Latest news with #Mikhaylov
Yahoo
29-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Stockholm music competition cancelled at Historical Museum over Russian ties
The Stockholm International Music Competition (SIMC) has been linked to Russian state institutions, prompting the Historical Museum in Stockholm to cancel its hosting of the event, following an investigation by Swedish broadcaster SVT. Source: SVT Nyheter Quote: "The competition was to be held at the Historical Museum and at the Nacka Music School. After the ties with Russia became apparent, the Historical Museum terminated the agreement with the competition, but the music school did not." Details: The Swedish government issued a directive in 2022 that Swedish cultural institutions should not cooperate with Russian state entities. Journalists found out that the entrance fee for the competition is paid to a Russian bank, and 14 jury members are employees of Russian state institutions that publicly support the war in Ukraine. The partner of the competition is Herzen University in St Petersburg in Russia, which also supports the war and sent humanitarian aid to Russian forces. Director of the Historical Museum Åsa Marnell, in a conversation with journalists, replied that she did not know about the Russian connection. The final concert of the competition has been held at the Historical Museum for several years, even after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. After an interview with SVT, the Historical Museum announced the termination of cooperation with the competition, "since this is contrary to the policy of the authorities." Several more stages of the competition take place at the Nacka Music School. Operations manager Catharina Grunér Kronqvist also commented that she did not know about ties with Russia. However, this week's competition will not be cancelled. The organisers of the international music competition deny ties with Russia. In particular, the co-founder of the competition, Galina Ehrngren, noted that "there is no politics in competitions. It's just music, nothing else." However, she added that they did not know that the Russian state university supported the war. What is known about the international competition and relations with Russia Journalists report that the competition was created in 2009 by two Russian musicians called the Savshinsky International Competition in St Petersburg. A year later, one of the founders, Dmitry Mikhaylov, launched a similar competition in Stockholm with pianist Galina Ehrngren and violinist Anna Sundin. Since then, Swedish competitions have been held annually. Mikhaylov is registered in St Petersburg as an individual entrepreneur. In the information about the competition, Russian participants who cannot use bank cards after the suspension of SWIFT are asked to pay the entrance fee directly to his account with the sanctioned bank Sberbank. Journalists found the final concert of the Savshinsky competition in 2025, where Mikhaylov says from the stage that he "organises a similar competition in Stockholm". In the same video, Galina Ehrngren appears as a member of the jury. She was identified using the Amazon Rekognition facial recognition tool. In addition, the official rules of the competition list jury members "from many countries", but there is not a single mention of Russia. Thanks to a search in open Russian sources, SVT was able to find 18 out of 47 jury members of Russian origin. Of these, 14 work in state cultural or educational institutions that directly support the invasion of Ukraine. In particular, several jury members work at Herzen University in St Petersburg. This university signed the appeal of the Russian Rectors' Union in support of Vladimir Putin and the army, and the university also sends humanitarian aid to Russian forces. Some also work at the Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatory. The university has its own patriotic programmes, including discounts and concerts for military personnel. Some members of the jury work at the Mariinsky Theatre, which since the spring of 2023 has been providing free tickets to theatre and concert performances to soldiers participating in Russia's war and their families. Support Ukrainska Pravda on Patreon!
