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Photos by Erin Nelson.
Kim Stone, CEO, and Preston Hooten, co-owner and chief operating officer, at the BUZD warehouse in Five Points South.
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In addition to alcohol delivery, BUZD offers customers options for various CBD products.
Since alcohol delivery services became legal in Alabama, companies everywhere have cashed in on the new enterprise.
However, only a few delivery services can deliver liquor in the entire state.
Two services in particular, Dippi and BUZD, both Birmingham-based liquor delivery services, are looking to change the game when it comes to alcohol delivery.
Rashad Grimes, founder and CEO of Dippi, wasted no time in trying to fill a new need for alcohol drinkers in the state when the company started making deliveries last October.
“We’ve had a 10% growth and when I say that, the amount of users that we had, just in Birmingham alone, has grown 10 times the amount,” Grimes said. “We have over 8,000 people using our platform in Birmingham alone. We’ve recently expanded to Montgomery, and when it comes to user acquisition, month after month we’re getting more users. We’ve partnered with more retailers so now we literally cover the entire city of Birmingham. We’re talking about Mountain Brook, Vestavia Hills, Ensley, Forestdale, Center Point and Tarrant.”
Grimes said the company is currently working to reach areas on the “outskirts” of Birmingham, including Chelsea and Alabaster.
Dippi sends delivery drivers to different convenience stores to buy beer, wine and spirits and then deliver the orders to their customers, he said.
Grimes said Dippi has an advantage against companies like Shipt and DoorDash because those companies only deliver beer and wine and are currently
not partnering with small businesses. Those local partnerships enable Dippi to deliver spirits.
“We believe we can be the next Shipt,” Grimes said.
Dippi’s not the only one that wants to change the game.
BUZD is a liquor delivery app that also sells CBD products and other accessories through its sister store, Near to Me Dispensary. Tony Parker, the senior advisor at BUZD, said the company has a unique business model that sets them apart from other liquor delivery services by saving their customers time and money.
BUZD is different in that they own their own inventory, which cuts costs and time for their customers.
In Alabama, alcohol couriers aren’t allowed to own their inventory but BUZD has a unique advantage, Parker said.
The founder and owner of BUZD and Near to Me Dispensary, a CBD dispensary in Five Points South, and John Parker, Tony Parker’s son, also owns Dave’s Pub, a bar in Five Points South that has a special on-and-off-premise license, which allows the bar to sell alcohol and lets customers consume it off the premises.
According to state law, Parker said, in order for a bar to deliver alcohol with the special on-and-off-premise license, the warehouse has to be connected to the bar, which is how Dave’s is able to utilize its license.
“BUZD is basically Dave’s delivery service,” Parker said.
BUZD delivers to several cities in the Birmingham area including downtown, Homewood, Vestavia, West Hoover and Irondale.
When a customer places an order on the BUZD app, a delivery driver receives a push notification on the company’s driver app and accepts the order, said Preston Hooten, chief operations officer at BUZD and co-owner of Dave’s.
In the meantime, Hooten said, at BUZD’s warehouse, connected to Dave’s Pub, the order is prepared.
The warehouse is then notified when a driver is outside and the order is taken to the driver for delivery, Hooten said.
With this model, Hooten and Parker said, BUZD saves their customers money because they won’t have to pay for a delivery driver to physically go to a retailer to buy the alcohol, and it also takes less time to prepare an order.
“I feel like one of our biggest features that’s going to set us apart in the market is our speed,” Hooten said. “The way that this has all been set up has also been for driver convenience, so we don’t put them through something like, ‘hey, go into Publix and get a 2015 Napa Valley cabernet called this.’ It’s going to be like they’re walking into a forest, and that’s going to add frustration and your margin of error is much greater.”
“I think we can all agree that an alcohol delivery app was going to be inevitable,” said Kim Stone, CEO of BUZD and Near to Me Dispensary. “We see the volume that other states are doing this at but where the concept of BUZD becomes different from everybody else that’s done it before is through the partnership with Dave’s, it’s through that special license.”
The former owners of the bar, Parker said, got the license when they were still being granted to bars and kept renewing it over the years.
Today, the license is still valid, but licenses like this are no longer granted by the ABC Board, he said.
We’re working hard to grow and expand that footprint and start some really good relationships with your favorite breweries and local companies, too.
Rashad Grimes
Dippi and BUZD have big plans for the rest of the year.
Grimes said Dippi is working to get more investors and increase their marketing, which is something Dippi was able to grow its customer base without.
He said Dippi is working to close seed-round funding no later than September.
“Once we close out our speed round at the start of September, that’s when people will start seeing a massive amount of advertising from Dippi, they’ll see massive expansion,” Grimes said. “Right now, we have the most partnerships with small businesses throughout the state. We’re working right now on expanding to Huntsville and Mobile, we’re already in Montgomery, and when it comes to partnerships with retailers in Birmingham, we have the most.”
BUZD is currently working on developing partnerships with local breweries and distilleries in order to widen their alcohol selection, Stone said.
“We want you to be able to buy your favorite beer and lucky for us, we’ve got a lot of good breweries in Birmingham, so we’re hitting those partnerships and working on them because the more beer we can buy and sell to the customers, the better it is for everybody else,” Stone said. “We’re working hard to grow and expand that footprint and start some really good relationships with your favorite breweries and local companies, too.”
Hooten said BUZD also has plans to introduce cocktail kits to the app with a bit of a twist.
In the app, he said, customers will be able to choose a cocktail, click on it and all of the ingredients for it will be liste, with the option to buy them.
There will also be a tutorial video that features an employee or bartender from local restaurants and bars in Birmingham in order to promote local bars and eateries, Hooten said.
Parker said they also have plans to build a facility in Hoover to expand their reach as well as build other facilities in the state.
“The growth is the biggest thing at BUZD,” Parker said. “We plan on having a footprint all over the state of Alabama. That’s the reason our five app developers have job security because each location will have its own inventory and its own challenges because of geography and local laws.”
BUZD and Dippi are both available on the App Store and Android.
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