From Wine Cellars to SEO Success: Lessons from My Unconventional Career

I’m James Nathan, founder of Market Jar, accidental entrepreneur, and someone who didn’t arrive in business through the front door.

I live in Richmond, London, with my fiancée and our golden retriever. And like most people who’ve built something from scratch, I didn’t follow a neat career path or inherit a head start.

What I did have was a willingness to graft, take risks, and learn the hard way, often under pressure, sometimes with debt, and usually with a fair amount of stress.

This isn’t a story about overnight success. It’s about how a very unpolished route through hospitality, wine, and entrepreneurship shaped how I now partner with businesses to help them grow.

Learning the Work Before the Work Meant Anything

I started working at sixteen, catering events for Bright-sparks. This involved long shifts, aching feet, high expectations, but I was also working with my mates, so lots of laughs too. 

From there, I moved through London’s hospitality scene, from high-end venues to corporate kitchens and fast-paced environments where mistakes weren’t tolerated, and standards were non-negotiable.

That early exposure taught me something that’s stuck: results matter more than titles, and consistency is how you hone your craft.

A brief but formative role with a youth-education charity in south-west London added a huge dollop of perspective. Not everyone gets the same start in life, and not everyone has the luxury of failure. It grounded me, shaping how I think about responsibility when you’re in a position to influence outcomes for others.

The point of my meandering jaunt through my early work life? Each job taught me something new. But they all had one thing in common: graft, grit, and getting stuck in. Lessons I carry with me to this day.

A Gap Year Filled with Learning

When it came time for a gap year, I already knew I wanted to keep working. While most people took time off, I leaned even further in, enrolling in Ballymaloe Cookery School, where 5 am starts and 12-hour days were the norm. It wasn’t glamorous, but it drilled me in discipline, systems thinking, and gave me a huge respect for the process and just doing the work. Skills that, in hindsight, look a lot like leadership training. 

After three months, I left with a merit certificate to undertake a ski instructor qualification in Zermatt. I passed, did a ski season and then swapped the winter slopes for summer sun, working as a chef in a private members' club on the Greek coast. Soon, however, the real world beckoned, and I returned to the UK, once more, to work in a Michelin-starred kitchen.

At the time, it probably looked to the outside world like I was wandering, jumping from job to job. And yes, that probably was the case, but also, I was learning how environments, systems, and people perform under pressure; vital life lessons that would underpin everything that came next.

Falling Into Wine: Finding My Niche

At nineteen, I joined New London Wine, a well-known merchant in Battersea, and fell into fine-wine trading. Over the next few years, I worked my way through four more independent merchants across London, starting from the bottom each time.

What I noticed with everyone wasn’t just the product, but a missed opportunity. Each of these brilliant businesses had incredible stock and loyal customers, but lacked a digital presence. So, I embraced the title of “the digital man” and started building websites, testing SEO, creating online demand where none had existed, and unlocking new revenue streams. 

At Albion Wine Shippers, for example, I launched a spirits division focused on sourcing rare, investment-grade whiskies from whisky auctions, with bottles ranging from £1,000 up to £30,000+. Finding these meant evenings spent scouring international auctions and building direct relationships with an online audience of collectors. These weren’t bottles to sell online or in a shop; I built this private buyer list and created demand for bottles that don’t typically retail.

That was the moment it clicked: I wasn’t just selling wine. I was creating visibility, and visibility changed everything.

Entrepreneurial Spark: Pull The Cork

After three and a half years at Albion, growth stalled. There was nowhere left for me to go. The wine trade is traditionally the preserve of the red trouser brigade. A peculiar cohort of chaps very much stuck in the past. I mean, the whole industry is 20 years behind - nobody uses CRMs, it’s all pen and paper. And I work in a digital world, not an analogue one. 

And so, one evening, a conversation with a friend running a winery in the south of France turned into an idea: why not build our own online wine business?

Pull The Cork launched into the UK’s emerging natural-wine movement, and it moved fast. I didn’t know much about natural wine (nor, if I’m being honest, did I particularly enjoy drinking it), but I understood how to sell and scale. Within just two months, we had over 200 wines on the platform, many of which were entirely new to the UK market, and offered on an allocation basis.

I was responsible for logistics, sourcing, building relationships, tasting wines, and driving growth. My blog quickly attracted a cult following, achieving 30,000 monthly visits within four months. 

Scaling, Merging, and Walking Away

Eight months into Pull The Cork, an opportunity appeared. 

London Wine Shippers, the same company I’d worked for at nineteen, was struggling. Debt-laden, but with a prime warehouse and central London presence, and serious potential, I knew we had to merge Pull The Cork with LWS. My instinct was right, and we scaled quickly. At peak, we were shipping two pallets of e-commerce orders a day.

When the pandemic hit, we were deemed “essential.” A strange label, but one that kept us operating while much of London shut down.

Growth, however, exposes everything.

As the business expanded, so did the challenges. Internal politics and questionable decisions from the LWS side made it increasingly hard to build the business I envisioned. After 18 months, I made the tough but necessary decision to exit.

Walking away taught me more about partnership, alignment, and leadership than any successful quarter ever could.

Market Jar: Building What I Couldn’t Find

At the same time I founded Pull The Cork, I also started my digital marketing agency, Market Jar, simply because we couldn’t find what we needed when it came to a reliable growth partner. 

We hired numerous digital marketing agencies to help us scale, but we came up against the same problems you do, every time: an A-team who sells you the dream, then hands you off to juniors. 

And we quickly realised: marketing agencies chase revenue, not profit. The more you spend, the more they charge, even when it doesn’t work. And you’re locked into long contracts, no matter the results.

Marketing should grow your business. Not drain it. That’s why we built what we couldn’t find, a new kind of growth partner. One that actually follows through.

We are very clearly not an agency. We work with you in a partnership. We’re expert operators, not account managers. We spend less time talking and more time doing. Our focus is profit-first. Growth should pay for itself. Top-line revenue isn’t enough.

We work on a flat partnership fee. No percentage of profit. No misalignment. You’ll always get clear execution, simple reporting, and full visibility. We’re not here to overwhelm you with fancy reports or acronyms you don't understand. We’re here to deliver real growth.

Most agencies lock you into £5-6k a month retainers. We don’t. Partnering with us starts at just £2,000 ($2,700) per month.

Eight years on, and I’m still leading Market Jar, working with household names, ambitious startups, and founders who want growth that actually holds up under scrutiny.

Looking Back, As We Move Forward

Each step in my diverse career, catering, cooking, wine, and entrepreneurship, has taught me crucial lessons about grit, growth, and the immense power of digital influence. 

I didn’t start with a silver spoon in my mouth. I started with long shifts, hard lessons, and a willingness to learn by doing.

Today, that experience shapes how we work with our partners. Not as an agency. Not as outsiders. But as people who’ve built, broken, fixed, and rebuilt businesses themselves.

If you’re ready to grow with people who’ve genuinely walked the walk, let’s chat, and build something real together.