Miami Herald
14-05-2025
- Business
- Miami Herald
How online auction startup Unicorn is turning whiskey bottles into windfalls
When it comes to liquid assets, a Chicago startup is finding that stocks and bonds may have nothing on bourbon. Unicorn, a five-year-old online auction platform for wines and spirits, has quickly established itself as the eBay of imbibing, authenticating, digitizing, storing and auctioning more than $125 million worth of prized booze since inception. More than 100,000 customers have been raiding their liquor cabinets to trade everything from the bargain bin to rare single-barrel bourbons. The weekly auctions have turned more than a few dusty but unopened bottles into five- and six-figure windfalls. 'We serve serious collectors and first-time buyers alike,' said Phil Mikhaylov, 34, CEO and co-founder of Unicorn. 'In every auction, you can find bottles that are $20,000, $30,000, $40,000, but you will also find thousands of bottles under $100. That's why we've grown so vastly.' A first-generation Russian immigrant raised in Northbrook, tech veteran Mikhaylov joined forces with Chicago bar owner Cody Modeer to launch Unicorn in 2020. The online auction platform, which includes a Unicorn app, moves thousands of bottles worth potentially millions each week. All the bottles are digitized for trading and sold on consignment by Unicorn for customers across the country. The bottles are then picked up, shipped to or stored for the winning bidders, a percentage of whom simply trade them again as digital assets. Operating out of a two-story, 30,000-square-foot industrial brick building in Ravenswood on Chicago's North Side that formerly housed a brewery, Unicorn has devoted the first floor to processing the active bottles to be traded on the platform. There's a small receiving room for customers to pick up or drop off bottles and a loading dock for the larger orders. Behind a locked door is a storage area known as the vault, which is lined with shelves packed to the rafters with 25,000 to 30,000 bottles. Warehouse workers roam the aisles, keeping tabs on the inventory, adding and pulling a menagerie of unusual and valuable bottles. Each week, the auction sells 4,000 to 6,000 bottles, meaning the stock changes over every two months. Each auction generates between $1.2 million and $2 million in sales, Mikhaylov said. Unicorn takes 20% of the revenue, with the seller paying a 5% fee and the buyer 15% on each bottle sold. Most auctions have no set minimum bids and a 100% sell-through, he said. The company has raised $5.8 million in funding to date, with a mix of investors including venture capital, NBA players, large wine and spirits collectors and others. Profitable since inception, Unicorn is planning another round of fundraising soon, Mikhaylov said. The fast-growing Unicorn has 75 employees and two Chicago locations, including a 70,000-square-foot warehouse in Bridgeport for longer-term storage of wine and spirits bottles. Unicorn moved into the Ravenswood headquarters from a smaller nearby office last year. The facility, previously home to Empirical Brewery, which closed during the pandemic in 2022, underwent extensive renovation, including the installation of a second floor where a maze of brewing equipment once towered. Upstairs at the Ravenswood headquarters is the tech side of the business, where bottles are authenticated, photographed and digitized for the auction platform by dozens of employees scattered at workstations across the open office. Bottles must be fully intact, unopened and in good condition to make the cut. Unicorn does not exclude spirits based on the perceived quality or original cost, letting the market set the value. The facility is dotted with memorabilia, from framed vintage liquor ads and novelty bottle displays to a 1910 Harley Davidson Model 6 motorcycle on the second floor picked up from a Los Angeles collector during a sales call, along with more than $1 million of whiskey for the auction. There's also a giant safe upstairs where the company keeps its most valuable bottles, including a rare Rip Van Winkle 20-year-old bourbon bottled in 2003 exclusively for the erstwhile Chicago-based Sam's Wines & Spirits, which sold out to Binney's during the Great Recession. Only 60 bottles of the single-barrel bourbon were ever produced. 'Think of it as the Mickey Mantle of bourbon bottles,' Mikhaylov said, carefully removing it from the safe and cradling it. 