By Nathaniel Luce
Sarah Woodnorth is a second-year MBA student at the Owen School. The Wisconsin native and Boston College graduate came to Owen with three years of marketing and project management experience in the insurance industry. But after her first year of graduate school, she decided to branch out — all the way to California wine country. This past summer she worked for the largest winery in the United States, where she learned the ins and outs of marketing in the wine and spirits industry and traveled to Napa and Sonoma to see the wine making process firsthand.
Internship: Assistant Brand Manager for E. & J. Gallo Winery
Location: Modesto, California
One word that describes the internship: Fun
Would you recommend the internship?: Yes
Why did you intern at E. & J. Gallo?
I knew I wanted to work in brand management, which means that typically you will find yourself at either a consumer packaged goods company or a food and beverage company. But when I went to the National Black MBA Conference, I realized that Gallo had a brand management internship opportunity, which was exciting because it was wine and spirits and it was in California. Business school is all about challenging yourself and growing and I knew that Gallo would give me the opportunity to really branch out, and try something a little different.
What was day-to-day life like at E. & J. Gallo?
A lot of fun. Very fast paced. I was in the Popular Business unit, working on the Gallo Family Vineyards brand, one of the only brands that has the family namesake on it. It’s one of their largest brands by volume.
The day-to-day was very similar to a start-up environment. People are working really hard and then take a break and play basketball or hop around in moon boots. I was running around from building to building, meeting with people in operations or wine making or packaging or talking with our consumer insights team. The job was very collaborative, fun, and fast-paced.
What was the biggest highlight of your internship?
Going to Napa and Sonoma to visit the “supply chain,” aka visit the vineyards and tasting rooms. That’s where a lot of Gallo’s premium wines come from. It was definitely a once in a lifetime experience, and a great opportunity to learn about winemaking right from the source.
What projects did you work on for E. & J. Gallo?
I had three specific projects. My main project involved a three SKU (stockkeeping unit) sub-line of the Gallo Family Vineyards’ brand. These wines are sweet and fruity, which is very different than the other wines in the brand’s portfolio. For my project, I analyzed marketplace trends, consumer preferences, and the competitive landscape. And using my findings, I made recommendations on how to optimize the product offering when launching the wines in additional markets. It was a very analytical and strategic project.
My second project was very general management focused. I examined Gallo’s entire portfolio, and made recommendations on how we could reduce expenses on the brand without harming consumer value. For this project I worked cross-functionally with people in wine making, glass, packaging and fiber, and our vendors to see where we could reduce costs. In the end, I identified about twenty different savings opportunities and recommended six that were worth researching further and potentially implementing.
For my third project, I worked with two other interns and Gallo’s New Business and Product Development team. We were given a consumer insight for a whitespace in the marketplace, and we used that to develop a target consumer profile and the new brand’s mission and values. We put it all into a creative brief, which we passed along to our advertising agency and they came back with a list of names and designs for the bottle. We chose a combination we really liked, and then created some in-store and out-of-store executions to showcase how the consumer would interact with the brand. This project was definitely the most creative out of the three.
Would you recommend an internship at E. & J. Gallo to other students?
Definitely! I had an incredibly memorable and fun experience. I chose this internship with the hopes of learning and challenging myself and I really feel that I accomplished that goal. And it was so different from other corporate environments I’ve experienced. Gallo is one big Italian family, so you have to be ready to be embraced from a corporate side and a personal side. They’re very entrepreneurial, very much self-starters, so you have to be able to hit the ground running.
The brand teams themselves were very small. They have more than 90 brands in their portfolio. As an assistant brand manager, when you come in you could be managing an entire brand yourself. That’s a big change from what you’d find at a larger consumer packaged goods company, where you’re normally running a very small component as part of a larger brand. It’s an amazing opportunity to really take ownership of your work.
Contact Person: Brett Israel Director, Business News and Communications Vanderbilt University Owen Graduate School of Management
Contact Phone: (615) 322-3469
Contact Email: brett.israel@owen.vanderbilt.edu
