There’s a new smart fridge in town, and it looks nothing like one.
Launching today, Rocco is a smart fridge that is specifically designed to hold—and cool—your favorite drinks. It is way smaller than a standard fridge, colder than a wine fridge (and therefore ideal for the panoply of ready-to-drink cocktails, functional sodas, and craft beers that permeate today’s market), and it can double as a bar cart. It comes in sleek white, mustard yellow, and a graphite black, and instead of the bland window you get in most wine fridges, it boasts a stylish ribbed glass that resembles an Art Deco cabinet from the 1920s.
The blended aesthetic—part retro, part modern—is no accident. Instead of boxing themselves in with a particular era, the team borrowed touches from various epochs for a look that would satisfy mid-century modern fans as much as it would please Scandi fans. “Philosophically there has been a shift to create pieces that feel like art objects instead of functional appliances and thats where we’re aiming to sit,” says marketing consultant Alyse Borkan, who after years at Billie, SoulCycle and Casper, cofounded Rocco with Sam Naparstek, himself an Away alumni.
Despite its founders’ DTC roots, Rocco isn’t launching exclusively online, as one might have expected, but at half a dozen Nordstrom locations around the U.S., where Rocco will sit in the Home section. The team is aware they’d stand out more in a Best Buy or a Home Depot where most wine fridges look like soulless metal boxes, but a Nordstrom presence is, in fact, a clever strategy: “We want to create a bit more of a lifestyle brand,” says Borkan. “Nordstrom is the perfect partner for us when people are envisioning how this fits into the rest of their life.”
In the same vein, the team partnered with the British-Italian designer Robin Rizzini, whose client roster counts furniture brands like Arper and Pedrali, and not a single home appliance. The result is a fridge that doesn’t need to be relegated to the storage room or the garage but can instead fit right into our increasingly Instagrammable homes. (Its “ultra-quiet” compressor is 39 decibels, or about the the sound of a suburban area at night.)
The need to create a photogenic fridge came with a few technical challenges. Chief among them is the need for the fridge to sit flush against the wall. This meant having to move all circuitry and vents, which are usually clustered at the back, to the front, but tucked at the bottom edge of the fridge, which sits on delightfully designed little legs. There, at the bottom, the fridge’s silhouette tapers away behind a perforated panel in such a way that “the eye doesn’t notice it,” says Naparstek.
Rocco can hold up to 27 wine bottles, 88 cans, or a combination of both. It comes with about six racks, each equipped with reversible trays with spacings for either wine bottles or cans. If you want your La Croix to be cooler than your Chardonnay, you can split the temperature in two. And if you’re out shopping and you forget how much Ghia you have left in your fridge, you can open the Rocco app and “peek” inside your fridge, which keeps tabs of every item it holds by taking pictures then running them through an object recognition database.
The team says any data specific to individual customers remains private, but like a website tracks your shopping history, Rocco can track your purchases and eventually, the team will be able to tell if people are using the fridge to store mostly Perrier cans or wine bottles.
If the slight Big Brother vibe isn’t a buzzkill, Rocco can be yours for the early-bird price of $1,195 (discounted from $1,500 just in time for Black Friday.)
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