Whole Foods' wine business replaces Amazon's; WineWoot founder sees an opening
Amazon.com's purchase of Whole Foods Market is showing up in the wine category. Amazon has shut down Wine.Woot and its own wine marketplace in favor of Whole Foods expansive wine operation.
As a result, Dallas entrepreneur Matt Rutledge sees an opening in the marketplace.
When Amazon.com purchased daily deals site Woot.com, based in Carrollton, in 2010 it also acquired Wine.Woot, a direct producer-to-consumer website that Amazon adopted for its own wine marketplace.
Now, Woot.com founder Rutledge and Wine Country Connect President David Studdert, who co-founded Wine.Woot with Rutledge in 2006, want to start a new business called Casemates.
Rutledge, who is also co-founder and CEO of a Dallas-based tech incubator called Mediocre Corporation, said Wine.Woot pioneered the winery-direct retail model.
"We created this method—we're not even a store, the wine you're buying is sold by the producing winery," Rutledge said in his Kickstarter blog post
Casemates plans to offer new wine deals three times a week. It's also planning to build tools to let customers share by-the-case orders with others nearby to lower the price.
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