'This bottle is worth $150,000.' Above the safe, a big video screen displays the progress of the current auction, with a running count of total sales, bids and dollars that will be paid out to consigners. A heat map shows where the bids are coming from across the U.S., and what bottles are drawing the most action. Meanwhile, on the ground floor, auction customers trickle in for scheduled appointments to drop off or pick up bottles. On Wednesday, Robert Drousth of Madison, Wisconsin, made the trip to Unicorn to sell 18 bottles he had accumulated over the years. He paid about $1,500 to build his collection, which was appraised at $31,000 to $39,700. A retired mechanical designer, Drousth, 74, assembled his collection between 2000 and 2013, mostly by visiting local retailers in Illinois and Wisconsin, with occasional sojourns to the annual Kentucky Bourbon Festival. He stopped buying bottles as bourbon became trendier and more expensive and recently made the decision to liquidate the bulk of his collection. The bottles will go up for auction Sunday. 'I didn't collect to sell - it was never an intention,' Drousth said. 'The reality is that many of the bottles I collected became very valuable to people that weren't alive or didn't know that it was available back when I bought it.' Drousth became 'vaguely' aware that his bourbon stash had appreciated in value before reaching out to Unicorn several weeks ago for an appraisal. For years, he 'bunkered' his aging whiskey collection in his basement. As the bottles grew in value, he found it harder and harder to justify cracking them open for a sip. 'It just got to a point where I don't get so much pleasure out of something that is outrageously valuable,' he said. 'It's really hard to pull the trigger on popping the cork.' Back in the day, Drousth would host whiskey tastings with a modest cover charge to help defray the cost of his collection. The return on investment has since grown significantly. The most valuable of the 18 bottles Drousth plans to put up for auction is a limited release E.H. Taylor Old Fashioned Sour Mash bourbon that Mikhaylov said should fetch between $9,000 and $11,000. Drousth paid about $75 for it newly released in 2011. On Wednesday, he made the drive to the Unicorn offices, the bottles carefully boxed up in the back of his Honda, ready to sell. With his collection authenticated, digitized and safely in Unicorn's custody, Drousth can sit back and watch the weeklong online auction with a vested interest. Seven days later, he'll collect the proceeds and a projected 2,000% return for his whiskey investment. 'Obviously, there's a demand for it, and people want to buy them,' he said. 'And some of us want to sell.' One of those buyers, Jake Marquis, showed up at the Ravenswood office during a subsequent time slot Wednesday to pick up a previous auction purchase on the lower end of the price scale: a bottle of Heaven's Door 10-year bourbon for $50 - below retail price. While Unicorn is becoming a high-end investment platform for some, Marquis, 36, a bartender at the Franklin Tap who lives in Uptown, is using it more like an exotic corner liquor store and has multiple bids in this week's auction. 'I just found the app three weeks ago and I bought three bottles so far,' he said. 'I'm finding stuff I didn't know existed, vintages I didn't know existed. It's cool.' Copyright (C) 2025, Tribune Content Agency, LLC. Portions copyrighted by the respective providers.
Yahoo
13-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
How online auction startup Unicorn is turning whiskey bottles into windfalls
When it comes to liquid assets, a Chicago startup is finding that stocks and bonds may have nothing on bourbon. Unicorn, a five-year-old online auction platform for wines and spirits, has quickly established itself as the eBay of imbibing, authenticating, digitizing, storing and auctioning more than $125 million worth of prized booze since inception. More than 100,000 customers have been raiding their liquor cabinets to trade everything from the bargain bin to rare single-barrel bourbons. The weekly auctions have turned more than a few dusty but unopened bottles into five- and six-figure windfalls. 'We serve serious collectors and first-time buyers alike,' said Phil Mikhaylov, 34, CEO and co-founder of Unicorn. 