Goverre entered the Shark Tank in Season 8 with its portable wine cup. It’s the first and only one to be made of glass and have a drink-through lid, making wine on the go easy and fashionable.
We interviewed friends and founders Regan Kelaher Shannon Zappala, who said their demographic is mainly busy women. In 2016, their first year of business, they sold 35,000 units. The glasses are now available in nine colors and can be found in 500 different retailers.
Here’s what else they told us about…
Interested in Goverre? Buy one here.
How the Idea Came About
Kelaher: One evening, while enjoying an outdoor concert in the park with our families, Shannon and I both noticed that everyone was drinking their nice wine out of plastic cups, including us! We began looking for a portable glass that wasn’t plastic. After an extensive and unsuccessful search, we decided to create one.
Experience With Kickstarter
Zappala: Our Kickstarter experience was tough! Our first campaign failed. We had to quickly decide whether or not we wanted to regroup and try again or give up. We decided that we would try to learn from our mistakes and give it a go again. We ended up exceeding our goal and raising almost $64,000.
Interested in Goverre? Buy one here.
Advice for Future ‘Tank’ Contestants
Kelaher: Focus on your pitch! Practice until your family members, roommates or kids all have your pitch memorized. Don’t worry about the investor questions yet, just the nail the pitch. This is TV, not a typical investor meeting. Be super fun and bring your own unique style to the pitch.
Running a Business in San Diego
Zappala:San Diego is a great place to start a business! There are so many resources here. Every resource we used (engineering, design, marketing) are local to San Diego. Regan and I are really lucky that we have so many local entrepreneurs to bounce our ideas off of. There were so many San Diego Shark Tank contestants this year!
Their 1st Prototype
Our first mock up took about a month to make. We created a very rough version of what we wanted Goverre to look like. We took this mock up to an engineering team who made a prototype for us. This took about six months. We then had to raise money on Kickstarter to fund the mold creating process and our first production run. We went to China, found a factory and had molds made.
Interested in Goverre? Buy one here.
Beverages that have appeared on Shark Tank:
