Jeff Patten is a co-founder of Flatiron Wines & Spirits and continues to be a partner in both the New York City and San Francisco shops. Before founding Flatiron Wines, he owned and managed specialty wine shops in Brooklyn, New York. One of those stores was Uva Wines, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which at the time was well known for its focus on natural wines and wines of terroir.
Company: Flatiron Wines & Spirits
We are thrilled to have you join us today, welcome to ValiantCEO Magazine’s exclusive interview! Let’s start off with a little introduction. Tell our readers a bit about yourself and your company
Jeff Patten: I’ve been working in wine retail for over 20 years, starting with specialty shops in Brooklyn before co-founding Flatiron Wines & Spirits. One of my earlier stores, Uva Wines in Williamsburg, was among the pioneering natural wine shops in New York at the time, and that focus on terroir-driven wines and smaller producers has stayed with me ever since. Flatiron grew out of that same philosophy.
We now have physical locations in both New York City and San Francisco, plus an active online shop that ships nationwide. We’ve built a subscriber community of over 110,000 people who follow our weekly newsletters, and our goal is to connect curious wine drinkers with smaller, artisanal producers from regions around the world. We’ve been recognized by Wine & Spirits Magazine, Food & Wine Magazine, the New York Times, and Wine Spectator, which is gratifying, but honestly the most rewarding part is just watching customers discover something they never expected to love.
Can you take us back to the beginning – what inspired your startup, and what were those early days like?
Jeff Patten: It really started with a genuine love of wine and a frustration with how it was being sold. When I opened Uva Wines in Williamsburg back in the early 2000s, Brooklyn was a very different place, and the wine world was still very much dominated by big brands and point scores. What I wanted to create was a shop where the conversation was about the farmer, the region, the story behind the bottle. Natural wines and wines of terroir were still pretty niche at the time, and honestly that made it exciting. The early days were scrappy in the best possible way. We were hand-selling every bottle, building relationships with small importers, and educating customers one at a time. There was no real roadmap for what we were doing, but the response from the neighborhood told us we were onto something real.
What was the biggest turning point or breakthrough that helped you scale from a small operation to a growing business?
Jeff Patten: It’s when we stopped thinking of ourselves purely as a retail shop and started thinking of ourselves as a community built around wine education and discovery. When we launched Flatiron Wines and really committed to the weekly newsletter as a storytelling platform, everything changed. Suddenly we weren’t just selling wine, we were taking people on a journey through regions and producers they had never heard of. That newsletter grew into a subscriber base of over 110,000 people, and that audience became the foundation for everything else, including the expansion to San Francisco and the growth of our online business with nationwide shipping. The other turning point was simply staying true to the independent, artisanal focus even as we grew. That consistency built trust, and trust is what turns a customer into a loyal part of your community.
How did you handle the toughest challenges during your growth phase – whether financial, operational, or personal?
Jeff Patten: : Wine retail is a capital intensive business, and inventory is where it can really bite you. You’re making bets on producers and vintages months or even years before you see a return, and when you’re a small operation that pressure is constant. The way we navigated it was by staying disciplined about who we are. It would have been easy to chase volume by stocking more mainstream brands with faster turnover, but that would have undermined everything we were building. So financially, we had to be patient and creative, leaning on strong relationships with importers and being very deliberate about where we allocated our buying dollars. Operationally, going from one Brooklyn shop to a multi-city business with an active e-commerce operation was a real learning curve. You have to build systems and trust people to run things the way you would, and that takes time to get right. On a personal level, there were definitely moments of doubt, but the community we were building kept me grounded. When a customer writes in to say that a bottle we recommended changed the way they think about wine, that kind of feedback carries you through the harder stretches.
As your company grew, how did your leadership style evolve to meet the demands of scaling?
Jeff Patten: In the early days I was involved in everything, every buying decision, every customer interaction, every piece of copy that went out in the newsletter. That works when you’re small because your fingerprints on every detail are what give the business its character. But as we grew I had to learn to let go of some of that control and focus on building a team that shared the same values and curiosity that drove me from the beginning. My style shifted from doing to communicating, making sure the people around me understood not just what we were doing but why we were doing it. The why at Flatiron has always been the same: help curious people discover wines that tell a story about a place and a person. As long as everyone on the team understands that, the details tend to take care of themselves. I also became much more intentional about listening, to customers, to my team, and to the market, because at a certain scale you simply cannot afford to operate on instinct alone.
What advice would you give to entrepreneurs currently in the “garage” stage, dreaming of going global?
Jeff Patten: Resist the urge to scale before you have genuine clarity on what makes you different. In the early days at Uva Wines and then at Flatiron, we could have tried to be everything to everyone, but instead we made a deliberate choice to go deep on a specific point of view. We were going to champion smaller producers, wines with a story, regions that deserved more attention than they were getting. That focus is what built the trust that eventually allowed us to grow. If you try to go wide before you have that foundation, you end up being a pale version of something that already exists, and there is no competitive advantage in that. Our San Francisco expansion only made sense because we had already proven the model in New York. Going deep locally before stretching globally is not a limitation, it is actually the thing that makes sustainable growth possible. Dream big, but build with intention first.
