Winely, a Dunedin-founded wine fermentation tracking company, was put into liquidation last month with total liabilities of more than $2.2 million.
It was founded by Jacob Manning and Abbe Hyde and incorporated in 2018 to develop and manufacture technology to provide real-time fermentation analysis to the wine industry.
Henry Greenslade said he worked for the company for 16 months and communication was not a strength.
“They just didn’t keep you informed of what was going on. Every sort of meeting felt like a pitch instead of an actual honest meeting about where we were at,” Mr Greenslade said.
“A lot of language that obviously you would hear if you were an investor. You might get the slideshow and that, but we were getting the same sort of language — where everything was going good and everything was mint and nothing to worry about. Then the next minute you’re on your ass.”
Just three days before most of the staff were made redundant in late 2022, they had been treated to a night out on the company. Pay had been reduced to 80% a few weeks before the axe fell.
“Because all the meetings were on a Monday, the Friday beforehand we went out to dinner, we went bowling to celebrate the end of the year, sort of a Christmas do,” Mr Greenslade said.
“So everyone was happy and energised and coming to work [on Monday] to basically a stack-full of meetings where you got to learn whether or not you were staying on.”
His manager and the manager above him were made redundant, leaving him with “a bunch of tools and a bunch of hardware and two leaders that were over in Australia at the time”.
He said sales were never high.
“I was just putting the stuff together but noticing that there was less and less going out. When you have boxes stacked mile high and they’re not moving, it’s not very motivating,” he said.
In 2023, Mr Manning told staff Winely would some day be bigger than Google, he said.
“At that point, everyone in the meeting looked at each other and went, oh, s***, here we go.”
He eventually moved on in 2023.
Another staff member, Steve Calvert, said just before the redundancies staff knew things were not great.
“But it was so much worse than they had let on,” he said.
“There was lots of promises of where everything was going to go and what they’re going to do. They’re going to take over the world as far as fermentation for other industries. They were great at talking about their visions.
“As far as running the company, they were awful.
“I had previously owned a cafe for 10 years. So I think I had a pretty good idea of how to look after staff. And it’s not how I would do it.”
He could see the writing on the wall for the company and friends had advised him to get out.
“But there was promises of shares and things. So that kind of led me along. And everyone was along with that. It was like, ‘it could be worth X amounts in so many years’ or whatever. ‘You’ll be millionaires …’.”
Mr Calvert said he had knowledge of start-up businesses and Winely was unlike any start-up he knew of.
“I think this was completely unrealistic. They didn’t actually prove their concept before investing huge amounts of money into hardware.”
Ms Hyde was contacted and she asked for questions to be sent to her. She never replied to the questions.