'In every auction, you can find bottles that are $20,000, $30,000, $40,000, but you will also find thousands of bottles under $100. That's why we've grown so vastly.' A first-generation Russian immigrant raised in Northbrook, tech veteran Mikhaylov joined forces with Chicago bar owner Cody Modeer to launch Unicorn in 2020. The online auction platform, which includes a Unicorn app, moves thousands of bottles worth potentially millions each week. All the bottles are digitized for trading and sold on consignment by Unicorn for customers across the country. The bottles are then picked up, shipped to or stored for the winning bidders, a percentage of whom simply trade them again as digital assets. Operating out of a two-story, 30,000-square-foot industrial brick building in Ravenswood on Chicago's North Side that formerly housed a brewery, Unicorn has devoted the first floor to processing the active bottles to be traded on the platform. There's a small receiving room for customers to pick up or drop off bottles and a loading dock for the larger orders. Behind a locked door is a storage area known as the vault, which is lined with shelves packed to the rafters with 25,000 to 30,000 bottles. Warehouse workers roam the aisles, keeping tabs on the inventory, adding and pulling a menagerie of unusual and valuable bottles. Each week, the auction sells 4,000 to 6,000 bottles, meaning the stock changes over every two months. Each auction generates between $1.2 million and $2 million in sales, Mikhaylov said. Unicorn takes 20% of the revenue, with the seller paying a 5% fee and the buyer 15% on each bottle sold. Most auctions have no set minimum bids and a 100% sell-through, he said. The company has raised $5.8 million in funding to date, with a mix of investors including venture capital, NBA players, large wine and spirits collectors and others. Profitable since inception, Unicorn is planning another round of fundraising soon, Mikhaylov said. The fast-growing Unicorn has 75 employees and two Chicago locations, including a 70,000-square-foot warehouse in Bridgeport for longer-term storage of wine and spirits bottles. Unicorn moved into the Ravenswood headquarters from a smaller nearby office last year. The facility, previously home to Empirical Brewery, which closed during the pandemic in 2022, underwent extensive renovation, including the installation of a second floor where a maze of brewing equipment once towered. Upstairs at the Ravenswood headquarters is the tech side of the business, where bottles are authenticated, photographed and digitized for the auction platform by dozens of employees scattered at workstations across the open office. Bottles must be fully intact, unopened and in good condition to make the cut. Unicorn does not exclude spirits based on the perceived quality or original cost, letting the market set the value. The facility is dotted with memorabilia, from framed vintage liquor ads and novelty bottle displays to a 1910 Harley Davidson Model 6 motorcycle on the second floor picked up from a Los Angeles collector during a sales call, along with more than $1 million of whiskey for the auction. There's also a giant safe upstairs where the company keeps its most valuable bottles, including a rare Rip Van Winkle 20-year-old bourbon bottled in 2003 exclusively for the erstwhile Chicago-based Sam's Wines & Spirits, which sold out to Binney's during the Great Recession. Only 60 bottles of the single-barrel bourbon were ever produced. 'Think of it as the Mickey Mantle of bourbon bottles,' Mikhaylov said, carefully removing it from the safe and cradling it. 'This bottle is worth $150,000.' Above the safe, a big video screen displays the progress of the current auction, with a running count of total sales, bids and dollars that will be paid out to consigners. A heat map shows where the bids are coming from across the U.S., and what bottles are drawing the most action. Meanwhile, on the ground floor, auction customers trickle in for scheduled appointments to drop off or pick up bottles. On Wednesday, Robert Drousth of Madison, Wisconsin, made the trip to Unicorn to sell 18 bottles he had accumulated over the years. He paid about $1,500 to build his collection, which was appraised at $31,000 to $39,700. A retired mechanical designer, Drousth, 74, assembled his collection between 2000 and 2013, mostly by visiting local retailers in Illinois and Wisconsin, with occasional sojourns to the annual Kentucky Bourbon Festival. He stopped buying bottles as bourbon became trendier and more expensive and recently made the decision to liquidate the bulk of his collection. The bottles will go up for auction Sunday. 'I didn't collect to sell — it was never an intention,' Drousth said. 'The reality is that many of the bottles I collected became very valuable to people that weren't alive or didn't know that it was available back when I bought it.' Drousth became 'vaguely' aware that his bourbon stash had appreciated in value before reaching out to Unicorn several weeks ago for an appraisal. For years, he 'bunkered' his aging whiskey collection in his basement. As the bottles grew in value, he found it harder and harder to justify cracking them open for a sip. 'It just got to a point where I don't get so much pleasure out of something that is outrageously valuable,' he said. 