A typical week at Zachys fine Wine
It’s 6:15 in the morning. My alarm rings and I get ready for my workday in New York City. I have my breakfast, prepare for my commute, and take the subway from Brooklyn to Grand Central Station in Manhattan, where I hop on the train to Port Chester, a small town just north of New York City. I remember thinking; how am I going to get used these extremely early hours, and especially, how am I going to get used to a two-hour long commute, back and forth, everyday?
It was all worth it. Reflecting upon my 5-month internship at Zachys Fine Wine Inc, I came back home with a ton of new experiences, a knowledge of wine I would have not expected, and actual work experience in the marketing field. But now; how is it to be a marketing intern at a wine retailer and auction house?
A typical week includes 5 workdays from 09:00 till 17:00, where I worked at the auction department at the beginning of the week and continued with the retail team from Wednesday till Friday. Because I worked at both departments at the same time, I got to experience the company from an all-round perspective. At auction, I somedays assisted with event planning for the auctions, dinners, and catalog photography. At other days, I help with assessing the wines for authenticity before we would sell them at an auction, facilitated client appraisals and consignments and set wine pricing and valued the wines according to the global market. Once every month, we organized an auction, in which the whole team would work together in making sure the auction would run smoothly.
At the retail department, there were daily marketing meetings, as retail works in a different more time-bound pace there were specific offers and deals send out to our clients every day. Here, I mainly assist with writing promotional texts of our wines on the website and making ‘specs’ for our email marketing. Email marketing accounts for the company’s biggest revenue, so a lot of focus was based on that. In between al these tasks, wine importers came to the store and let us taste new vintages of rare wine producers, and based on what the whole team thought, we decided to or not to buy them.
The fun part of this, is that my opinion was really counted for, all the decisions we made in terms of what wines to buy or how to sell them, was a team effort. I didn’t feel like an intern, but rather an employee with an influence on the decision making.
So, reflecting upon my first office experience, I would in the future decide to find accommodation close to work rather than at the other side of a big metropole… nevertheless, realising that you love the work that you do makes it all worth it.