The Crowd Drinks Better
We’re modernizing the online alcohol shopping experience — making it fully interactive, collaborative, data driven, and social by default.
Here’s the Low Down
Picks is building the mass personalized shopping experience for e-commerce — a convergence of crowdreview insights and marketplace — starting with adult beverage. Within the next 5 years, it’s estimated that 10% ($140B) of alcohol purchases will be made outside of a traditional brick and mortar liquor store. We believe that as more people conduct their shopping online, their ability to pick what’s best for them becomes harder, but it doesn’t have to.
Picks App is the first truly crowdreviewed spirit and wine community, brought to you by OakBottle, Inc. By harnessing social collaboration in the form of aggregated user generated tasting reviews and taste profiles, our community is able to make more informed purchasing decisions about what products match their personal taste preferences. Utilizing the Picks App to leverage crowdsourced tasting notes, profiles, and scores places unprecedented power at your fingertips. Picks Shop’s aggregated scores represent real data that has been injected into our free community by enthusiasts like you who want to explore spirits and wines and track their tasting notes to curate selections that take the guesswork out of finding a bottle you’ll enjoy.
While stores still play an important role in this process, much of this activity is now taking place online. In fact, online is the one area in which alcohol sales are steadily growing. We’ve seen the rise of online alcohol delivery websites and apps, but delivery today makes up less than 10% of the adult bev market. The rest — in store and on premise — is a $1.3T global market ($64B in the USA alone) that remains offline, anonymous, and on the verge of disruption. The biggest reason why customers still prefer in-store alcohol shopping is (a) the quality of selection, (b) the customer service recommendations they get from experts who work there, and (c) the amount of information they are presented at the point-of-sale in the form of shelf-talkers and displays that help them learn about the products. There is an opportunity to convert over these customers who prefer in-store shopping.
Picks is the first fully integrated crowdreview tasting app and commerce platform in the USA, and one of the fastest growing marketplaces. And we’ve built this with a very small team of extremely talented engineers. We are growing fast and looking for hungry and humble builders to join us. Stay tuned for job openings and partnership opportunities to become part of what we are building.
C’mon, tell us how you do that
How does it work? As a spirits and/or wine enthusiast, you understand that everything has its own unique DNA comprised of color, aroma, texture, and flavor. With the input from Picks App users and through the law of large numbers we craft specific profiles for each sensory component in our offerings. This bleeding-edge technology can calculate on the exact experience you’re looking for and guide you to products you’ll love.
The Mission (if you choose to accept it)
We are relentlessly focused on our mission to be the largest online community of spirit and wine afficionatos and the number one destination for shopping adult beverage online.
With the Picks Shop you’ll easily identify the tasting notes for each bottle based on data analytics from real Picks App users when you click and see the additional information on any bottle. The aggregated data allows for ultra-tailored recommendations that meet your exact standards. Not only this, but since our website’s marketplace is connected directly to our app’s data, you can for the first time narrow down our assortment by taste note level and you can view the actual combined “like” counts coming directly from the combined tasting reviews of our app community!
The matching algorithm of our tech leverages these analytics to take the guesswork out of your next purchase—with Picks App the more tastings you input the more specific your curated picks will be. We’re not choosing the bottles for you, you’re choosing them yourself by fueling the powerful recommendation engine behind the Picks App.
Alright, give us the best part
The best part? This is all free. Open source taste profile data is a resource that is available both within the Picks App and on our website. We encourage you to explore our “Examine” page to take the most advantage of this by viewing the detailed crowdsourced taste profiles of spirits and wines as well as your own taste profile. Become part of the Picks App community today to join fellow spirits tasters and reviewers in building the most comprehensive crowdsourced spirits and wine review resource in the world; for the people, by the people. Free of charge.