Brennerei Wild: Scaling Up for Seasonal Peaks

170-Year Family Distilling Tradition

On the western edge of Germany’s picturesque Black Forest lies the historical town of Gengenbach. It is here that the Wild family is continuing its long tradition of producing high-quality liqueurs, spirits, and wine.

Established in 1855, Wild Schwarzwald Brennerei & Weingut has moved with the times while maintaining its traditional heritage. The distillery continues to produce fruit schnapps, a regional specialty, while also branching out into more international products such as whisky, gin, rum, and even an alcohol-free aperitif. Since 2015 the company also run a winery, manufacturing first-class wines.

In the buildup to Christmas, Wild experiences peaks in demand, both through its online shop and in physical sales at Christmas markets around Germany. To keep up with these seasonal peaks, Wild regularly employs a large number of temporary staff on top of its core team. As Wild’s Head of HR Valentin Grimm explains, “In November and December, we employ up to 500 people to help meet the seasonal demand and staffing needs at the Christmas markets. That’s an order of magnitude where we absolutely needed software to support our HR processes.”

Supporting the Core Team With Digital HR Processes

While seasonal work was one of the main motivations for Wild to find a new HR solution, flair offered a number of other opportunities for the company to rethink its HR processes. Prior to using flair, Wild had managed core HR tasks such as shift planning and time tracking in Excel spreadsheets.

“We chose flair because it offers a 360-degree approach,” says Valentin. “I can really manage everything – recruiting, contracts, time tracking, shift planning, payroll, employee development – in one tool. That was appealing to us because the fewer interfaces there are, the better the whole process works. What’s more, the fact that flair is built on Salesforce was an assurance of its quality for us.”

With flair, Wild can store all employee records, certificates, and payroll documents in one place. The team no longer needs to print out salary statements; instead, they can send out digital pay slips that can be accessed in the Employee Hub. This has saved time for the HR team. “I simply create separate payroll runs for employees who receive a wage and those who receive a salary,” explains Valentin. “I integrate any absences and data changes, generate the documents, and then send them to our tax office. Instead of having the data scattered across different spreadsheets and printed files, it’s now all consolidated in flair.”

Quickly Hiring and Onboarding Temporary Workers

One of the biggest advantages for Wild has been using flair to hire and onboard staff for the Christmas period. With hundreds of temporary staff joining each year, it was crucial to have an efficient process in place.

With flair, Wild has set up a new career page to advertise its open positions. As job listings are directly integrated with flair’s Salesforce backend, it is now easier to manage incoming applications and candidates. Valentin explains, “I found configuring the career page in flair’s Recruiting app extremely intuitive. You simply choose design elements, upload text and images, and the layout is generated for you. It was really easy.”

To prepare the new hires for the busy Christmas markets, Wild uses flair’s onboarding workflows. With to-do lists and file attachments, Wild ensures that all the employees provide all the necessary information while helping the market employees to get to know and understand the extensive product range.

Intuitive, Multi-Location Shift Planning

flair also helps Wild to manage their seasonal workforce at Christmas markets around Germany. As each market has its own opening hours and the number of customers can vary highly depending on the day, careful shift planning is needed to efficiently handle demand.

The solution that Wild found was to treat each market stall as a business location in flair, which enables the company to create a location-based workload for each week. Wild then adds each employee’s skills, preferences, and availability into the app, consolidating all shift-relevant information in one place.

“The advantage is that I can see everything on one screen when I’m creating the shift plan,” says Valentin. “I know which days an employee can work and what their maximum weekly hours are. As soon as I publish the schedule or make a change, the employees are automatically notified. It works extremely well.”

Having time tracking and shift planning integrated into one solution also helps Wild to verify the recorded working hours, no matter where the employees are working.

Saving Time With Automatic Time Tracking

Using flair, Wild employees can clock into work via browser or mobile app. But for some employees, particularly those working in Wild’s production facilities who might not have access to a PC at work, it can be easy to forget to use the time tracker. “We wanted to digitize our time tracking, but without it being a burden to any employee,” says Valentin. “So we needed to find a solution to reliably record working time without disrupting our employees’ working day.”

flair and Wild worked together to create a Salesforce flow that would automatically record working hours without the need to clock in or out. The working hours in Wild’s production facilities are clearly defined and variations from this schedule are rare. For this reason, the solution could be configured to automatically log the scheduled working hours for specific employees every day.

“If someone does work overtime, they can let us know. We’ll update the time entry and compensate them for the extra hours,” says Valentin. “I no longer have to remind workers to clock in. This saves me a lot of time while ensuring that we have a clear record of working hours to comply with regulations.”

Wild’s implementation of flair shows how traditional companies can also reap the benefits of modern HR. We are thrilled to accompany them on this journey.