A Chicago-based direct-to-consumer wine marketplace wants to help you discover new wines, and it raised some funding to grow its platform and open new showrooms across the country.
Winestyr, founded in 2014, has built a direct-to-consumer wine marketplace that connects users with small-production wineries that are hard to find at traditional retail stores. The startup operates a digital marketplace and two brick-and-mortar showrooms in Chicago, and it recently raised $3 million in funding as it prepares to open another showroom in Boston.
The new funding, led by Continental Investors, a Chicago VC firm founded by Phillip Purcell, the former chairman and CEO of Morgan Stanley, brings Winestyr's total amount raised to date to nearly $6 million.
Winestyr's marketplace bypasses traditional wine wholesalers and retailers, allowing wine makers to reach customers directly and skip the middleman. This allows wineries to keep costs down on WineStyr's platform, CEO Bob Wilson said, and connect with customers who otherwise wouldn't have seen their inventory.
"[Small-production wineries] want more exposure, and we give that to them," he said.
Winestyr has around 2,000 people using its wine club, which starts at $79 for three bottles of wine. The startup says it has grown over 100 percent year over year since 2014.
It operates two showrooms in Chicago---one in the West Loop and another in Lincoln Park---which are appointment only and introduce shoppers to select small-production wines in person. Winestyr is planning to open a new "flagship" brick-and-mortar store in Boston's Seaport neighborhood in the Spring, and it's eyeing additional showroom locations across the country, Wilson said.
"With our showrooms, we can tell our story and tell how different we are," Wilson added. "It was an immediate success."
