were looking for was wine that tasted the same from year to year to year, which was the opposite of the vintage wine idea.”
2024-09-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Barefoot Wine: Bonnie Harvey and Michael Houlihan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Don Brown said, make sure she can see the label from four feet away. I noticed he used the pronoun she. So, I did some research and I found out that like 78% of supermarket shoppers were women and that they were actually doing the buying even though the men were the gatekeepers. So even though the supermarket wine buyer was a male, his customers were females for the most part.”
2024-09-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Barefoot Wine: Bonnie Harvey and Michael Houlihan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To quote his jargon, he said, Look, Hoolahan, he says, give me a salt and pepper act and make it better than Bob cheaper than Bob and put it in a pig. Can you do that? And I'm writing down salt pepper Bob Pig, and I'm looking at it and I'm thinking, what language is this, you know? And then I thought, I better not ask. He says, can you do that? And I said, yeah, I can do it. He says, good, get out of my office. Well, I didn't know what it was. I wrote it down. I had to translate it. And what I found out was that the pig was the 1.5 liter magnum and that the salt and pepper act was a red and a white wine under the same brand. And then Bob was Robert. Robert Mondave had a red and white in a magnum, so he wanted to have another alternative to Robert Mondavi on the shelf.”
2024-09-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Barefoot Wine: Bonnie Harvey and Michael Houlihan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just to get the meeting with him was amazing. I called him up. I said, Don Brown, I said, I know you went to St. Mary's. I went to Bishop Dowd and we cleaned your clock on the basketball field. I said, listen, I'd like to meet with you. I got something I want to talk to you. He says, I don't have time to talk to you. I said, you know, I'm going to make it worth your while. Just give me 15 minutes, Don. And so it was luck that I knew this guy. And he went on in his career and he became the buyer for one of the largest supermarkets in California. And so when I went to Don. In about 37 seconds, he gave me the equivalent of a college education in wine marketing and merchandising. He says, I've got room in the 1.5 liter section.”
2024-09-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Barefoot Wine: Bonnie Harvey and Michael Houlihan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. Our nickname for Mark was Mixmaster Deluxe. Because he had a way of looking at wine and fixing it. He could blend out the mistakes and he could accentuate the benefits. He's a top winemaker. He still is today. He's a fantastic artist at what he does.”
2024-09-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Barefoot Wine: Bonnie Harvey and Michael Houlihan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were not wine aficionados, but Mark Lyon was. And when we said instead of us working for you, you work for us, we met, you work for us as not just the winemaker, but the wine designer. And this is something that Mark wanted to do for years, and we provided a vehicle for him to actually do that. So we were not the wine people. As a matter of fact, as a business grew, we got excellent winemakers, some of the best.”
2024-09-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Barefoot Wine: Bonnie Harvey and Michael Houlihan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah, he's in the car. Yeah. He's sitting next to me. Looks at me and goes, like, whatever it is, because we're facing destitution here, you know, and a big waste of time. And I'm not going to get my commission and all kinds of things. And so I said, well, you're facing quite a loss here of 300 grand, Mark. What would you say if instead of us working for you, you work for us? Instead of the winery owing you the money, we execute the contract and we owe you the money. And what if we pay you off over time so we can use the cash flow from the sales of the wine to finance the business?”
2024-09-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Barefoot Wine: Bonnie Harvey and Michael Houlihan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we had just completed dinner at a lovely restaurant down in Sonoma. We're driving home and all of a sudden it hit me and I just slammed on the brakes and pulled the car over to the curb and I said, I have an idea”
2024-09-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Barefoot Wine: Bonnie Harvey and Michael Houlihan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, Michael, when Mark said this, I mean, because you guys had done a bunch of work, but there was still more you had to put in, all of a sudden the money guy, the guy who's owed the money but also has the money to finance this, says, I'm out. So what'd you do at that point?”
2024-09-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Barefoot Wine: Bonnie Harvey and Michael Houlihan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He was very wise to say that because that's exactly the situation he was in. He couldn't take on another project. And we weren't intending on doing all the business for him on an ongoing basis just to set him up. Basically, we were doing whatever was required to get him the money. We simply didn't know what was required.”
2024-09-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Barefoot Wine: Bonnie Harvey and Michael Houlihan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes And I had the licenses in place. We had bottling scheduled for right about Easter of 86. And it was Christmas time of 85 when Mark said, I have a confession to make. I can't take on another responsibility. He's full-time winemaker and he's got 100 acres of vineyards he's managing. He said, I'm sorry I can't take on another project. I guess I'll just have to.”
2024-09-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Barefoot Wine: Bonnie Harvey and Michael Houlihan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, well, Mark had the cash, and I was getting this line of credit with the bottling supplies company in Mark's name. I could only do business with one company that was California glass. They were the only ones that would answer my questions. I was asking too many questions. People were just hanging up on me. So I finally found somebody who'd pay attention and realize how ignorant I was and that I really did have a big project and that they would sell a lot of glass. So somebody listened to me there and became my mentor. And we worked throughout August, September, October, November, and December, what is that, about five, six months.”
