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Club W bills itself as the world’s only personalized wine club where its members can receive a curated selection of wines developed exclusively for Club W by noteworthy winemakers.
The Club W experience is intended to provide quality, unique and personalized wines straight to your home. The Los Angeles-based company’s mission is to transform choosing wine into an ongoing dialogue between Club W experts and a customer’s personal tastes.
Club W has leveraged Autodesk PLM 360 software as the foundation for its product team to work error free in a collaborative environment, which in turn has helped the company grow its product sourcing more than 900 percent in one year. For its unique approach to business, Club W is being recognized as the Autodesk Inventing the Future recipient for August.
Autodesk seeks Inventing the Future candidates each month from its Manufacturing customer base through a brief Q&A interview on a company or individual addressing their business, products and inventive spirit. Here is what Club W Vice President of Operations KJ Carlson had to say about leveraging Autodesk software:
Autodesk: What does your company develop, and why is it important for the world?
Carlson: Club W is leading the grape-to-glass revolution. Wine is a beautiful thing, a snapshot of a particular place and time bottled and stored for people around the world to enjoy. However, over time it has become a story-less commodity, with many layers between the people that harvest the grapes, transforming the juice, and those that eventually drink it.
At Club W, our mission is to make the wine experience better. We are reducing the layers between the winemakers and the end-consumer and, along the way, helping keep the wine and its story strong and rich.
Autodesk: How has adopting technology helped your company evolve?
Carlson: Core value #2 at Club W is to "Challenge the Status Quo, Including Ourselves.” Technology is a major component of that. Using industry-leading systems like our warehouse and product line management software, we are able to increase accuracy during the production and shipping processes, delivering a more consistent result to our customers. Even more, because we've invested in these systems early in our lifecycle, we've been able to scale rapidly without adding overhead.
Autodesk: What Autodesk software do you use and why?
Carlson: Currently, we use Autodesk PLM 360 and are a subscription customer. PLM 360 allows us to be dynamic in our process changes, while having an easy-to-use and reliable way to communicate our sourcing, logistics and product details all in one place.
For example, by using PLM 360, we’ve been able to grow our product sourcing more than 900 percent in one year while keeping our logistics operations headcount flat.
Autodesk: How do you see your company five years from now? In 10 years?
Carlson: We are growing so fast, its tough to imagine where we will be in five to 10 years. A little less than two years ago, we we're just getting our feet wet in a rapidly growing direct-to-consumer wine market.
Today, we're a leader in the industry and have expanded into bars and restaurants, continuing to deliver on our goal of putting a great bottle of wine on every table and a great story in every bottle.
Autodesk: What does being an operations leader mean to you? [You fill in blank with your occupation.]
Carlson: Being an operations leader means that my team and I are responsible for always keeping the wheels on the bus. As we've grown, matured and continue to change, the problems our company faces also change. Operations fills that critical of role of handling what ever someone else isn’t responsible for, regardless of whether we've been assigned the responsibility or not. I've been fortunate to grow an amazing team that embodies our core values and ensures that no matter what happens, today (and tomorrow) that our customers will be delighted.
Do you think you have what it takes to be recognized by Autodesk for Inventing the Future? If so, send in your submission to inventingthefuture@autodesk.com.
