We used email marketing for ecommerce Starts With Knowing 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 simple idea. We wanted to buy bulk sms service 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.
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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 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 advertising account vkontakte 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 Starts With Knowing
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 sample email list 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”.
A wine barrel thief
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.
Our logo for CellarThief – looks outdated now but we were pretty excited about it:)
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.