At the time, there were some really cool companies doing something similar in other industries. For example, Tom's Shoes donated a pair of shoes for every pair sold. It was an inspiration to us, so we decided to get involved in our own cause when we started the business.
So we partnered with Charity Water and came 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 while helping people drink better wine.
The next thing we needed was a name. In hindsight, we probably could have come up with a better overseas chinese in usa data name, but we named it CellarThief.
You see, a thief is a device that a winemaker uses to take samples of wine from a barrel during the winemaking process. We thought it was a great play on words because we were also trying to offer great wines while “stealing.”
The Wine Barrel Thief
With the name, we then needed to come up with a logo. So we used the 99 designs, had our friends vote on the logos we received, and chose a logo.
Our logo for CellarThief - it looks outdated now, but we were pretty excited about it
With our concept, name, and logo in place, it was time to build our website. We had a friend create a unique design, and we teamed up with a small development shop to build our site on an e-commerce CMS/platform that was soon acquired by Adobe. We wanted the site to be cool, inspiring, and fun.
Original website design for CellarThief - we won many awards for it
Finally, we had to figure out where the wine came from. Luckily, our team had contacts in the wine industry—both at the winery and at the distributor. The idea was simple—if we could sell a bunch 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 concept and we were quickly able to have a good line of top quality 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 then 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 of the winery, and help our customers connect with the people behind the wines we sold.
Through many pieces, 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 helps people drink great wines at an affordable price. And make a big difference.
The first wine we offered was a huge hit – Robert Mondavi Reserve Cabernet.