25 years Whisky.de (The Whisky Store)

Our anniversary is over

On 15 June 1993 Theresia Lüning founded her mail-order business The Whisky Store in the basement of her private house. It all began with 11 boxes of Scottish Single Malt Whisky, which she offered for shipping via classified ads in the national media.

The World Wide Web (www) had just been invented for the public, even though the Internet had already been around before in the scientific field. Whisky distribution in the mail order business was still largely dependent on print media as a multiplier.

After half a year of mail order, we took a first detailed look at the customer data. How many customers had we won? How many times did they buy? How much had they bought? And what could one deduce from these figures for the future?

Numbers do not lie. We were completely surprised when, after six months of shipping, we already had numerous customers who had ordered two and three times. Yes, there were also customers who had ordered five and six times in six months.

Now it was mathematically easy to calculate the number of newly acquired customers from the placed ads. Lo and behold, it still paid off then. So, over the coming years, we regularly sent out our small mailing ads in all national daily and weekly newspapers.

Even more interesting was the development of the number of regular customers (multiple buyers). Meaning the customers who did not only order after reading an ad, but wrote or called again to place an order. Yes indeed, 25 years ago many orders were sent in the morning by post or by fax during the day. Neither we nor our customers had an e-mail address in the first year. Considering the number of new customers compared to the placed ads as well as the number of multiple orders compared to the orders in total, an incredibly positive picture emerged.

The rest is history. Our turnover exploded and the number of new customers and orders reached unimaginable heights. Since every address and order had to be entered into the merchandise management system, the jump to the Internet followed already in 1994. Now the addresses and articles could be managed by machines and no longer had to be tediously typed in manually.

Years and decades went by. Customers came and went. Luckily, many more customers kept coming than leaving. And for the 25th anniversary, we asked ourselves, which of these customers from the first years probably still belonged to our customer base.

It would have been easy to simply search the old databases. But due to the ever-increasing legal data protection we have to delete customer data after a few years.

Now you could look up the bills in the old accounting folders. But even here, the statutory holding period is only 10 years. After that, the customer data is to be destroyed. Too bad.

Our supplier Diageo had a fantastic idea. He had 25 gift sets made for us with several 0.1 litre vials, each containing special bottlings of special releases with 25 years of age. We asked our customers via our website and newsletter to search for their oldest bill and send it to us. The 25 customers with the oldest bills received one of those sample sets.

Again, we were surprised how many regular customers of more than 20 years we still have among our clientele. Customers who have stayed with us for almost the entire existence of our company.

Thank you so much!

The two oldest bills were dated November 1994. Before that customers remembered, but could no longer show any invoices and we also had no documents to confirm.

From 1995, numerous customers contacted us. The last gift set went to a customer with a bill from January 1996.

Thank you all for taking part in this campaign. We also thank for the many nice anniversary greetings that we received from you. Unfortunately, there were not nearly as many sample sets as there were participants.

We took the anniversary as an opportunity to ask for exclusive bottlings from our distilleries. Some of them responded by filling specially labelled bottles from single casks. The majority of these bottlings included only a few hundred bottles each. Naturally, they are already out of stock.

Based on the great success of these bottles, we have since then regularly created exclusive bottles of various distilleries and independent bottlers for Whisky.de.

We are looking forward to the next 25 years!