'It's really hard to pull the trigger on popping the cork.' Back in the day, Drousth would host whiskey tastings with a modest cover charge to help defray the cost of his collection. The return on investment has since grown significantly. The most valuable of the 18 bottles Drousth plans to put up for auction is a limited release E.H. Taylor Old Fashioned Sour Mash bourbon that Mikhaylov said should fetch between $9,000 and $11,000. Drousth paid about $75 for it newly released in 2011. On Wednesday, he made the drive to the Unicorn offices, the bottles carefully boxed up in the back of his Honda, ready to sell. With his collection authenticated, digitized and safely in Unicorn's custody, Drousth can sit back and watch the weeklong online auction with a vested interest. Seven days later, he'll collect the proceeds and a projected 2,000% return for his whiskey investment. 'Obviously, there's a demand for it, and people want to buy them,' he said. 'And some of us want to sell.' One of those buyers, Jake Marquis, showed up at the Ravenswood office during a subsequent time slot Wednesday to pick up a previous auction purchase on the lower end of the price scale: a bottle of Heaven's Door 10-year bourbon for $50 — below retail price. While Unicorn is becoming a high-end investment platform for some, Marquis, 36, a bartender at the Franklin Tap who lives in Uptown, is using it more like an exotic corner liquor store and has multiple bids in this week's auction. 'I just found the app three weeks ago and I bought three bottles so far,' he said. 'I'm finding stuff I didn't know existed, vintages I didn't know existed. It's cool.' Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Chicago Tribune
10-05-2025
- Business
- Chicago Tribune
Chicago online auction startup Unicorn turning whiskey bottles into windfalls
When it comes to liquid assets, a Chicago startup is finding that stocks and bonds may have nothing on bourbon. Unicorn, a five-year-old online auction platform for wines and spirits, has quickly established itself as the eBay of imbibing, authenticating, digitizing, storing and auctioning more than $125 million worth of prized booze since inception. More than 100,000 customers have been raiding their liquor cabinets to trade everything from the bargain bin to rare single-barrel bourbons. The weekly auctions have turned more than a few dusty but unopened bottles into five- and six-figure windfalls. 'We serve serious collectors and first-time buyers alike,' said Phil Mikhaylov, 34, CEO and co-founder of Unicorn. 'In every auction, you can find bottles that are $20,000, $30,000, $40,000, but you will also find thousands of bottles under $100. That's why we've grown so vastly.' A first-generation Russian immigrant raised in Northbrook, tech veteran Mikhaylov joined forces with Chicago bar owner Cody Modeer to launch Unicorn in 2020. The online auction platform, which includes a Unicorn app, moves thousands of bottles worth potentially millions each week. All the bottles are digitized for trading and sold on consignment by Unicorn for customers across the country. The bottles are then picked up, shipped to or stored for the winning bidders, a percentage of whom simply trade them again as digital assets. Operating out of a two-story, 30,000-square-foot industrial brick building in Ravenswood that formerly housed a brewery, Unicorn has devoted the first floor to processing the active bottles to be traded on the platform. There's a small receiving room for customers to pick up or drop off bottles and a loading dock for the larger orders. Behind a locked door is a storage area known as the vault, which is lined with shelves packed to the rafters with 25,000 to 30,000 bottles. Warehouse workers roam the aisles, keeping tabs on the inventory, adding and pulling a menagerie of unusual and valuable bottles. Each week, the auction sells 4,000 to 6,000 bottles, meaning the stock changes over every two months. Each auction generates between $1.2 million and $2 million in sales, Mikhaylov said. Unicorn takes 20% of the revenue, with the seller paying a 5% fee and the buyer 15% on each bottle sold. Most auctions have no set minimum bids and a 100% sell-through, he said. The company has raised $5.8 million in funding to date, with a mix of investors including venture capital, NBA players, large wine and spirits collectors and others. Profitable since inception, Unicorn is planning another round of fundraising soon, Mikhaylov said. The fast-growing Unicorn has 75 employees and two Chicago locations, including a 70,000-square-foot warehouse in Bridgeport for longer-term storage of wine and spirits bottles. Unicorn moved into the Ravenswood headquarters from a smaller nearby office last year. The facility, previously home to