Peter Talks Retail with Joshua Wesson of Best Cellars
Joshua Wesson, CEO of innovative wine merchant Best Cellars, will be presenting at MX East, our design management conference, taking place October 21-23 in Philadelphia. In preparation, Peter Merholz chatted with him about his store, its mission, design choices, and future. Here are the highlights of the discussion.
Peter Merholz [PM]: My first question is really simple: what is the history of Best Cellars? How long has it been around and how did it get started? What made you realize the need for it?
Joshua Wesson [JW]: The first store opened in November of 1996, but it was really a two-year process to turning on the lights and opening the doors. We opened a week before Thanksgiving, which is not the best time for a retailer to open, literally into the jaws of the monster holiday.
PM: The holiday season forces you to test your ideas very much in the moment.
JW: We opened on Lexington Avenue in Manhattan — on the upper east side of Manhattan, a small footprint store like all of our stores. Like all retail environments, there is a rating of how many bodies you can stuff in there before the fire department gets upset. And for the first week that we were open, we were exceeding our fire capacity. We actually had to have a bouncer there to make certain we didn’t exceed code.
PM: Is Best Cellars something that occurred over time or did you emerge from the bathtub shouting, “Eureka!”
JW: 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.
Prior to Best Cellars, wines in wine stores were categorized by place of origin and/or grape type and that’s a fine way of organizing wine if everybody who walks into your store knows a lot about places of origin and grape types. But if they don’t, they’re lost and have to rely on the kindness of whoever might be their guide. If they don’t have a guide, if they’re in a supermarket, a big box store, or a place where there’s nobody willing to help them, then they’re lost.
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.
Read the rest of Peter’s interview of Joshua Wesson and join us for MX East in October. Register with discount code “NEWS” to receive an additional 15% off of registration.
MX East’s Early Bird Registration Ends September 14
Just a quick reminder: Early bird registration for MX East ends September 14 — register today. You can get a taste of MX East’s scintillating topics with the podcasts from our sold out MX San Francisco at IT Conversations.
Also check out the finalized speaker line-up including Kim Goodwin of Cooper: Integrating Design in Your Organization; Chris Conley of Gravity Tank: Building a Creative Culture; Scott Berkun, author of The Myths of Innovation: How Companies Innovate.
Dan Calls for Technical Libraries to Tear Down Their Walls
Dan Saffer posts another grand slam with his challenge to technical libraries: tear down your walls!
“If ever there was an organization behind the times in its philosophy, it is the Association of Computing Machines. The ACM has has a stranglehold on technical papers for years, preventing anyone outside of their organization access to these documents without payment. This even though the ACM hasn’t written or reviewed these documents — the authors and reviewers have done all that work for free. And the thanks they get? Their work doesn’t make it out to the general public; it’s trapped behind a walled garden, where typically only those in academia will ever see or use it because their universities have an account…”
Read the rest of Dan’s blog post and check out the comments our readers left.
UX Week 2007: Thanks and See You Next Year!
Whew! We had a great UX Week this year — our largest one ever. Attendees from across the globe came together to share ideas and learn from an amazing group of speakers whose work and products have impacted millions of lives: Deb Adler’s Target ClearRx system, Bill Scott and Karon Weber of Yahoo! Teachers, plus the first public demonstration of One Laptop Per Child’s UI. We also announced our own internal R&D project, the Charmr.
Attendee feedback from the event was great — we had our strongest program yet. We saw attendees experimenting with new techniques for collaboration, design, and user research. If you were able to join us, we hope that you had as much fun as we did. See you next year at UX Week 2008 in San Francisco.
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