The Mesh - Lisa Gansky [9]
CASE STUDY:
Crushpad Wine
When Michael Brill ripped up his backyard and installed two dozen grapevines at his home in San Francisco, it was, he said, by far the coolest thing he’d ever done. While Brill was making the wine in his garage, people walking by stopped to help. At the season’s high production point, one hundred people popped in to lend a hand, have some pizza and beer, and get their clothes dirty. By accident, he had tapped into a latent passion in many people to make their own wine.
Inspired by this experience, in 2004 Brill started Crushpad. The company is targeted to people, like his volunteers, who want to make their own wine but don’t own a vineyard. Crushpad provides everything they need, including high-quality grapes, access to wine experts, and crushing, fermentation, and bottling facilities. Brill, now the CEO, thought the primary business would come from restaurants, bars, and retailers who wanted their own wines and labels. But it soon became clear that no restaurant—always cash-tight on low margins—was going to pay $10,000 for a private wine label that they wouldn’t see for two years. Today, Brill laughs. “That model was so not going to work.”
Instead, the company figured out there were a lot of people who wanted to make fifty to a hundred cases a year. Today, anyone can make a barrel of wine using Crushpad’s tools and metrics, including fermentation data and information for interpreting it. The Crushpad customer base remains passionate. Many of them fly in for the crush. The company offers a fairly low price point for beginners and provides lots of assistance. For those far away, it sends barrel tastings. For those who only want to blend wine, it sends a case of six small wine bottles (splits) and a graduated cylinder, and you add different volumes of claret, pinot noir, and cabernet until you come up with your preferred blend. Through Crushpad Commerce, customers not only make wine but sell it under their own brand. The company offers a platform for creating a customized Web site with the feel of a big winery. There, wine lovers can order fabulous Napa wines for a nice price.
Crushpad offers access to materials and tools that are too expensive and involved for most people to own. Starting with 5,000 square feet of space, the company now has ten times that much. As Crushpad has grown, Brill has started investigating what’s been learned by music providers such as Pandora, Rhapsody, or MOG about how to create “influencers” that help people discover new music. Who are the influencers for wine purchases? Retail store staff? Magazines and blogs? Restaurant sommeliers? These are exactly the kinds of questions that can help a Mesh business take off.
If you’re like most of us, there are many things you now don’t use, or use infrequently, such as musical instruments, specialty sporting equipment, or a second car. You may own them for the convenience of having them available, just in case, or possibly to impress friends. Imagine how much wasted money and time they represent. (Some sites, such as wattzon.com and carbon-neutral. com, will actually calculate it for you.) Consider how much you’d save or earn if it were easy and secure to share the stuff you seldom use. Mesh businesses turn that potential into profit, much the same way that people rent out a second home when not using it. You just have to “see” it.
Of course, not everything can or will be shared. That’s an extreme. I’m not looking at the extreme. I’m looking for where you get a big payoff for a family, for a community, for a business, and for the planet by reducing the friction of sharing. Zipcar succeeds, for example, because the value proposition of car sharing is compelling. Cars sit unused twenty-three hours a day, on average, and many families own more than one. Through car sharing, a person in the United States saves an average of $400- 600 monthly on insurance, maintenance, and other costs. Dense urban areas, where car sharing