13 Million Bottles Later: How an Instagram Community Became One of America’s Best-Selling Rosé Brands

Erica Small and Nikki Huganir didn’t start Yes Way Rosé with a winery, a distributor deal, or funding. They started with an Instagram account in 2018, built entirely around a community of people who already loved rosé and a simple philosophy: wine didn’t have to be intimidating. It could be fun, approachable, design-forward, and still be high quality.

They built the audience first and figured out the product second — a sequence that sounds obvious in hindsight and is almost never how beverage brands actually get built.

The brand has now sold more than 13 million bottles and ranks as the fourth best-selling French rosé brand in the United States — competing directly against wineries with generations of distribution relationships and marketing budgets Yes Way Rosé never had at the start.

That’s not a small-brand success story anymore. That’s a top-five position in a category dominated by companies with a hundred-year head start.

Their newest line came from an even more personal place: when Erica and Nikki were both pregnant at the same time, neither could find a non-alcoholic rosé that actually tasted like the wine they loved. So they spent nine months testing more than 50 formulations until they got it right.

Erica and Nikki walk through building that community and turning it into real retail numbers on this episode of Starting Small.

Listen to the full conversation with Erica Small and Nikki Huganir on Apple Podcasts