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- The Mindset of The Widow Clicquot (part three)
Welcome to The Strategy Files—a newsletter about history's most ambitious people in fashion, beauty, and culture. I study the icons, you apply their strategies; you win.
Before we get started, I want to give a shout out to my friend, Matt Gira for creating something so valuable that I wish I had access to it sooner. Matt created a free resource for founders called The 2025 Bootstrapped Report. The report has data behind 64 founders who built their businesses to $250k+ in annual revenue without venture capital.
WITOUT VENTURE CAPITAL.
Grab the report here, and once you’ve checked it out, tell me what you think!
Let’s get into it.
This month’s deep dive comes from the book The Widow Clicquot: The Story Of A Champagne Empire And The Woman Who Ruled It.
France, early 1805.
Last we spoke, Barbe-Nicole’s husband died a mysterious death, making her a 26-year-old single mother and widow. He’d spent the last decade of his life failing in the wine business.
Even though she watched him fail, and knew how difficult it was to succeed in the wine businesses, The Widow was determined to take over the family business.
But this was France in the early 1800s, and she was a woman. So, even though she was the most qualified to oversee the family business, she had to ask her father-in-law for permission.
He said yes, but under one condition: She’d have to partner with someone who was experienced in the wine business. And he had the perfect partner in mind: Alexandre Jerome Fourneaux, a family friend and local winemaker. So together, The Widow and Alexandre started a new company called Veuve Clicquot Fourneau And Company.
While Alexandre was there to make her life easier, there was one man who would spend years making her life more difficult: Napoleon.
War, Blockades, and Spoiled Champagne
In 1806, just 1 year after her husband's death, Napoleon did something that all business owners dread: he started a trade war. It was called The War of The Fourth Coalition. France was fighting against a "coalition" of countries: Prussia, Russia, Sweden, and Great Britain.
Napoleon created a set of rules and regulations that were meant to have a negative economic impact on the coalition. So, they retaliated by cutting off France's trade opportunities.
The Widow didn't scale back her operations. She didn't wait for times to get better. Instead, The Widow and Alexandre doubled down and planned on sending millions of dollars of product across Europe.
From the book:
"In the first flush of success, she and Alexandre negotiated the delivery of over 50,000 bottles of champagne M – an amazing $3 million worth of product – to be taken through the military blockades that constricted trade routes across Europe…"
Her bravery. Her ability to take risks! Truly inspiring.
Unfortunately, the risk didn’t pay off.
Alexandre found a route to Amsterdam, but couldn't ship their wines any further. So the wine sat in Amsterdam, and went bad.
Neither of them had the skill set or the connections to pull off shipping international products during a trade war. So they kept failing, and Alexandre left the company after a few years.
This was a blessing in disguise.
This gave her 100% control over the business; she’s in charge of everything from the soil to the salespeople. This allows her to make key decisions that will set the company up for long-term success:
Businesses with one clear leader seem to have a better chance of winning. I don’t have the stats, but it’s a common theme that shows up in every biography I’ve read. Nobu was run by Nobu. Everyone knew Steve Jobs was the leader at Apple. Larry Ellison, Madam CJ Walker, Martha Stewart, and Anna Wintour.
They were all successful because they set clear visions for what their companies should be doing.
So, The Widow made two key calls:
Step away from the international luxury market and focus solely on the French market. It's expensive and risky to try to sell internationally during a trade war.
Wars don’t last forever. So she sent her salespeople to other countries to make connections.
She got in sacrifice mode: it’s that time when you realize that everything is negotiable except the mission, and you act on it.
She needed more money, so she sold her jewelry. She needed more time to focus on the business, so she sent her daughter off to boarding school.
In 1813, Napoleon lost a crucial battle in Russia and went into hiding. The Russians came looking for him in her town.
And when war comes to town, foreign troops are going to take whatever supplies they want - including wine and champagne.
This is just one of those weird moments where hard work and luck collide. Because usually occupying troops take whatever they want, food, wine, peoples homes, peoples art. But this time the Russians did something that she was not expecting; they started to buy her wine.
Did she sell them the good stuff? No. They were far from home and at war; she knew they didn’t care about quality; they just wanted to get drunk.
So instead of wasting the good stuff on them, The Widow sold them a bunch of wine that she was unable to sell during the war.
Eventually, the French army captured the city back from the Russians. And this went back-and-forth for a while, the Russians taking over the city getting drunk on her wine and then the French coming in taking over the city getting drunk on her wine.
Seeing all this back and forth up close led her to one conclusion: Napoleon was going to lose. He was going to give up the throne, which meant the end of the war.
Now, most people would receive news like this, and sit back and celebrate. But not The Widow. Her only goal was to use this information
So even though the blockades were still up all over Europe, she decided to ship her product, knowing that the black aids would be down soon.
Where others saw "we can't sell," her mindset was "we'll be first when this ends." Temporary restrictions can create permanent opportunities.
Napoleon abdicated the throne on April 11 of 1814 and her team was ready. She sent Louis, the salesman who had previously been accused of being a spy, back to Russia in May.
By the time Louis went back to Russia, people were BEGGING to buy her product.
In fact, he and his team didn't have time to get all the champagne off of the boats before people were asking him. People are going to his hotel, begging to buy wine from him.
And they were willing to overpay.
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