Wine Down, Sarah Girand and Jaime Hiraishi

Over the last year, we incorporated our Equity Pledge goals into our monthly KPIs and monitored them closely. We exceeded our shorter term goals [1.  Have at least 75% of our Wine Club selections and 35% of our full in the bar menu (wine, beer, bites, non-alcoholic drinks) made by typically underrepresented populations (Black, Indigenous, or other People of Color and/or women).  2. Share at least 1%/part of monthly sales to causes we care about every month], and they’ve become such an integral part of our regular business practices, we no longer need to have them as goals—they’re standard operating procedure now.  Because of this, we may not need the day-to-day operational equity goals, and may want to focus on our longer term goals for this year.

For our third goal [6-12 month goal: Incorporate discussion of implicit bias, privilege, race into onboarding and training], we took the Diversity in Wine leadership training in preparation for this goal, however we didn’t hire and new staff to incorporate it into onboarding and training.  This is an ongoing goal, if/when we do bring on new team members.

And for our 4th goal, [12 month goal: Formalize profit sharing partnership with team and promote from within], we have promoted our one team member and are figuring out an incentive structure. To be candid, we didn’t have any profits to be able to share a percent of in 2022, so we just gave a bonus at the end of the year. For this coming year, we are still figuring out if we should continue with bonuses, or make them more incentive based so it’s more similar to a profit-sharing model, but we want to make sure it’s not tied to profits again in case we don’t have any.