How it started:

Founders Gert Jan van Arkel (Dutch living in France Managing director of Wineforces)  and his best friend John Oliveira (Portuguese lived in USA and previous owner of Trivin NY and Wineforces) were in New Zealand and created the brand Tussock Jumper and the first animal was born: The Sheep.

Soon after the Boar came with the French wines, the Wolf with Italian and many more to follow. Officially we have 14 animals but over the years made some exclusives and are now 18.

For SPAR we will expand our portfolio with more South African wines and bring alive the elephant.

Today:

With great sadness in 2020 we lost John to cancer and both his sons took over the USA business. You can find our Portuguese tribute wine with only the jumper on a hanger. (special)

His son, Marc Oliveira, is active partner within Wineforces and next to Tussock Jumper buys a lot of wines for Trivin through Wineforces with many successful brands made past years.

Wineforces is a very successful marketing company with a serious track record, we don’t have vineyards or a winery but partners where we source wines ourselves.

Next to Gert Jan we have our own consultant Winemaker, Export manager and small team of people (1,5FTE) at the office.

With 2 central warehouses in Netherlands and New York we deliver the whole world.

Today we export in 60+ countries round the world and see the brand growing each year in turnover and have over 30 SKU’s pending.

Brand strength:

The strength of the brand is the animal with red sweater, the consistent quality and strong value for money concept.

Consumers/People in general are not good in remembering a brand name but they do remember strong images.

The Apple logo, Mc Donald’s are such strong examples, obviously in a whole different level but it does give an idea how the brain works, an image sticks a name only after a while.

When a consumer is in a shop and sees a shelf full of wines bottles, they most of the time have no clue idea what they want.

Group 1 they have Zero clue: look for safety, result animals is a safe image, colour red is attractive, so they give it a try.

Group 2 they have an idea about the grape variety but don’t know where to look, Tussock has the grape variety strongly visible on 90% of the portfolio.

Group 3 they know what they want but have difficulty to find a safe choice they want typicity, so buying a chardonnay it must be a chardonnay.

All three groups will be happy with what they bought but next day/week they will forget about the name but not the animal with red sweater.

Result they go back and want to rebuy and will find out there are more options and will shop within the group of wines.

Success:

Our success around the word has proven to work with several big retailers, Jumbo Netherlands, X5 Russia, Coles Australia, Carrefour France, Spar Ireland and most interesting one Prima Kazakhstan where we are considered one of the biggest wine brands.

We are selling in countries with their own strong wine production for example new world wines into France.

Quality:

All our wines are checked by 2 independent laboratories, and we have a proven track record of getting +15 point out of 20 with some 17 points wines.

The laboratory in Netherlands (Meron) also keeps our parameters and can notify us per bottling if wines are consistent and our desired quality.