Maeve Wine had a loyal dining audience and a new product: hand-selected artisan wine subscriptions, shipped to customers' doors.
Getting those subscriptions in front of buyers meant expanding into ecommerce without breaking the aesthetic customers already trusted.
The constraint was real: a tight budget, an existing design system that couldn't be discarded, and a CMS (Trello and FTP) that made content updates a manual chore.
The information architecture was condensed and simplified, reducing decision friction across the site. A dynamic image gallery was added to drive restaurant bookings, giving first-time visitors a clear picture of the in-venue experience. A dedicated functions page with an inline enquiry form shortened the path from interest to event quote, supporting lead capture for high-value private bookings.
The migration to Shopify wasn't cosmetic. It restructured how the business could acquire and retain customers across two distinct channels: walk-in dining and at-home subscription.
Subscription purchasing followed established ecommerce patterns: account management, order history, cart and checkout, and policy pages built for trust. A third-party subscription app was integrated to handle recurring billing, keeping build time focused on UX quality rather than payment infrastructure.
The site launched in November 2021. Within the first nine months, the results validated the channel.
$12,900 in subscription sales, as a side business to an already-profitable venue.
58% returning customer rate, against an industry benchmark of 20 to 40%.
37,000+ unique visitors and over 41,000 sessions, driven largely by the existing brand's audience discovering the subscription offering.
A Shopify Lighthouse performance score of 65 placed the store faster than the majority of comparable stores on the platform.
With a rate of nearly double the industry average at launch, the results suggest the purchasing experience matched the brand promise customers already associated with Maeve Wine in person. The ecommerce build didn't introduce a new brand. It extended an existing one into a new context.
