Vinfolio announced today that we've completed a $4.5 million financing in what is the second round of outside capital raised since inception (see full press release).
From our customers' point of view, there will be numerous benefits which result from this capital infusion:
- More supply of hard-to-find fine wine - The pace of our private cellar acquisitions through our personal selling service continues unabated (e.g., two cellar purchases this week total over $1 million). About 60% of our retail sales are now supplied from this channel which is often the only way to obtain many fine wines that were either highly allocated upon release or which are no longer offered from trade sources.
- VinCellar and website enhancements - Roughly 20% of Vinfolio's staff are Java software developers which we further supplement with numerous specialist consultants. As a business which is 100% online, we need to be innovators and stay in front of competitors with our website and VinCellar functionality. Numerous major developments are under way which will be released over the coming months. Moreover, as we raised $1 million more in equity than we had targeted, we plan to expand even further our previous aggressive plans in the software arena.
- Even finer service - Vinfolio's guiding principle is "Fine wine, finer service." Good service in any business is usually driven from the top (that means me in this case!) and it depends on investing in people and systems to provide responsiveness, convenience, and certain self-service capabilities. If you have suggestions on how we can improve our service, please email service@vinfolio.com and put "Service suggestion for Steve" in the subject line.
To all of our customers, thank you for getting us to this point and we appreciate your business. If you're reading this and are not currently a customer, visit our site and see what you're missing.
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