As the editors of The Unicorn Review (formerly The New Wine Review), we’re new to Unicorn. And it turns out there are quite a few fascinating things you come to learn when you work alongside the people who run America’s largest online spirits and wine marketplace. 

So we sat down with Unicorn’s founders, Phil Mikhaylov and Cody Modeer, to ask them some questions about themselves, the spirits and wine market, and the company they’ve built. Here’s what they said.

Why did you start Unicorn?

Cody Modeer, Co-Founder and COO: We actually built it for ourselves. Nothing like this existed for whiskey. We were frustrated with the legacy auction houses and how they ran their businesses.

I ran a bar, and a lot of people who owned bars had the same problem I did:  we had access to all of this special whiskey where the secondary market price was way higher than the retail price. But if you sell that whiskey at your bar for the true market price, you’re an asshole; and if you sell it at a “fair” price, you’re a sucker.

There was no good way to transact with a customer or friend where people felt good on both sides. So this felt like a natural solution.

Phil Mikhaylov, Co-Founder and CEO: Cody came from hospitality. I came from tech. We saw what great hospitality looked like, and what tech could do, and Unicorn is the marriage of the two.

Look at what’s happened for consumers in the last decade. You can buy shoes on StockX, get a car on Uber, food on DoorDash. I was passionate about wine and spirits, but it felt stuck in the past. The old way of buying bottles, managing a collection, storing it  — all of that felt incredibly archaic. There was nothing built for someone like me, who’s used to all of these modern marketplaces and services. Why was there no StockX for spirits and wine? Why can’t you discover, buy, sell and vault a bottle all in one place? 

Our core value is hospitality. We built this whole experience centered around the idea of a great, transparent, frictionless, easy customer experience. The tech just enables it.

Give us a sense of scale. What does it mean to be “the largest whiskey marketplace in the United States “?

PM:  We’ve been in business for about five years and have done $150 million in sales, with over 100,000 users grown organically and mainly word of mouth. In that time, we’ve sold over 500,000 bottles and had over 6 million bids placed on the platform. 

We’ve also had some truly iconic, record-breaking sales—bottles that very rarely surface, commanding five and six figures at auction. But it’s not just volume or bid levels, it’s variety. We’ve done more than 100,000 transactions under $200. We love that. It shows that Unicorn is built for everyone, from first-time buyers to seasoned collectors. If you have a platform that’s trustworthy and accessible, you attract all types of people.

What do you know about the whiskey market that you didn’t when you started?

CM: The true size of it. It’s massive! When we started, people kept telling me whiskey auctions were a $3 million per year business. But what people deemed worthy of a “tradeable” bottle was wrong. Only a tiny fraction of the bottles people wanted to buy and sell were ever coming to market. People thought there was no secondary market for lots of bottles that now trade in high volumes on our platform. We’ve just let consumers tell us what they want to buy and sell rather than dictating to them. 

PM: Yep. We heard this was a $3 million per year market — but at this point, we sell $1-2 million of whiskey per week. I knew the wine and spirits market was big, but the scale is amazing. Globally, 100 million bottles are sold every day. That’s crazy! 

CM: This market is a multi-billion dollar industry, and we’re at the forefront of meeting the demands of the modern consumer. 

PM: What’s happened is that we’ve become effectively a “redistribution platform”. A bottle that’s selling for $50 in Chicago might have $200 of value to someone in New Mexico. So we started as a collector platform and have turned into a buying destination for the everyday consumer. If you can’t get something in a shop within 3-5 miles of your house, you come to Unicorn and get exactly what you’re looking for.  

A few years ago, it seemed crazy to buy groceries or clothes online and have them delivered — today that’s the norm. Why isn’t that the norm in wine and spirits? That’s the shift we’re seeing.

CM:  Another thing we’ve learned is that there’s a lot of artificial scarcity that’s actually created by some auction houses.

