Ingrid Best of IBest Wines

BUKUNMI GRACE

Today, Ingrid Best, entrepreneur and founder of IBest Wines, which touts award-winning red and white blends sourced from Stellenbosch, South Africa, announces that IBest Wines is now available at select Southern California Costco locations, marking a significant retail milestone for the brand.

As one of the largest wine retailers in the United States. Costco provides a powerful platform to introduce IBest Wines to a broader audience while maintaining its positioning at the intersection of fine wine, art, and luxury. The rollout includes both IBest Wines’ award-winning red and white blends and coincides with the brand’s transition to a newly designed lighter-weight bottle, reflecting a continued commitment to intentional, design-led sustainability. The partnership is a meaningful step toward the company’s ability to operate at scale in one of the most disciplined retail environments.

The Bay Area native started the popular namesake brand in 2023 after playing an influential role in developing some of the world’s most iconic brands while working in the wine and spirits industry for over 20 years. She’s worked with Ciroc and Deleon, Moët Hennessy, and Diageo, and was instrumental in managing a venture spirits partnership for Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter. Since the launch of IBest Wines, the company has formed impressive partnerships with Costco, American Airlines, the Brooklyn Museum, with wines poured at institutions including the Hammer Museum, the Broad Museum, Lincoln Center and more. Best’s wines have quickly become a staple among entertainment and art communities, with Hollywood celebrities like Yvonne Orji signing on as investors in the premium wine brand. “I’m so excited to be an investor in IBest Wines, but more importantly, in the passion and vision that Ingrid Best has for the company. IBest Wines sits at the intersection of culture, luxury, leisure, and that’s a combination I’ll gladly get behind any day,” she shared via an email statement.

While Best enjoys her brand becoming a staple amongst the Hollywood elite and glitterati, she’s intentional about its growth and expansion, “I hear often that IBest Wines is everywhere. My answer is, always, we’re everywhere I want the brand to be. So the wine placements have been very strategic and methodical. We don’t want to be everywhere. We want to be exactly where we know the brand should be,” she said.

Now, Best continues to forge a new path for IBest Wines, intentionally scaling the business with Costco as a key retailer, while Regal Wine Company serves as the brand’s California distributor. Over the past year, IBest Wines has made a significant strategic shift, reengineering packaging and logistics to prioritize long-term sustainability while also addressing tariffs and rising global freight costs. Their new Bordeaux-style bottle is over 43% lighter than our previous format, reducing weight from 725g to 410g and eliminating 315 grams of glass per bottle.

By transitioning to lighter-weight glass, they’ve reduced transport weight, lowered emissions across shipments, and improved freight efficiency while preserving the premium positioning of the wines. For Best and IBest Wines, sustainability isn’t a marketing layer. It’s a structural business decision and a long-term commitment to building responsibly as the brand scales.

As a founder-led, woman-owned wine brand, scaling has required discipline beyond storytelling, particularly in supply chain strategy, capital efficiency, and retail readiness. “Staying disciplined while trying to access capital, which has always traditionally been one of the biggest challenges for founders, especially women founders, has been my focus, along with continuously looking for solutions. We know what the data says. We know what the reality is. But my focus is to build and scale this wine brand,” she said to me. “I think it really is a balancing of growth and discipline and ensuring that every decision supports my long-term vision, and that really starts with yourself.”

The Costco placement reflects not just product validation, but the growing momentum of a brand built with operational rigor and environmental sustainability top of mind. To form the Costco partnership, Best and her team began looking at the business as a whole and considered ways to expand while preserving the brand's integrity. “We realized that transitioning to a lighter glass allowed us to operate more efficiently, while also reducing our environmental impact. So, for us, sustainability starts with a lightweight, sustainable wine pack. In the midst of that, we started thinking about the retail partners that we would love to present this to right at scale, and had an opportunity to connect with the Costco supplier team and the buying team, and they love the brand and story,” she states. “It was a very strategic decision to go deep, not wide. We are a startup. We have to really operate where we are. I think the fact that Costco is bringing us in means we have real product-market fit, which is important. So Costco will be the first retailer to light up the launch of our new lighter-weight pack, which we're really proud of.”

As for what’s next for IBest Wines? Best is laser-focused on continuing to scale but educating others on the culture of wine. “I love proving that you can build a premium wine brand that’s both culturally relevant and operationally sound. But I always ask myself, ‘How do we continue to show up in a way that drives feeling that transcends the brand?’ We want to do immersive trips to South Africa. My dream is to set up a tasting space in an art gallery. We’re always aiming to do something very unique and very different, but also allows people to come in and taste the wine,” she revealed.