Mail drop: Plastic bottles make home wine deliveries a reality

A ‘wine-by-post’ business has redesigned conventional glass wine bottles with plastic alternatives.  

Garçon Wines, based in London, runs a mail order wine service using plastic bottles that fit through letterboxes. 

The standard 75cl bottles are flattened for posting. Garçon Wines target busy workers in cities and hope to remove the cost of failed home deliveries, estimated by the Interactive Media in Retail Group to be £771 million. 

Garçon Wines hopes the switch from glass to plastic will reduce manufacturing carbon footprint and improve recycling rates.

The PETG bottles are made by a specialised bottle manufacturer in Shenzhen, China, and packed in padding and a box. 

Santiago Navarro, Co-founder, said: “Having previously established and run an online wine company delivering wines to customers in cases of regular bottles, I saw first-hand how inconvenient this method of delivery was for our city-living customers and how much unnecessary work it caused us, the company, when a delivery failed or bottles shattered in transit. Wine sales for at-home drinking in UK was worth £6.7 billion in 2015 and we cannot allow delivery issues to stop consumers receiving wine when they’re not home.” 

Navarro’s partner at Garçon Wines, Joe Revell, won an American television show ‘Pop-up Start Up’, on CNBC, to receive £20,000 of funding for their idea.