GRAPE EXPECTATIONS
Online wine club aims to use QR codes to transform consumer experience
If Xander Oxman has his way, the ancient business of wine selling will never be the same again.
Oxman recently launched Club W, an online wine club that taps into a number of technologies, including QR codes and adaptive algorithms, to help people track down that perfect red or white.
“We’re going to democratize the way people buy wine,” Oxman told The Daily. “We started this company last August because we thought the old-school way of buying wine, of going to a liquor store and having someone help you, was an overall underwhelming experience.”
Club W delivers up to three bottles of wine for $39 per month. (An iPhone app is due within the next few months.) The site begins by gauging users’ taste preferences, asking things like how they like their coffee, or whether they enjoy citrus. The goal is to make it easy for people who don’t know the difference between a merlot and a shiraz to be able to jump right in.
Bottles arrive with QR codes stamped on their label, and scanning them with a smartphone brings up things like “behind-the-scenes” videos on the wine’s origin, oftentimes with the winemakers themselves.
Oxman acknowledged that QR codes “are often ridiculed” — one popular Tumblr blog pokes fun at them — “but that’s because they’re broadly misused.”
“But when you’re home, they can be incredibly powerful and convenient, and the whole process comes across very well,” he said.
As users receive bottles of wine in the mail, they can then rate how much they enjoyed them. Similar to how the news-reading app Zite “learns” its users’ reading preferences, Club W’s algorithms will then take into account user ratings, and will begin to offer similar-tasting wines for future orders. This feedback system is then taken into account sitewide, determining what kinds of wines it should buy from wineries in the future.
Oxman said he wants to do for wine what Gilt Groupe or Amazon’s MyHabit did for fashion.
“Wine distributors don’t like us because we cut them out of the equation,” he said. “But we think consumers, particularly younger ones who are comfortable with the Internet, have been waiting for something like this.”
@nicholasadeleon
Oxman recently launched Club W, an online wine club that taps into a number of technologies, including QR codes and adaptive algorithms, to help people track down that perfect red or white.
“We’re going to democratize the way people buy wine,” Oxman told The Daily. “We started this company last August because we thought the old-school way of buying wine, of going to a liquor store and having someone help you, was an overall underwhelming experience.”
Club W delivers up to three bottles of wine for $39 per month. (An iPhone app is due within the next few months.) The site begins by gauging users’ taste preferences, asking things like how they like their coffee, or whether they enjoy citrus. The goal is to make it easy for people who don’t know the difference between a merlot and a shiraz to be able to jump right in.
Bottles arrive with QR codes stamped on their label, and scanning them with a smartphone brings up things like “behind-the-scenes” videos on the wine’s origin, oftentimes with the winemakers themselves.
Oxman acknowledged that QR codes “are often ridiculed” — one popular Tumblr blog pokes fun at them — “but that’s because they’re broadly misused.”
“But when you’re home, they can be incredibly powerful and convenient, and the whole process comes across very well,” he said.
As users receive bottles of wine in the mail, they can then rate how much they enjoyed them. Similar to how the news-reading app Zite “learns” its users’ reading preferences, Club W’s algorithms will then take into account user ratings, and will begin to offer similar-tasting wines for future orders. This feedback system is then taken into account sitewide, determining what kinds of wines it should buy from wineries in the future.
Oxman said he wants to do for wine what Gilt Groupe or Amazon’s MyHabit did for fashion.
“Wine distributors don’t like us because we cut them out of the equation,” he said. “But we think consumers, particularly younger ones who are comfortable with the Internet, have been waiting for something like this.”
@nicholasadeleon
No comments:
Post a Comment