Local tech entrepreneur to launch cloud-based catalog

New platform for wine industry professionals
A pair of local businessmen are launching a new technology venture that targets the wine industry.
Dan Chapin and Scott Schulze are teaming up to produce Artisan Cloud, a cloud-based hosting platform for wine industry marketing professionals. The product, still in its trial phase, provides a space for wineries to upload data and information such as label art, tasting notes and other marketing material, and have it accessible from anywhere in the world.
Cloud-based technology is essentially the method of storing data on third party servers, that can be accessed remotely.
Schulze is the CEO of Fusion Technology Solutions and a Healdsburg native who recently relocated his business to Healdsburg from Santa Rosa. Fusion is an IT company with clients in the wine industry. Schulze partnered up with Chapin, a ten-year veteran of wine sales, to get Artisan Cloud up and running.
“We’re essentially servicing the food and beverage sector,” Chapin told the Tribune. “Wine of course is a large part of that; it’s in our back yard.”
He described Artisan Cloud as a niche product for the food and beverage sector. The wine industry is one segment of that market that goes to great lengths to create the advertising products and media used to sell its product, he said. These materials are referred to by marketers as “collateral.”
“Wineries don’t spare expense when it comes to their collateral,” Chapin said. “It requires an image of their product, lots of photography, lots of content and that’s all in digital format.”
As wineries grow and develop the need for spreading these materials elsewhere in the US or even overseas, they often have to send marketing materials by email, which, depending on the size of the files, can be difficult and time-consuming.
Based on the wineries whose assets Artisan Cloud already hosts, Schulze said the amount of data can amass rapidly.
“It gets quickly to gigabytes,” Schulze said, adding that he expected that an average winery producing between 5,000 and 10,000 cases annually would need up to 10 gigabytes of storage.
Artisan Cloud took on its first client in October, and it was a sizeable one. Facebook Inc., is getting into the physical gift-giving business, including wine, and secured the services of Artisan Cloud to provide the digital marketing assets of wines to be sold on the social media platform’s gift service.
The wine industry is rapidly transitioning to more of an online sales presence, Chapin said. Amazon.com also recently began selling wine on its website. Between these two giants and other online wine merchants, the floodgates are opening, Chapin said.
“Now there are a lot of online marketplaces that are going to be opening up, and a lot of small wineries are open to selling to these online markets because they’ll be able to retain their margins,” he said.
“These small wineries are going to get pinged by every one of these [online retailers] just like they would be by a distributor, ‘I need your bottle shot, I need your one-page or sell sheet, I need your digital assets,’ and the marketing person is just going to be inundated with all of this.”
Jennifer LeBrett, director of business development at the Healdsburg Chamber of Commerce said she thinks cloud-based technology is perfect for a small town like Healdsburg.
“Technology-based companies require only a small footprint and have minimal environmental and infrastructural impacts,” she said in an email. “This is important given Healdsburg’s commercial, industrial and retail rents are significantly higher than the county’s average, making technology an ideal growth industry.”
Artisan Cloud is expecting to launch version 1.0 in January, Chapin said, with version 2.0 coming next summer.