Photography: Jason Loucas at his studio on Glebe Point Rd, Sydney.

Ayu is live. Why we built Ayu.

There is a Tuesday afternoon in every wine venue I have ever worked in.

The order arrives. Half of it. The vintage on the Shiraz has changed and nobody has told the Sommelier (me). The discount that was agreed in person is missing from the invoice. The fuel levy has appeared without warning. The new wine list went to print last week, and the person who needs to update the POS button is on holiday until Thursday.

This is the part of the wine business that has not changed in twenty-plus years.

I spent two decades on the floor of Australia's best wine restaurants and hotels, from the Grand Hyatt Tokyo to Shell House, before I built Ayu. Then I spent four years selling my own brands across the same trade. Both sides told me the same story.

The Australian wine trade is a multi-billion-dollar industry running on tools built for a different business. Most of the current tools are built for kitchens. The sommeliers, F&B Directors, winemakers, and sales reps doing the actual work get whatever's left.

So we built better ones.

Twenty years of the same Tuesday

If you have worked the floor, you have heard every version of this conversation.

"Wait, the wine is unavailable? I had an allocation."
"What do you mean the order is split delivery?"
"The vintage has changed?" "Where is my pouring discount?
"Why didn't you tell me the wine went up in price?"
"When is the CPI increase?"
"Why is there a fuel levy now that nobody mentioned?"

Every one of those questions costs somebody time, energy, money, or trust. Usually all four.

Behind each question sits a process that should take ten minutes and instead takes a week. You buy the wine. You reconcile it. You enter it on the POS. You build a new button on the POS. You add it to the stocktake sheet. You chase the supplier for the invoice. You chase them again because the agreed discount is missing. You cost it on Excel. You add it to the InDesign file. You wait for the F&B Director to approve the list. You wait for the paper to arrive. You train 10 to a 50 staff on what has changed.

Then the next wine arrives, and the cycle starts again.

On a list of 500 wines, 5–15% of SKUs change every month. That's 25 to 75 wines shifting in some way every single month. New vintages. New prices. New wines. New producers. Are you on top of every wine change?

Four years on the other side

The other half of the answer came from selling my own wine.

I made Nama on my own. I created Elle Rosé with Tim Robards. Long days. Tight margins. The daily grind of coolers and wine bags across the city. I love it because it's honest work. But it also convinced me there has to be a better way.

The parts that don't make sense have nothing to do with making good wine. Unproductive meetings. Open ended promises. Wine buyers who don't reply (I get it; I get 50 to a 75 supplier emails a day myself). Chasing payments from 6 months ago. Losing out to a big-brand Rosé because the venue has a "contract" that turns out not to be real.

A small Australian producer competes for restaurant space against distributors with national footprints, six-figure marketing budgets, and decades of mates' relationships. Their biggest disadvantages have nothing to do with their wine. No visibility into what venues actually need. No way to be discovered without driving the bottles in person. No structured channel beyond a good tasting and a hopeful follow-up email.

That's the other half of why Ayu exists.

What Ayu does

Ayu is a finance platform built specifically for the Australian wine trade. Venues use it to cost out wine automatically and order from producers and distributors. Producers use it to manage their on-trade business. Money flows cleanly, with WET, GST, and discounts handled in the right order on every invoice.

More on how Ayu actually works →

Starting small on purpose

A handful of anchor venues. A small founding cohort of producers. We're growing carefully on both sides, keeping the trust dense, letting the platform's value compound as the network grows.

The platform is engineered to scale to hundreds of venues across Australia. We're growing alongside the venues and producers we serve. We're building for the long term.

Ayu is live. The first orders are flowing.

If any of that resonates, we'd love to show you what we've built.
Book a demo.