Adaptive Path Blog

I had the fortune of interviewing Joshua Wesson, CEO of innovative wine merchant Best Cellars. Joshua Wesson will be speaking at MX East, and even leading a wine tasting! Here are some highlights, and you read the full interview here. (Don’t forget, when you register for MX East, use the promotional code BLOG for an additional 10% off).

“It was a grape stand epiphany after many years of suffering under the cruel heel of Manishevitz Concord, my first wine. I worked in restaurants for a number of years as a wine steward, thinking about putting wine and food together and helping people — all sorts of people, people who had broad knowledge of wine and people who had no knowledge of wine — connect to food in delicious ways.

The idea was to take a complex subject, wine, and make it instantly accessible, because when you think about it, ordering wine in a restaurant, you may spend three or four minutes, if that, thinking about what wine you want to drink and how it may or may not connect to the food.”

“I really wanted to make the experience so intuitive and simple that the store became your wine expert and it was your best friend, your reliable insider who would give you information that would connect your palette preference to a specific bottle.”

“It was kind of like Apollo 13, on the ground they threw all the things that they had up in the capsule on a table, and tried to figure out how they could jury rig a device that would allow the astronauts to get enough oxygen to come back to earth. We looked at all the different things that constituted a traditional wine shop experience and we basically threw away anything that was an obstacle and what was left on the table became the basis of Best Cellars. We took away the bad stuff, kept the good stuff, and added our own stuff and that’s how Best Cellars came to be.”

“We really believed that the way people learned and reacted to systems of classification, especially when it came to something as complex as wine, needed to have the option of going with their strongest suit.

And we were creating new categories, these taste-based categories, so it was absolutely critical that all these elements come together to present a common idea: the reinvention of the way that wine was merchandized by taste rather than by anything else.”

“We have become a little bit smarter in the way that we tune the music to the time of day. We actually have day parts and evening parts and the music that we play is markedly different: mellower during the day, a little bit faster at night. We also don’t play Christmas music. We’re very proud of that. In fact, we have signs that go in our windows at Christmas usually with a picture of Bing Crosby with a circle and a slash.”

Again, read the full interview here.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, September 6th, 2007 at 1:36 am and is filed under Adaptive Path, Experience design, MX East, Plugs, retail. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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