Empirical Brewery, which closed during the pandemic in 2022, underwent extensive renovation, including the installation of a second floor where a maze of brewing equipment once towered. Upstairs at the Ravenswood headquarters is the tech side of the business, where bottles are authenticated, photographed and digitized for the auction platform by dozens of employees scattered at workstations across the open office. Bottles must be fully intact, unopened and in good condition to make the cut. Unicorn does not exclude spirits based on the perceived quality or original cost, letting the market set the value. The facility is dotted with memorabilia, from framed vintage liquor ads and novelty bottle displays to a 1910 Harley Davidson Model 6 motorcycle on the second floor picked up from a Los Angeles collector during a sales call, along with more than $1 million of whiskey for the auction. There's also a giant safe upstairs where the company keeps its most valuable bottles, including a rare Rip Van Winkle 20-year-old bourbon bottled in 2003 exclusively for the erstwhile Chicago-based Sam's Wines & Spirits, which sold out to Binney's during the Great Recession. Only 60 bottles of the single-barrel bourbon were ever produced. 'Think of it as the Mickey Mantle of bourbon bottles,' Mikhaylov said, carefully removing it from the safe and cradling it. 'This bottle is worth $150,000.' Above the safe, a big video screen displays the progress of the current auction, with a running count of total sales, bids and dollars that will be paid out to consigners. A heat map shows where the bids are coming from across the U.S., and what bottles are drawing the most action. Meanwhile, on the ground floor, auction customers trickle in for scheduled appointments to drop off or pick up bottles. On Wednesday, Robert Drousth of Madison, Wisconsin, made the trip to Unicorn to sell 18 bottles he had accumulated over the years. He paid about $1,500 to build his collection, which was appraised at $31,000 to $39,700. A retired mechanical designer, Drousth, 74, assembled his collection between 2000 and 2013, mostly by visiting local retailers in Illinois and Wisconsin, with occasional sojourns to the annual Kentucky Bourbon Festival. He stopped buying bottles as bourbon became trendier and more expensive and recently made the decision to liquidate the bulk of his collection. The bottles will go up for auction Sunday. 'I didn't collect to sell — it was never an intention,' Drousth said. 'The reality is that many of the bottles I collected became very valuable to people that weren't alive or didn't know that it was available back when I bought it.' Drousth became 'vaguely' aware that his bourbon stash had appreciated in value before reaching out to Unicorn several weeks ago for an appraisal. For years, he 'bunkered' his aging whiskey collection in his basement. As the bottles grew in value, he found it harder and harder to justify cracking them open for a sip. 'It just got to a point where I don't get so much pleasure out of something that is outrageously valuable,' he said. 'It's really hard to pull the trigger on popping the cork.' Back in the day, Drousth would host whiskey tastings with a modest cover charge to help defray the cost of his collection. The return on investment has since grown significantly. The most valuable of the 18 bottles Drousth plans to put up for auction is a limited release E.H. Taylor Old Fashioned Sour Mash bourbon that Mikhaylov said should fetch between $9,000 and $11,000. Drousth paid about $75 for it newly released in 2011. On Wednesday, he made the drive to the Unicorn offices, the bottles carefully boxed up in the back of his Honda, ready to sell. With his collection authenticated, digitized and safely in Unicorn's custody, Drousth can sit back and watch the weeklong online auction with a vested interest. Seven days later, he'll collect the proceeds and a projected 2,000% return for his whiskey investment. 'Obviously, there's a demand for it, and people want to buy them,' he said. 'And some of us want to sell.' One of those buyers, Jake Marquis, showed up at the Ravenswood office during a subsequent time slot Wednesday to pick up a previous auction purchase on the lower end of the price scale: a bottle of Heaven's Door 10-year bourbon for $50 — below retail price. While Unicorn is becoming a high-end investment platform for some, Marquis, 36, a bartender at the Franklin Tap who lives in Uptown, is using it more like an exotic corner liquor store and has multiple bids in this week's auction. 'I just found the app three weeks ago and I bought three bottles so far,' he said. 'I'm finding stuff I didn't know existed, vintages I didn't know existed. It's cool.'