2024-09-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Barefoot Wine: Bonnie Harvey and Michael Houlihan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Michael went about getting information from the marketplace and I had gone about getting all the research that was necessary for the licenses. I started researching bottling supplies, different colored glass, different types of corks and foils we realized early on we had to come up with a label. Well, what's the label look like? And gee, things seemed to be getting a little more complicated.”
2024-09-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Barefoot Wine: Bonnie Harvey and Michael Houlihan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All right. So was this the Michael, you had been a consultant already for a few years for wineries, and Bonnie, you'd been doing helping office or organize offices. Was this the first project that the two of you kind of combined your forces on?”
2024-09-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Barefoot Wine: Bonnie Harvey and Michael Houlihan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Whether or not we were going to help him sell it hadn't we hadn't gotten to that point in the procedure yet. But I was getting paid by the hour and Michael was getting a percent of that $300,000 that he was collecting.”
2024-09-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Barefoot Wine: Bonnie Harvey and Michael Houlihan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, so you guys, Bonnie, you feel like part of your job is to get this money to him. So you guys acquire, the idea is you acquire $300,000 in bottled wine are you going to, and then you're going to help Mark sell it. And then he's going to get his money back. And Bonnie, you've done your job as a consultant. That's basically sounds like that was the plan.”
2024-09-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Barefoot Wine: Bonnie Harvey and Michael Houlihan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, that's exactly what Bonnie said. She said, This isn't going to pay our bills. This isn't going to help Mark out. Now we have to do all this other stuff. And I said, yeah, but how long could that take? How hard could that be? Because I had no idea. You know, I didn't realize that I would need 50 different licenses from different governments to do this. And here I was a government guy. And so we went to work”
2024-09-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Barefoot Wine: Bonnie Harvey and Michael Houlihan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I came back and I said, I think I've got this solved because I thought at the time, you know, Mark could bottle it up and sell it to a supermarket and get his money that way. But I wanted to make sure that they were committed.”
2024-09-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Barefoot Wine: Bonnie Harvey and Michael Houlihan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, you know, this was a situation where I was either going to walk out of there with nothing or I had to come up with something pretty fast.”
2024-09-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Barefoot Wine: Bonnie Harvey and Michael Houlihan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they made the wine out of it. But now they have it in bulk wine. They haven't bottled it. So then I look out the other window and I see this strange looking room that looks like a handball court, you know, with a chrome locomotive sat right in the middle of it. It's got tracks and everything. And I said, what's with the Chrome locomotive in the handball court? And they said, well, that's not a Chrome locomotive. That's a Chrome's bottling line from Germany. I said, really? And they said, yeah, and it's not a handball court. It's a clean room. It's where we do our bottling. And it hit me like a Chrome locomotive. And I said, what would happen if we settled the debt by you guys giving us some of that bulk wine in those steel tanks over there and run it through that bottling line? And instead of paying us in dollars, which I know you can't, you can pay us in bottled wine. We'll come up with a label. We'll come up with a sales program. How hard could that be? How long could that take?”
2024-09-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Barefoot Wine: Bonnie Harvey and Michael Houlihan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's going south in a hurry. And I look out this window in the conference room and there's a big line of tanks out there, a big line of stainless steel tanks. And I said, well, what's in those tanks? And they said, well, it's Cabernet Sauvignon and Sauvignon Blanc bulk wine. And I'm thinking, isn't that interesting? That's what Mark sold you.”
2024-09-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Barefoot Wine: Bonnie Harvey and Michael Houlihan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you know, I just met this girl, right? I've only known her for a year, and she comes to me and asks me to go collect 300 large from this winery. So I said, okay, well, I'll give it a shot, you know, no promises. So I got an appointment with their board of directors. And as I drive up, the guard stops me on the way in and he says, I hope you're not here to collect any money. And I said, well, as a matter of fact, I am. Well, he says, we just declared Chapter 11 this morning. So I thought, well, do I go through with the meeting? I'm going to go through with the meeting. So I went through at the meeting and I was sitting there. And I'm trying to make small talk.”
2024-09-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Barefoot Wine: Bonnie Harvey and Michael Houlihan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Winery, yes, in the town of Sonoma And he also had grapes that he was growing 100 acres along the Russian River. He was not just a client, but before that he was a friend and he was somebody that Michael had introduced me to. So then I took over as Bill Paying, an organization for his office, and that also involved helping keep track of his records for his vineyard. And within a short period of time, I saw that he was owed $300,000 for three harvests. And that was in 1985.”
2024-09-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Barefoot Wine: Bonnie Harvey and Michael Houlihan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I'll go get you your drink. She says, That's not a bad idea. When I came back with the drinks, she was gone. And so I had to wait until she finally came back. And we hit it off. We started talking about things that, because we were both adults. And we'd been around on the single scene for a while. So we knew what the behavior was in the way that people would behave in those kinds of environments. And so we were actually commenting to each other on how people were going to behave in this club. And sure enough, they behaved exactly the way that we predicted. And we got a big laugh out of it. And so that was it, you know, we've been together ever since.”
