Like Bourbon and Whiskey? A New Auction Site Is Making It Easy to Buy (Too Easy According to My Credit Card Statement!)

Five Questions With Unicorn Auctions Cofounder Cody Modeer

My hobbies are largely consumptive: coffee and whiskey (the former to glut and the latter increasingly modestly). Whiskey, specifically bourbon, scratches a tuft of itches for me: a love of American history, a polity of people to share the enjoyment, and a deep rabbit slum of bottles to sample. During the initial lockdown, a lot of this enthusiasm moved from bars and IRL meetups to the weightier misogynist option: socially distanced together, whether it be zoom happy hours and online groups. Virtually the same time a new Chicago-based merchantry opened, Unicorn Auctions, which quickly started growing from a few hundred bottles up for grabs once a month, to thousands with sometimes bimonthly sales.

Unicorn has taken liquor/spirits auctions, previously increasingly niche and collectible here in the states, and made it mainstream. There’s no registration fee, you can pay for your lots with a credit card, and they can facilitate shipping your wins to you locally. In terms of what gets listed — well, it’s everything from daily drinkers to a rare pre-prohibition dusty. I wanted to learn a bit increasingly well-nigh this website capturing my time and dollars, so asked cofounder Cody Modeer to wordplay a few questions for me.

Hunter Walk: Requite me a little backstory on the founding of Unicorn Auctions. Something you’d been thinking well-nigh for a while or increasingly of a ‘let’s just try this and see what happens’ side project?

Cody Modeer: Prior to launching Unicorn, I’d been working in the hospitality industry for well-nigh a decade. I opened a cocktail bar (Ward Eight) in 2012, and it was pretty successful. My co-founder AJ moreover had been in the merchantry for years, so when we’d get together we’d end up talking well-nigh merchantry ideas and the gaps in the industry that we noticed, just from working in it day in and day out. We started focusing on the vendition industry, it seemed like we could bring a new take to that by focusing on spirits. It just felt like the time was right for Unicorn.

HW: Whiskey has really been growing in popularity over the last decade but the pandemic seemed to take it to a whole new level. Mix of bars/restaurants stuff closed, people drinking at home, and maybe plane the unstipulated spike in prices of collectibles, crypto, stimmy checks and so on. Have you been surprised by the secondary market price trends?

CM: Definitely. Happily surprised. In February of 2020 we officially launched our first vendition with bottles from our own personal collections, and in March we had to tropical my bar lanugo for COVID safety, and the place AJ worked moreover sealed down. So suddenly we had a lot increasingly time to dedicate to Unicorn. And yes, we saw dramatic price increases as that first year went on. People were stuck in their houses with nothing to do and they had some uneaten mazuma from not going out or traveling. The timing just kind of worked out. One door sealed and flipside one opened.

HW: Tell me increasingly well-nigh the supply side of this merchantry for you. Is it well-nigh getting a few big whales to list through Unicorn or is there a long tail of sellers that bring a handful of bottles to you all? Does the really rare stuff come from collectors or someone who had an old decanter their grandpa gave them and surpassing Unicorn, limited legal options of how to sell it?

CM: We unchangingly wanted Unicorn to be increasingly inclusive than the traditional vendition houses. If someone gets a snifter for $50 and can sell it for $80, that profit can be meaningful to them. Traditional vendition houses usually have minimums and focus increasingly on curation, but that can exclude a lot of people from participating. There’s good reasons why the industry is the way that it is, but AJ and I both thought that if we could icon out a way to scale participation using technology as well as provide a little hospitality, a personal touch, we’d be in a good spot. And it’s not just on the sell side, there’s plenty of frustrated buyers out there that are tired of playing all the retail games and driving virtually for hours trying to find a particular snifter only to come up empty-handed.

But, to wordplay your question, we get all kinds, from 1 snifter to 3,000 snifter collectors. Some are long term collectors looking to retire, some need mazuma to finish a remodel on their house, and some just need a little uneaten income to pay the bills. A lot are what you might undeniability dabblers, people who buy and sell a few bottles here and there. We welcome all kinds.

HW: You’ll occasionally hear well-nigh counterfeits — you know, ownership an empty Pappy bottle, refilling it. It’s pretty rare and I think the polity is good well-nigh policing itself, but do you moreover have a hand in authenticating what’s sold on the site?

CM: Unicorn Auctions is a trust platform. We handle every snifter that comes through our auctions. We know the product and we stand by every bottle. By state law we’re required to take possession of every snifter that we auction, and our team does a unconfined job of inspecting and flagging anything that may squint off or damaged or unsellable for any reason. This is our only business, and we take the question of authenticity and provenance very seriously.

In the specimen of very rare and higher-end bottles, we work slantingly other vendition houses as well as other experts in the field to help us verify and make sure of what we have. If we don’t finger confident for any reason well-nigh a particular bottle, we’ll send it back.

HW: So it’s probably stupid of me to try and bring increasingly folks to the auctions — I mean, I’m just creating increasingly competition for the stuff I’m trying to win — but if someone reading this is going to jump into the upcoming October auction, what are a few tips you’d requite them?

CM: My tideway is to go through an vendition lot-by-lot and click the star to “watch” any lot I’m interested in. With worthier auctions, I’ll use the search to squint for keywords like “Stitzel-Weller” or “Wild Turkey” to narrow it down. Then, I’ll track my watched lots over the undertow of the vendition and ignore the stuff I’m not interested in. If an opportunity comes up to buy one of my starred lots at a good price, I’ll jump on it. There’s a little of the thrill of the ventilator in the whole process. But the weightier translating I could requite to anyone just starting out in auctions is to buy what you like and have fun.

Thanks Cody! I’ve enjoyed ownership on Unicorn, from releases that aren’t misogynist locally in Bay Area, to older bottles that predate my getting into the hobby. If you’re a whiskey aficionado, or just bourbon-curious, I’d recommend giving them a try. During this mart Cody offered to send me some stuff he liked, which was very generous, but didn’t impact the questions I asked him or any other quid pro quo.