Forbes
06-05-2025
- Business
- Forbes
The RealReal For Whiskey? Inside The Startup Changin Spirits Sales
As high-end resale moves further online, Unicorn says it is applying a new kind of structure to the fragmented spirits market. Unicorn Rare spirits have long circulated through a patchwork of auction houses, specialty retailers and informal channels, with little standardization in pricing, verification or logistics. One startup is working to change that. Unicorn, a five-year-old company founded by Phil Mikhaylov, a former Uber executive, aims to bring order to an industry that has been slow to adopt the tools of modern commerce. By building a digital platform for buying, selling and storing bottles—from everyday offerings to high-value collectibles—Unicorn is creating new infrastructure for a market worth more than $70 billion globally. 'When we first started thinking through the concept of Unicorn, a few things about the industry stood out right away,' says Mikhaylov, via Zoom. 'The spirits and wine industry just felt antiquated. There wasn't a modern, tech-forward platform that met the expectations consumers have in pretty much every other industry.' The company's platform—accessible via web and app—lets users buy, sell, track and store bottles ranging from common pours to six-figure collectibles. Unicorn has overseen more than four million bids and $125 million in platform sales to date, with $100 million worth of bottles held in its Chicago vault. The process begins with authentication. Every bottle is submitted, vetted and physically verified before entering circulation. 'Trust is everything in this space,' Mikhaylov says. 'From day one, Unicorn has strived to be the most trusted platform globally. We built our platform to solve what's long been a huge problem in the industry and secondary market: a lack of transparency around authenticity.' The company uses a mix of artificial intelligence, expert review and a proprietary database—more than one million digitized photos and historical transaction data—to spot inconsistencies. Listings are only approved once they pass through this system. Unicorn's decision to build its own storage and logistics infrastructure is part of what differentiates it from competitors. The company operates 12 pickup and drop-off locations around the United States. And yet, many of the bottles it stores never leave. 'Digital trading is taking off,' Mikhaylov explains. 'More and more, bottles in our vault are changing hands multiple times before they even leave our facility. Collectors are treating rare spirits like assets, and we're making that process seamless and instant.' That shift aligns with changes in consumer behavior. Younger buyers now make up a majority of Unicorn's users. 'Traditionally, this space was dominated by older collectors. But now, Gen Z, millennials and Gen X make up 60-70% of our customer base,' Mikhaylov says. 'There's a clear 'drink better' mindset.' Spirits sales are increasingly shifting online, though the pace and patterns of growth vary across segments. E-commerce revenue for alcoholic beverages is projected to exceed $36 billion globally by 2028, up more than 20% from current levels, according to industry analyst IWSR. But growth has not been uniform. The volume of rare whisky sold at auction declined by 16% between 2023 and 2024, with an 18% drop in total value. The slump points to shifting buyer behavior—away from traditional auctions and toward more streamlined digital platforms. The platform's growth has been driven in part by its accessibility. While some bottles listed are valued at $10,000 or more, a significant portion of sales occur at much lower price points. 'What really excites us is that we've had more than 100,000 transactions under $100,' Mikhaylov says. 'That kind of volume speaks to how broad and inclusive the community has become.' This inclusivity, Mikhaylov argues, is central to the company's mission. 'We're not built on scarcity or status. We're built on access and trust,' he says. 'We've always aimed to create a more inclusive, transparent space for wine and spirits enthusiasts of all kinds, not just elite collectors.' The origins of Unicorn's operational approach trace back to Mikhaylov's time at Uber. That includes customer service, logistics, warehousing and engineering—each designed to support a frictionless experience. 'One of the biggest lessons I took from my time at Uber was the power of pairing world-class technology with operational excellence,' he says. 'It's not just about moving fast. It's about building systems that can scale without compromising the customer experience.' This direct-to-consumer strategy also reflects the broader shift within the spirits category itself. Mikhaylov describes an industry that was slow to adapt to modern e-commerce. 'Most luxury categories have already embraced digital,' he says. 'But the spirits industry hadn't caught up. It's been largely rooted in brick-and-mortar retail and traditional auction houses.' Unicorn, he says, launched at a time when behavior was already changing. 'When we launched Unicorn right in the middle of the pandemic, consumer behavior was shifting fast,' he says. 'People were getting comfortable making major purchases online, and the expectation for real-time, digital-first experiences became the norm.' To maintain its credibility as it scales, Unicorn continues to prioritize vetting and transparency. 'Every bottle we list is physically authenticated by our in-house experts using a combination of deep industry knowledge, AI, refracted light analysis and cross-referencing the largest data repository of digitized bottles in the industry,' Mikhaylov says. Each verified listing is tied to a full chain of custody. The company also works directly with distilleries to confirm provenance and offer controlled releases. Ultimately, Unicorn sees itself not as a dealer in exclusivity, but as a modern infrastructure for a historically fragmented category. 'When a bottle is digitized, it's tied to a full chain of custody, so buyers can feel confident about what they're purchasing,' he says. 'Whether you're buying a $50 bottle or a $50,000 one, our goal is the same: deliver a seamless, transparent and trustworthy experience.'
