So, we partnered with Charity Water and found a way to phone number list 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.
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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.
You see, a Thief is a device used 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 how to deal with changes in google’s algorithm pulled from 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 fresh list 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.