Starting July 26, Vivino’s co-founder and current CEO, Heini Zachariassen will step down from his role at the top of the company that he created in 2010. In his place, Olivier Grémillon will step in to helm the world’s most popular wine app and largest online wine marketplace.
Zachariassen will remain on Vivino's board and continue on as the company’s Chief Evangelist.
His decision to step away from the day-to-day leadership of Vivino comes after a year in which consumers increasingly embraced online wine sales. In fact, Vivino's e-commerce platform sold $265M worth of wine sold in 2020, a 103% year-over-year jump in sales from 2019.
This shift in consumer habits led Zachariassen to realize that “it felt like the right time to bring in a new leader with the skills and experience to take our business to the next stage in its development and accelerate our growth from where we are today."
Vivino's board Chairman, former Moët-Hennessy CEO Christophe Navarre, said, "Olivier's appointment brings a fresh perspective to the business that is grounded in community and will help propel Vivino's presence as the go-to resource for all things wine worldwide."
Grémillon is an experienced internet industry executive and is considered an expert in growing and nurturing passionate digital communities. Most recently, he spent three years leading global growth efforts at Booking.com. Prior to that, he spent six years at Airbnb, where he led the property rental platform’s charge into Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.
"Olivier is bringing years of success and experience to Vivino that will allow for even more consumers to buy wine through our marketplace with the confidence that they are getting the best possible wine for their specific taste," Zachariassen stated.
Gremillion called it “the perfect moment to join Vivino," which now has over 50 million users as well as 700 merchants in 17 international markets. These users have resulted in the app building up a database of over 1.6 billion scanned wine labels, 72 million written reviews, and 204 million ratings on 13.5 million bottles of wine.
Gremillion added, “With ten years of data collected from nearly two billion wine label scans and hundreds of millions of unbiased reviews and ratings, no one is better placed than Vivino to bring wine drinkers of the world closer to the wines they love.”
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