e-commerce and have gathered valuable lessons that every entrepreneur and marketer will find useful. Here is our story.
In 2011, a few friends and I had a simple idea.
We were a small group of friends trying to build a career mobile database while living in California. We had small children, new mortgages, and the expenses of trying to make it in California. At the end of the day, there wasn’t much money left over to crack open a few good bottles of wine each month.
So, we decided to start a site to help people drink great wines at an affordable price. But we didn’t just want to make a profit.
Besides making money, we also wanted to do some good in the process. So, we wanted this business to have a cause. We thought, “wouldn’t it be great if we could make a difference and offer wine at an affordable price?!?” That’s when we came up with the idea of donating clean drinking water for every bottle of wine sold.
At the time, there were some really cool companies payment apps can be more doing something similar in other industries. For example, Tom’s shoes donated a pair of shoes for every pair of shoes sold. It was an inspiration to us, so we decided to weave our cause into it as we got the business off the ground.
So, we partnered with Charity Water and found a way to donate clean drinking water for every bottle of wine sold. We were excited about our potential to make a difference and fresh list help people drink better wine.
We had our idea and off we went.
The next thing we needed was a name. In hindsight, we probably could have come up with a better name, but we called it CellarThief.