In 2011, my friends and I had a simple idea. We wanted to help people drink great wine at an affordable price.
We were a small group of friends trying to build careers while living in California. We had young children, new mortgages, and the expense of trying to make it in California. Eventually, we just didn't have enough money to uncork a few good bottles of wine a month.
So we decided to create a site to help people drink great wine at an affordable price. But we didn't just want to make a profit.
Besides making money, we also wanted to do 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 really cool companies doing similar things in other industries. For example, Tom's shoes donated a pair of shoes for every pair sold. That was an inspiration to us, so we decided to weave our own thing into it as we were getting the business off the ground.
So we teamed up with Charity Water and came uae whatsapp number up with a way to donate clean drinking water for every bottle of wine sold. We were excited about our potential to make a difference and help people drink better wine.
We had our own concept and we started to implement it.
The next thing we needed was a name. Looking back, we probably could have come up with a better name, but we called it CellarThief.
You see, a Thief is a device used by a winemaker to sample wine from a barrel during the winemaking process. We thought it was a cool play on words because we were also trying to offer great wines on the cheap.
Wine Barrel Thief
After the name, we needed to come up with a logo. So we turned to 99 Designs, asked friends to vote on the logos they received, and chose a logo.
Our logo for CellarThief looks dated now, but we were very happy with it
With our concept, name, and logo in place, it was time to build our website. We asked a friend to create a unique design and teamed up with a small development company to build our site on an e-commerce platform/CMS that was soon acquired by Adobe. We wanted the site to be cool, inspiring, and fun.
The original design of the CellarThief website - we won a bunch of awards for it
Finally, we needed 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 batch of a certain wine in one day, would they give us a big discount that we could then pass on to our customers
