Luke Battiloro on Battling the Post-Covid Economy! | Vavoom Vodka

Luke Battiloro is an entrepreneur that is well-known for his adventurous approach to marketing! It’s a skill that he’s cultivated over the years, jumping from industry to industry and wearing as many hats as possible to become the jack of all trades that he aspires to be.

His most latest venture—his premium spirits brand, Vavoom Vodka—is a great example of what he can accomplish with his unsinkability. After all, Luke managed to come out of 2020 with Vavoom Vodka in the positives.

If you’re curious about how Luke Battiloro has managed to beat out the odds, continue reading! This interview should tell you all that you need to know.

Let’s dive straight in! Please introduce yourself! Who are you? And, what do you do?

Luke Battiloro: Hey! My name is Luke Battiloro, I’m the founder and CEO of Vavoom Vodka. Vavoom is my current focus at the moment, but I’m not known to stand around for very long. I like to keep myself busy by getting to know new industries. Of those industries, the ones that I have the most experience with would be the CBD and supplements industry (both of which I used to be heavily involved in before I got into selling Vodka), but my consulting work—wherein I help other companies generate new business—really ends up taking me just about anywhere.

As a bit of fun, what is something about you that, perhaps, not many people would know?

Luke Battiloro: I’m an incredibly driven person. I crave challenges, and I hate giving up on things. So, I work on self-improvement a lot. Not just physically (I take my weight training very seriously), but mentally as well.

In the past couple of years, neuro-hacking has been something I’ve been ‘dabbling’ in on the side while I work on my business. I’ve gotten to the point in my training now (which involves learning to breathe underwater and swimming with sharks — a long story that I talked about in another nterview or on Instagram@lukebattiloro) that I’m starting to see improvement in how I make decisions. More specifically, it’s allowed me to step up my game when it comes to making hard-and-fast decisions, you know? The type that would probably have been really stressful to make otherwise.

Now, shifting our focus back on Vavoom Vodka, can you tell us a little bit more about what kind of business it is so that our readers know what they should expect?

Luke Battiloro: Vavoom Vodka is a high-end, premium vodka brand. Our vodka is made only of the finest ingredients and is 100% grain-based, gluten-free, and five-times distilled to match its, admittedly, larger-than-life packaging.

Its conception came about when I was looking for a ‘standout’ piece that I could bring to a dinner party with my friends. And, as I was sorely disappointed when I realized the rather lackluster Vodka options at the time, I decided to go out and make my own – pouring my all into its production, and later, it’s marketing.

To my understanding, you chose to sell Vavoom Vodka exclusively online and direct-to-consumers. Why is that?

Luke Battiloro: The alcohol industry is large. So large that it is nearly impossible to breakthrough — especially with a large majority of alcohol brands being parts of big equity firms.

As a small brand that was just starting out, we didn’t want to do what everyone else was doing. And, to that end, selling products directly to consumers was something that I had tons of experience with already (with CBD at least), so doing the same with Vavoom seemed like the obvious, nay, the right choice.

How has selling exclusively online affected how you do business? Was it a benefit or a disadvantage when you first started off?

Luke Battiloro: Despite what others may have thought, our decision to sell our Vavoom Vodka exclusive online ended up being the best move for us. Especially with COVID-19.

Because of it, we were able to get ahead of our competitors when it came to online customer service and seamless checkout experiences (because those were things that we had always known we needed to focus on). To the point that, in the past couple of months alone, I’ve had several big companies reaching out to me to try and figure out how exactly we were able to get our products to our customers.

What kind of things did you end up improving on with Vavoom Vodka last year?

Luke Battiloro: Even though we were already ahead of most of our competition in terms of shipping and checkout experience, we knew better than to grow complacent. Efficiency was the name of the game last year, and we weren’t about to let ourselves be beaten right after we managed to pull off at least 3x the amount of sales we were pulling before the pandemic.

So, we did our best to find a way to keep up with the bigger online retail companies who were able to ship express while still keeping our prices low enough that our customers wouldn’t be tempted to turn to cheaper alternatives that had slower shipping rates. All while constantly making improvements to enhance our customers’ checkout experience.

And lastly, to top us all off. What should we expect from you next? Where do you think Vavoom Vodka will go in the future?

Luke Battiloro: At the moment, everything is going wonderfully for us. Vavoom is growing fast, and even after COVID, we’ve managed to cultivate a strong sense of optimism that has allowed us to continue to keep trucking through — despite the strangeness of the economy now. In any case, I don’t know where we’ll be five or ten years from now, but I know where we aspire to be. And, we’re not about to stop until we meet every last one of our goals.