D5. Who audits GDPR compliance?

[sakibkhan22197]

Our logo for CellarThief - it looks old now, but we were very excited about it
With our concept, name, and logo, it was time to build our website. We asked a friend to create a unique design and partnered with a small dev shop to build our site on a CMS/e-commerce platform that was soon after acquired by Adobe. We wanted the site to be beautiful, inspiring, and fun.

Original website design for CellarThief - we've won tons of awards for this
Finally, we had to figure out where the wine was coming from. Luckily, our team had connections in the wine industry, both with wineries and distributors. The idea was simple: if we could sell a little bit of a certain wine in a single day, they would give us a big discount that we could then pass on to our customers.

The wineries and distributors embraced the concept and we were quickly able to have a good range of premium wines that we could offer at a great price. We gave them an estimate of how many cases we would sell and they would hold them and we would pick them up and ship them to our customers.

We believed that storytelling would be the most important part of what we did. So we were excited to interview winemakers, tell the story behind the winery, and help our customers connect with the people behind the wines we sold.

With many of the pieces in place, CellarThief was born. It was a small company, with no outside funding. It was just a few friends trying to build a nice little business that helped people drink great wines at an affordable price. And, make a big difference.

The first wine we proposed was a great success: a Cabernet Riserva Robert Mondavi.

The first wine offered by CellarThief
So it was time to figure out how to get customers. We employment data knew we had to find a balance between taking care of existing customers and finding new ones.

So we reached out to them to get some PR.

We have developed our social media.

We have made some collaborations and tried to create word of mouth.

And while we were pushing to get new clients, we also invested heavily in customer service for our existing clients. We did this mostly with our own time because, well, we didn’t really have any money.