2024-09-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Barefoot Wine: Bonnie Harvey and Michael Houlihan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was called Magnolias at the time. And this club, one whole wall of the club was the stage. And there'd be like 11 pieces up there, you know, lead guitar, bass guitar, scratchy rhythm guitar, three horn rhythm section, drums, congas. I mean, it was a serious orchestra. In those days, it was more romantic by today's standards. I was talking to my friends and was looking behind them. I saw this woman come through the door and she was backlit by the streetlight. And I thought, you know, excuse me, guys, I'm in love. And so I left. They'd heard me say that before, but this time they didn't see me for four days. I walked up to her and I said, I bet you're looking for a drink. And she says, as a matter of fact, I am. So I said, why don't you scope the place out and see if there's anybody better looking in here than me?”
2024-09-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Barefoot Wine: Bonnie Harvey and Michael Houlihan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly. They're brilliant people and they're very good at what they do and they're good at their own business. But I quickly realized that they don't know how to run a business. And I realized that if I could just organize everything and put it in a format that was easy for them to understand, I think that most business owners need that.”
2024-09-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Barefoot Wine: Bonnie Harvey and Michael Houlihan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do filing, do coding Other boring stuff. But as I worked for them a little longer, I started getting more interesting jobs. And once you've learned how to file, there's no challenge after that. So I was interested in learning more about business. It was exciting for me to learn. So I continued to work with much like Michael did, the clients that I got on a temporary basis through the agency. I would go back and work with them because I would recognize a need that they had that I knew I could fulfill. So I started getting my own clients after that.”
2024-09-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Barefoot Wine: Bonnie Harvey and Michael Houlihan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I like traveling, and San Francisco was such an exciting place I was hearing about it and reading about it, and I thought, I've got to go to San Francisco. So as soon as I turned 18, basically, I headed off to San Francisco.”
2024-09-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Barefoot Wine: Bonnie Harvey and Michael Houlihan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's the wine industry, and so I get sucked into the wine industry as a consultant. And so that's what I was doing really when I met Bonnie”
2024-09-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Barefoot Wine: Bonnie Harvey and Michael Houlihan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And in the process, I learned how to write business plans and write business procedures and manuals and job descriptions and checklists and all of this fundamental stuff. Then I realized that I was going nowhere in the government and my grandmother. She just about died when I quit. She said, oh, Michael, you gave up that fine civil service job with all that great security. Yeah, but I was business-minded and the government was not the place to be. However, I learned about government and I learned about how to get things through the government. And then I had the opportunity to move to Sonoma County. Now, when I was a kid, my parents used to bring me to Johnson's Beach in what we called Gurneyville, which is actually Guernville. Guernville, yeah. In Sonoma County. And of course, now that I've moved here, what is the industry here?”
2024-09-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Barefoot Wine: Bonnie Harvey and Michael Houlihan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No matter when you bought it, and they wanted a label that evoked fun, which is why you get the footprint in the sand. Now, if all of this sounds like it was easy, it was far from it. Bonnie and Michael spent years and years trying to convince skeptical buyers from supermarkets that they were on to something. But today, Barefoot wine is worth over half a billion dollars, and it's a huge part of the E&J Gallo company. Bonnie and Michael met and became a couple in the early 1980s as kids, Bonnie grew up in Portland, Oregon, Michael in Oakland, California. After college, Michael got a job in government advising businesses on urban renewal projects for the city of Oakland.”
2024-09-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Barefoot Wine: Bonnie Harvey and Michael Houlihan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which in many cases is useful. Before they started barefoot wine, Bonnie Harvey and Michael Hoolahan knew very little about wine. Both of them were accountant consultant types. They didn't know about Terroir or vintages or noble grapes. They couldn't tell you the difference between a claret and a beaujois, but they did manage to create what is now one of the biggest wine brands on earth. And there's a good chance you can picture the logo. It looks like a footprint in the sand. But here's what Bonnie and Michael did know when they launched Barefoot back in the 1980s. They knew that wine wasn't being made, or at least marketed, for people like them. It was impenetrable, snobby, and felt exclusive. They wanted to market wine to beer drinkers. They wanted the wine to taste consistent.”
2024-09-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Barefoot Wine: Bonnie Harvey and Michael Houlihan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He takes the bottle in his hand and he spins it around and he looks at me and he goes, Are you crazy? You put a foot on it. You can't put a foot on wine. Yeah. He says, and nobody's ever heard of this barefoot idea. So I say, okay, well, you know, what am I going to do, Don? We bottled it all up for you. He says, well, I guess you're going to have to sell this to every independent, every mama papa, every corner grocery store, every restaurant until it becomes a household name. When that happens, I'll put it in. And I said, but that's going to take years, Don. He says, that's right. You better get started”
2024-09-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Barefoot Wine: Bonnie Harvey and Michael Houlihan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT