We used email marketing for ecommerce and picked up valuable lessons that every business owner and marketer will find helpful. Here’s our story.
Back in 2011, some friends and I had a telegram data simple idea. We wanted to help people drink great wines affordably.
We were a small group of friends trying to build our careers while living in California. We had young kids, new mortgages and the expense of trying to make a go of it in California. At the end of the day, there just wasn’t much money left to be able to uncork a few good bottles of wine per 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 turn a profit.
In addition to 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 do social mia affect seo? be cool if we could make a difference and offer wine for 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 doing something similar in other industries. For example, Tom’s shoes was doing donating a pair of shoes for every pair of shoes sold. It was an inspiration to us so we decided to weave in our own cause as we got the business off the ground.
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 also helping people drink better wine.
We had our concept and we were off and rolling.
The next thing we needed was a name. In hindsight, we probably could have come up with a better name but we named it CellarThief.
You see a Thief is a device used by a winemaker to business fax lead sample wine out of a a barrel during the winemaking process. We thought that was a cool play on words because we were also trying to offer great wines at a “steal”.
With a name, we then needed to come up with a logo. So, we tapped into 99 Designs, had our friends vote on the logos that we received and picked a logo.
With our concept, a name and a logo, it was time to build our website. We had a friend create a unique design and partnered with a small dev shop to create our site on an ecommerce CMS/platform that soon after got purchased by Adobe. We wanted the site to be cool, inspiring and fun.
Finally, we had to figure out the sourcing of the wine. Thankfully, our team had connections in the wine industry – both to wineries and distributors. The idea was simple – if we could sell a bunch of a certain wine in one single day, would they give us a big discount that we could then pass off to our customers.
Wineries and distributors embraced the concept and we quickly were able to have a good lineup of top wines that we could offer at a great price. We gave them an estimate of the number of cases we would
