From that first scan in 2010 to the one billion scan milestone we’ve hit today, we here at Vivino want to toast all the users who have helped us age like a fine wine. Cheers to you, from all of us!!
Vivino Success Story
ONE. BILLION. SCANS. That’s what we are celebrating today and our community of millions of wine drinkers is at the center of it all. Read more about our journey to one billion scans from our founder.
In 2009, I was on my way to a dinner party and wanted to pick up a good bottle of wine. As I stood staring at the wall of wine, something dawned on me – the wine industry had a problem – there was no easy way to know which bottles of wine were good and which were not good. At that moment, I knew I wanted to try and change some things.
Fast forward to July 2, 2010, just two years after Apple’s App Store launched when I pointed my phone at a bottle of red wine from Northern Italy. That was my very first scan on Vivino, the new app my co-founder Theis Søndergaard and I had just finished building. We hoped Vivino would help people buy and drink better wine by leveraging crowd-sourced ratings from wine drinkers around the globe.
That scan not only meant a lot to me but would soon mean a lot to the entire world of wine. As the first in Vivino’s history, that scan led to what has become the world’s largest online wine community and marketplace.
Now, we’ve reached another huge milestone. Thanks to our community of millions of wine drinkers, Vivino has hit one billion scans. When I think about what one billion scans means, I can’t help but think about the billion moments behind these scans: finding the right red for a celebratory toast, perhaps. Or nervously scanning the restaurant wine list so you can pick the perfect champagne to sip on your first date — then using Vivino to remember what that wine was years later, so you can buy it for an anniversary gift because that first date turned into far more.
When we created Vivino in 2010, there were already 600 wine apps in the App Store, yet the wine industry remained an intimidating place. It was still difficult for wine drinkers to easily access information, and shopping for wine felt like something that required insider-only knowledge. I didn’t think that was fair. Anyone should be able to walk into a supermarket and quickly figure out if a bottle is worth buying, or not. It should be easy and fun, not overwhelming.
That’s why we decided to create something different. We built a one-of-a-kind database that unlocks the power of ratings from the people who matter the most — the wine drinkers themselves. This database became the reason people like you came back — year after year, occasion after occasion. It was an idea that changed the whole industry, and today, Vivino is attracting more than half a million new users each month. We’re starting a new relationship between humans and wine, one scan at a time.
We’ve worked hard over this past decade to democratize that wine database and make it as transparent as possible. Today, our 40 million users have scanned 10 million wines from more than 200,000 producers around the world. This means you can walk into a supermarket in California, Campania, or Copenhagen and look up any wine, discover its rating and figure out which one is right for you.
Connecting our users not only to wine, but directly to thousands of merchants and wineries, has allowed us to help users find a wine to fall in love with, and — with a couple of taps on their phone — purchase it in 17 countries around the globe.
What started as a simple tool to scan wine labels has evolved beyond my wildest dreams. Since then, we’ve added features like the Vivino Wine List Scanner, which means you never have to sit and stare blankly at a restaurant wine list ever again. Now our focus is on making Vivino a truly personal experience, and we’re working hard to teach our algorithms to understand unique taste profiles: person by person, palate by palate, plate by plate.
In the beginning, Vivino was simply an idea, with an office in a basement. Now it employs hundreds of people around the world and holds the trust and knowledge of over 40 million users.
