From algorithm to wine: Bright Cellars
When you come for the first time in a wine shop, the good vintner asks you what kind of wine you are searching for, what is your taste, what you want to pair it with, how much you want to spend.
He or she talks with you, understanding what bottle you’d buy, if you are interested to well known wines or you like to do experiments.
Tell me who you are and I sell you the right wine
Your answers help the wine seller to show you the right bottle. Bright Cellars is a tech wine startup does the same thing, just using an algorithm.
Their users pay a monthly subscribers, effaceable at any time and without purchase restrictions. When they subscribe it, the platform ask some questions about wine and favorite food to know consumer preferences.
Thanks answers, Bright Cellars display you four different bottles every month for 60$; they are based on your preferences, bottles change, so satisfy the wine lover taste.
It’s the same way as Netflix or Spotify work, asking your favorite genre and suggesting a different movie or song. Very simple, really working.
The Wine Lover Algorithm
Two MIT graduates, Joseph Laurendi and Richard Yau, four years after their degree meet themselves again and thought to build this startup, creating Bright Cellars in 2014.
Yau is a music and art expert, Laurendi is a mathematician and a programmer; their difference is, in their words, the important thing of the Bright Cellars algorithm.
They moved themselves from Boston to Milwaukee starting from the Gener8tor accelerator, funding them with 70,000$. With these money they hired their first three people.
We see ourselves as this big experiment in finding out what people actually like. And on many occasions it’s not what they think they like, and on many occasions it’s not necessarily what the older demographic wine drinker likes. [Richard Yau, from Chicago Inno]
The wine bottles BrightCellars suggests aren’t choose among most famous ones, but are labels less known, from little wineries. So, prices are kept low, offering to customers some wines they couldn’t find in the offline channels.
At August 2015, Bright Cellars received a 2 M$ fund, at May 2018 2,8 M$ from Cream City Venture Capital, and now they have 25 employees and 16,000 users.