PM:  Definitely. Things we thought were super rare continue to come up regularly at auction. Our thinking about what’s actually rare versus what certain actors in the market want collectors to believe is rare has changed a lot. We’re very transparent with our data, so it’s not just us who’s come to understand this — anyone using our platform has learned a lot about this, too.

What are the most expensive bottles ever sold on Unicorn?

PM:  We sold a bottle of Buffalo Trace Old Fashioned Copper 1982 for almost $123,000, which is the most expensive bottle of bourbon ever sold by anyone. It was originally sold for $50,000 as an NFT. On our platform it sold for almost three times the NFT price. It turns out, owning the actual ‘tangible’ thing matters.

CM:  The most expensive whiskey we’ve ever sold wasn’t bourbon, it was a bottle of Yamazaki 55 Year Single Malt Japanese Whisky, which was actually missing the wooden lid to the packaging. No other auction house would touch it. But we examined it and were fully transparent with our customers about its condition, and we ended up selling it for over $200,000. Everyone was happy. The buyer knew exactly what they were getting, and the seller couldn’t have sold it otherwise. That’s just one way that transparency benefits a platform like ours. It opens up parts of a market that otherwise can’t be reached.

PM:  Another huge sale was the Very Very Old Fitzgerald 18 year “Blackhawk” 121 Proof that sold for over $80,000. The family that owned the Chicago Blackhawks owned Breakthru Beverage, a big liquor distributor. They gave a special bottle of Old Fitzgerald to their friends and family back in the ‘60s that had never come up at auction. We’re from Chicago, and when we saw it in a collection we were so excited. We thought it might fetch $30,000-$40,000. It sold for more than $80,000. There were a huge number of bids on that bottle, and that’s one of the most collectible / sought after bottles in bourbon. 

What are the most heavily traded brands and bottles on your platform?

CM: The Sazerac portfolio is certainly very popular: Buffalo Trace Antique Collection (BTAC), Van Winkle whiskies (obviously), and annual releases that come from their major distilleries. We also see great demand for older Stitzel-Weller, pre-fire Heaven Hill, and rare Willetts, which come up a lot. 

On the Scotch and Japanese side, Macallan and Yamazaki always drive interest.

But these are the things that have always been traded and were already widely accepted by auction houses. What’s interesting is that the market has expanded dramatically for brands that previously didn’t have a secondary market.

PM: We’ve seen a resurgence of interest in companies with deep history: Wild Turkey, Old Grand Dad. But it’s fascinating to see the next generation of craft distillers and brands develop real secondary markets:  Rare Character, Michter’s, Karuizawa, Chichibu, Compass Box, independent bottlers.

Who’s using your platform? Who’s actually doing all of this buying and selling?

PM:  We certainly have some interesting people buying and selling on Unicorn — we see a lot of players from the NBA, NFL, NHL, baseball, pro golfers, celebrities, musicians. But honestly, we have all kinds of people on our platform. This isn’t just a weird subset of the market. It’s mostly just thousands of normal people who like wine and spirits.

CM: We get interesting stories from industry people who buy and sell on Unicorn, too. There was a person who had bought the rights to a very old, defunct whiskey brand they wanted to revive, but they’d never actually tasted any of the original whiskey. So they found a pre-prohibition bottle for sale on Unicorn and bought it, which is how they tried their own brand’s original product for the first time!

How do you guys source all of the bottles that show up on your platform?

CM: In the early days, we were solving a problem for bar and restaurant owners who had access to these incredible whiskeys but couldn’t really sell any of it through their bars. They didn’t know how to price it and they didn’t have the customer base to sell a giant expensive collection to. So our early supply came from fellow restaurant and bar owners to whom we gave a place to transact. As we grew, more supply came out of the woodwork and created a natural flywheel.

PM: Today, our bottles come from all over. We have plenty of massive collections that come through, but 70%+ of our sellers are just everyday people looking for liquidity from bottles they aren’t going to drink, have too many of, inherited – that kind of thing. We get collections from all over the world — Europe, Canada, Japan. We have more than 1,000 inbound inquiries from sellers every month.

