You see, a by a winemaker to sample wine from a barrel during the winemaking process. We thought that was a great play on words because we were also trying to offer great wines at a “killer” price.
With a name, we then needed to find a logo. So, we pulled from phone number list 99 Designs, asked our friends to vote on the logos we received, and chose one.
With our concept, name, and logo, it was time to build our website. We asked a friend to create a unique design and partnered with a small dev shop to build our site on a CMS/e-commerce platform that was soon after acquired by Adobe. We wanted the site to be beautiful, inspiring, and fun.
Finally, we had to figure out
where the wine was coming from. Luckily, our team had connections in the wine industry, both with wineries and distributors. The idea was simple: if we could sell a little bit of a certain wine in a single day, they would give us a big discount that we could then pass on to our customers.
The wineries and distributors embraced the offering free trials and introductory concept and we were quickly able to have a good range of premium wines that we could offer at a great price. We gave them an estimate of how many cases we would sell and they would hold them and we would pick them up and ship them to our customers.
We believed that storytelling
would be the most important part of what we did. So we were excited to interview winemakers, tell the story behind the winery, and help our customers connect with the people fresh list behind the wines we sold.
With many of the pieces in place, CellarThief was born. It was a small company, with no outside funding. It was just a few friends trying to build a nice little business that helped people drink great wines at an affordable price. And, make a big difference.