When we launched the WineLibrary website in 1996, I didn't even own a computer yet. I just understood that there was an opportunity here to market in a different way.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I am thinking about launching a wine website where there is a deal and the crowd can dictate how cheap it can get.
My store, Wine Library, outsells big national chains. How do you think we do it? It started with hustle. I always say that our success wasn't due to my hundreds of online videos about wine that went viral, but to the hours I spent talking to people online afterward, making connections and building relationships.
Essentially, wines are fermented grape juice, so I'm trying to make the point that the wine world is about scores and marketing and kind of creating a scarce resource where they don't really exist.
Winelibrary.tv was about building personal brand equity. It was a business move. Now, it was totally surrounded by a passion for wine, but I very much gave a lot of thought to doing a sports-video blog instead.
Many people who I respected were disappointed when I started 'Wine Library TV.' They thought I was dumbing down wine, but I always knew I was one of the biggest producers of new wine drinkers in the world, and people are realizing it now.
I'm actually surprised how technical a lot of commercial wine production is. Things are done very much from an industrial chemistry point of view at certain price points, but that's not the impression you get with wine.
We realized we had high-volume marketplace as a platform. Anyone can come in and buy with a subscription.
We never had a giant library or owned a lot of commercial characters the way most studios did. And since we didn't have a lot of internal resources, we had to find ways to be inventive and resourceful, which I think is a healthy way to run a good business.
I went online with winelibrary.com in July of 1997; that was my first professional online play.
2006, I started 'WineLibrary TV.' To build 'WineLibrary TV,' I started using Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter in 2008.