Distiller and Drizly have an answer to one of winter’s worst hardships: that freezing trip to the liquor store for more body-warming booze. The Distiller whiskey recommendation platform just partnered with the Drizly liquor delivery app to bring your favorite bottles straight to your door.
Distiller teased the partnership to Macworld last month, but officially rolled out integration with Drizly this week after the delivery app opened its API. In exchange, Distiller will put its original content—product data and reviews—in Drizly.
Every Distiller user will now see a ‘buy’ button next to every product, even in areas where Drizly doesn’t operate. The delivery app covers Austin, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, NYC (Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Hamptons), Seattle, and Washington D.C. The app will add St. Louis to its list of markets this week.
If you live in one of those cities, Drizly will connect you to the closest store in its network and scan its inventory for the bottle of your choosing. If your preferred whiskey is unavailable, Distiller will recommend three similar options. You don’t have to be a registered user of either Drizly or Distiller to make your purchase, and you can expect a delivery in less than 40 minutes.
“My first time ordering, it got to my house in 14 minutes,” Distiller CEO Mikael Mossberg said. “I don’t know if that’s the norm, but it was pretty gratifying.”
If you’re not one of the 10 areas currently covered by Drizly, you can submit your ZIP code by tapping ‘buy,’ so both companies get a better idea of where delivery service is most requested. When Drizly adds service in a new city, Distiller users in that city will get a notification.
Making money on whiskey
Drizly makes money by sharing profits with stores, and Distiller will get a cut of that action for sales made in its app. Mossberg said the partnership is the first step toward revenue for Distiller, which has no real model to follow. The list of companies at the intersection of alcohol and tech is a short one.
“We’ll be keeping an eye on order frequency,” Mossberg said. “One of the reasons we allow everybody to see the ‘buy’ button is we want to see what types of products and where people are that are interested in buying. Maybe we find out not a ton of people are interested in major markets, but maybe there are people all over the world interested in high-end bottles.”
Mossberg said he’s keeping an eye out for other apps to partner with and more ways to license out Distiller’s original content. As whiskey continues to dominate discussions around craft liquor, Distiller is poised to serve that growing community with reviews, recommendations, and now delivery.