CLIENT SPOTLIGHT
Cellr
In October 2020, we asked CELLR to tell us about themselves…
Tell us about your company. What problem are you trying to solve?
CELLR is a mobile app that is intended to let wine enthusiasts curate every aspect of their wine life. From tracking your Wish List items, your own personal inventory, or to see where you can find a sold out or unavailable vintage wine. The app allows you to easily filter your favorite wines by Producer, Region, Subregion, Varietal, as well as Vintage. We have launched the app in Apple Test Flight to an invite only beta user group and will soon be launching additional functionality that will connect cellar owners directly as well as create a robust DTC channel for winery owners. CELLR will effectively manage the crossroads of inventory management, wish list curation, and wine commerce.
How did your company get started?
CELLR started originally as a project between a small group of friends who were finding that the current apps were not providing the insights we needed as active collectors and buyers in the wine space. We were finding that we needed more than an app that gave us photo recognition for wines that were no longer available or even sold through their network for current vintages. We set out to change that…
Why is your team well-positioned to solve the problem you’re tackling?
Team has always been the biggest x-factor for me in the companies I have worked with. You can have a great concept, but without the right team it simply won’t go anywhere. We have a group that brings 1st growth relationships to the table, top Napa vineyard relationships to the table, solid product development & engineering talent, as well as the recent addition of a member of the Court of Master Sommeliers. For us to sign a Master Sommelier was huge as there’s only 266 in the world and was a testament to the product we had developed and the vision we had for further development.
What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned along the way?
Communication and Patience has been the biggest factor in getting to where we are. As a start-up that has chosen to bootstrap from the start, cost management has been huge and we’ve had to make sure that our product roadmap has been well thought out and on point. We’ve strived to make sure that we didn’t have countless redo’s in our development and wasted spend on ideas that were not well thought out.
What resources do you rely on to help your company grow?
We’re fortunate to have great relationships comprising our group’s halo. From development, to winery relationships, to our professional relationships. We’ve chosen to put relationships in place that will support us for the long play and as we are now moving towards commercialization and expanding our marketing efforts we’ll be looking to include funding relationships in that equation. With the U.S. alone being a $71B wine economy, we’re making sure that relationships will have the resources to support us at not just a handful of employees, but hundreds, and a revenue trajectory that will have our competitors taking note.