We’ve seen that the easier we make it to sell, the more people will want to. So we now have 12 drop-off points around the country, and people get paid within a week of the sale. 

What are the key trends you’re seeing in the whiskey market right now?

CM: Hyper-aged, high-proof whiskey is what a lot of people ascribe value to at the moment.

PM: For sure. Also, older brands that were high-quality but lower-shelf and easily accessible in the ‘80s and ‘90s are becoming really popular: Wild Turkey, Black Maple Hill, Old Grand Dad.

The next wave of enthusiasts is starting to make its own trends because some things are way out of reach: a lot of newcomers can’t just buy a $10,000 Willett. So we’re seeing markets develop for brands that weren’t previously considered blue chips.

CM: In bourbon, there’s a resurgence of historical labels being brought back into production. D.H. Cromwell, Brook Hill, Colonel Randolph, Old Commonwealth, Bourbon De Luxe, Black Maple Hill. These were labels that existed at one time, then went away. But some new producer has brought them back to life or reintroduced them.

Scotch and Japanese whisky collectors tend to like ghost distilleries and finite supply. Bottles like Littlemill, Rosebank, Karuizawa or other labels that went dormant are quite popular. 

PM: In wine, demand for the classic collector regions is still strong: Napa, Bordeaux, and especially Burgundy, which continues to grow in popularity. But this new generation of collectors is really adventurous, so what they deem tradeable is a much broader set of wines, regions, and producers than what were previously considered auction-worthy. 

Also, we’ve found that allowing people to buy wine by the bottle is a huge advantage for many collectors. It enables them to try a bottle and de-risk a bigger purchase of a case. 

What do you each collect personally?

PM: For wine, I love collecting birth year bottles that are significant to me. It feels like I’m traveling back to that year.

For spirits, I love Wild Turkey from 1991 and Macallans from 1991. I also love bottles that are no longer in existence or production. There’s something unique about a whiskey that came from Stitzel-Weller or pre-fire Heaven Hill that couldn’t be replicated after 1996 when those barrels caught on fire. 

CM: I collect things I’m nostalgic for. Bottles that no longer exist or that I used to make interesting cocktails with. I like things from a time when products were more hand-made. There’s been a lot of industrialization in this (and many other) markets. But until the early 2000s, whiskey was a more hands-on product. Handwritten labels, wax-dipped bottles and such. I like being able to see the connection between the producer and the end product.

Give us your most ridiculous story from doing this.

PM: Oh man.

CM: So, in the early days when we had maybe 1,000 customers, there was a guy who was selling scotch with us. Great collection, but he didn’t know who we were. Even so, he was super friendly the whole time. And then when he was on his way to the office to deliver his collection, he called us and got very serious and said “look, I have my AR-15 in the trunk in case you guys pull any shit.” We drew straws to see who had to go down to meet him, and the rest of us watched from the roof just in case the AR-15 came out. In the end, he was super cool, and when we were done, he just said to us, ”Hey, you never know. This is my life savings.” 

PM:  That’s actually one of the things that makes me so proud of this business. We hear that kind of thing all the time. One person who sold a collection through us that he’d been building for 15 years said to me, “You just helped me pay for my daughter’s college tuition.” People have sold their collections to pay for surgeries or retirements. We did a pickup of 6,000 bottles from a guy in San Antonio — it turned into the biggest sale we’ve ever had.  And after it was over, he sent us a picture of the lake house he bought with the proceeds. That was really cool.

Alright. Last word here. Where’s this all heading for Unicorn?

PM: We’re growing very quickly, and expanding the kinds of services we can offer to both buyers and sellers.

But mostly, we just want people to have the best possible experience finding, discovering, learning about, and buying these bottles. We want people to walk away feeling like we’ve built Unicorn with them in mind. If we can do that, everyone wins.