Business that relies on legend

09/11/2009 Nune HAKHVERDYAN

On October 15-18 the Ukrainian Nemiroff company, which has a very good position in the European market of Vodka, organized an info tour for journalists from CIS countries.

The tour program included visits to the company factories and Nemiroff town of Vinnica region. The name of this town is translated as “non-quiet” even though the city seems to be pretty quiet and beautiful. There are no metallurgy and chemical factories there. The nature and mountains have kept the beautiful and quiet attractive appearance, which tells people that the nature should not be polluted and people should take care of it. They told us that the bread and mushrooms of this area are the best ones in the world, and the potato which grows here is as big as a football ball. The organizers of the eco-tour introduced their country as a land, which has a positive aura.

The info tour organized by the Nemiroff had a certain purpose and every time it seemed that there was a legend connected with the Nemiroff. Generally legends are everywhere and the Nemiroff understands this very well.

“Nowadays every business creates legends to promote its products, and most of this job is being done by PR companies. We don’t do that and we don’t think what to invent either; we are basing on the history. Ecology is not new for us, it is our way of living,” says the chairman of the Nemiroff board of directors Alexander Glus.

There are fertile lands, a lot of grain and good springs in Vinnica, which are giving birth to the good vodka production. The first factory producing wine and vodka was founded in this region in the 19th century. The Nemiroff has recovered the inn and gardens of the earl’s family who established the tradition of making wine and vodka in this region, thus showing that this is a historical tradition. In Podolye region they have recovered the wooden benches and bridge, which looks very beautiful. It doesn’t seem very luxurious because in this region the nature is luxurious itself. Mr. Glus says, “The bad soviet principle still exists, according to which people think that if their neighbors don’t need something they should not care about it either. The social responsibility is our trend, which we created first in Ukraine. This is what our children and we need. There is so much fantastic energy in these regions that it fills our vodka with good energy.”

The threats of the financial crisis made the Nemiroff to rebuild the structure of its business and make a pyramid system from the different branches of the company. “We were developing fast and we became a huge machine, which was very hard to control. Different business levels had different opportunities, and it was an obstacle for the work. Due to reconstructing the business structure we were already strong and ready to face challenges before the beginning of the crisis,” says the commercial director of the Nemiroff company, Sergey Bleskun.

 

Now the company has a vertical management system and takes care of the employees. The capacity of the vodka trade has drastically grown as well. According to the statistics of the Nemiroff, their product does not have a large capacity in the Armenian market, however the capacity is stabile. On the one hand, our market buys the highest capacity of vodka in Caucasus. Even Azerbaijan does not consume as much vodka as Armenia. “Using vodka depends on mentality which is formed during many years. Certainly people don’t drink vodka much in Georgia as they prefer wine. But vodka is the number one alcoholic drink in Armenia. We know that Armenians like the white vodka, they don’t use the color drinks and that is why w are mainly importing the white vodka to Armenia,” says Mr. Glus. He also perfectly knows that their product is very often falsified in the Armenian market. He believes only useless product is not falsified.



Yerevan-Nemiroff