Wakozi is Kozmo For Booze
Erick Schonfeld
17 comments »
One of the great flameouts of the 1990s tech boom was Kozmo, which started in Manhattan, and let you order a pint of Ben & Jerry’s online and a Kozmo bike messenger would deliver it to your door. After burning through $280 million in capital, they closed shop. Well, now New Yorkers have Wakozi. It just launched and only covers Manhattan wine shops, liquor stores, and delis. But they’ve learned from the failure of Kozmo. They don’t actually deliver anything themselves. Instead, they only list inventories of shops that make their own deliveries. Founder Rob Rizzo explains the concept:
Through our site, you can order virtually anything that you would find in a bodega, deli or wine shop and get it delivered to you in less than an hour. So if you want a bottle of Chardonnay or a six-pack late at night or if you’re partying with friends and need another bottle of Belvedere, you can now get it without leaving your apartment. We don’t hire delivery guys or stock any of our own inventory—instead we work with the stores in your neighborhood who already have all the stuff you want and can get it to you the fastest. Right now we’ve got stores in every neighborhood in Manhattan and we’ve initially knocked out what we think everyone cares about most: booze
So this is really a lead generation site for local businesses. (For another approach to tryingto reinvent the Kozmo model, see our coverage of LicketyShip). Wakozi’s site is built entirely on Adobe Flex and lets you drill down into the inventory of your local wine shop. Once it loads, the user interface is fast enough, but the developers chose a faded look for the Website that is hard to read (or is that just Flash?). And the initial loading time is pretty slow. You have to wait again when you click through to an individual store as it loads up what it has in stock. Also, the only information presented is the inventory on the shelves and the price. For wines, you can sort by region or type in search terms. But there is no other information that would help you make a purchase of a wine you’ve never heard about before, such as tasting notes. If you know what you want, this is fine. If you want to try something new, you are better off walking to your local wine store and asking for advice.
A search near my office in downtown Manhattan yielded nine participating stores. I just ordered a bottle of Gnarly Head Old Vine Zin from Gramercy Wine & Spirits about an hour ago. Let’s see if it can get here before I leave my office.
Update: My wine has arrived, exactly an hour and a half after I ordered it. I am a very happy customer, although I’d be happier if they could get the time down to under an hour. Now, I’ve got some more important research to do. (Where’s that corkscrew?)
sounds like a kick ass idea! It should work!
What will tank first?: Wazoki or DanceJam?
I wonder how accurate the inventory is? my guess is that inventory is batch uploaded, daily (maybe). These are small shops, so I doubt there are any real interfaces polling point of sales terminals… which likely include the inventory management module for the store.
Maybe they shave a day or two worth of inventory sales from the (presumably) daily inventory feeds?
I would try them. I’m a wino.
In Hungary, such a thing is one of the most successful online companies, although they started with pizzas (now you can order virtually anything edible or drinkable)
This is amazing — where I am (LES) de-vino has pictures and descriptions! And the site is actually very fast.
But what is Kozmo again? I guess I’ll just google it.
Actually, some of the people from Kozmo started MaxDelivery.com more than a year ago in Tribeca. Just like Kozmoe, you get your order in 1 hour (DVD rentals, food/groceries, drug store items, etc).
They’re pretty cool and I order from them occasionally. I’m not sure which neighborhoods they deliver to, but you should check them out.
Big deal. Los Angeles has had Pinkdot for ages which does include food and has door-to-door delivery. Yawn.
Kozmo may have been a business failure but it was a tremendous success for the customers. It was such a great service to have access to. To be able to order Videos, snacks and even school supplies and have them delivered to your door was well worth the added costs and tips.
Another great idea was WebVan. Too bad those businesses were funded by morons and run by crooks otherwise we would all be enjoying the ease of which you could deal with a trip to the market or the video store.
@1: You stole your design from Jesse Chamberlain.
…sigh….I miss kozmo.com. My favorite company by far while in college. I can order a bag of Doritos, beer (they tested alcohol delivery in Seattle), and a video game rental at 9pm and have it delivered? DONE.
This is similar to seamlessweb.com which has an uncatchy name but has been doing this with food for a while. Seamless’ secret is that they seem to make most of their money as a backend system for Business Catering. They let big companies use their backend to coordinate ordering food for business meetings, etc on a regular basis. Apparently there is in-house staff to handle this for large companies and they spend a lot of time and effort coordinating it all. With Seamlessweb, they just use their web interface and probably love it.
Maybe Wakozi should be shacking assets at Seamless to see if they want the team, although I would imagine that Seamless could build a wine/beer feature pretty quickly.
It appears a lot less capable than http://www.grubhub.com. Similarly, they work directly with the store, but have collected menus from thousands of restaurants that deliver. Granted, they only serve Chicago, San Francisco and Boston at this time, but I think it’s a more useful service.
I’ve used a bunch of times for wine delivery on the UES. I also use Seamlessweb 3 or 4 times a week at work. Wakozi uses Seamlessweb’s business model (i.e., piggybacking off stores that already deliver so there is very little overhead cost for Wakozi) but Wakozi’s user interface is infinitely more intuitive, cleaner and user friendly than Seamlessweb. And it scales (and as a result the delivery is much faster) than Maxdelivery.com is (or Kozmo ever was).
Tried it out for the first time this past weekend and thought it was genius. Beer, cigarettes and chips delivered to my door - and quickly too.
Seems like there is a lot of room to move into other markets too. Would love to be able to hop online and arrange for pet food, dry cleaning, etc. to be delivered.
I have actually used Wakozi a few times and I think it’s a great site with a lot of potential.
I’ve ordered wine for both immediate and future delivery on the Lower East Side and in the East Village and everything worked as promised. The immediate deliveries were fast (about 30 minutes from a store called De Vino) and the future delivery was literally exactly on time (from a store called September Wines). I placed one of the orders during a dinner party and everyone at the party was pretty amazed that I had managed to have more wine delivered to the party without anyone noticing how I had done it.
I never would have called these stores to order, I don’t think that I would have hunted down their individual websites, and were it not for wakozi I probably would have just bought beer from the corner bodega on these occasions, so I think Wakozi is actually driving additional sales to these businesses, rather than just changing whether people go in person or not.
As far as the wine delivery goes, I hope that they add tasting notes and other content that would help users choose their wine. And, of course, they need to be in Brooklyn.
I’ve noticed now that bodegas are popping up on the site as well. Seems like the site will only get more useful as more stores sign on. Real grocery stores? Pharmacies? The local video store? Will be interesting to see how it plays out.