Wine.com had the inventory and the authority, but the experience was utilitarian, cold, and overwhelming. Exactly the wrong feeling for a category built on pleasure. Over seven years as Creative Director and Senior Product Designer, I led the transformation from a basic wine warehouse into an award-winning ecommerce platform that made wine approachable for the novice and indispensable for the enthusiast. That meant rethinking everything: multitiered product information, deep filtering, powerful search, and a human layer built on personal somm recommendations and live chat, across web, iOS, and Android.
Before we could redesign the platform, we needed to address the brand. The existing identity was a relic of the 90s, visually dated and out of step with the premium-but-approachable direction the company was moving toward. We slimmed down the iconic "Wine Guy" mascot, simplified the color palette, and gave the whole system room to breathe. The refreshed brand became the foundation everything else was built on.
The original Wine.com was built for transactions, not people. Our first major redesign addressed both problems at once: give the brand a warmer, more inviting voice, and rebuild the experience around discovery. We introduced personalized wine recommendations, a significantly smarter search and filtering system, and a navigation structure that guided customers by varietal, region, and occasion rather than making them already know what they wanted.
The results speak clearly. Since the initial redesign, Wine.com has sustained 20% year-over-year growth. Not driven by traffic alone, but by an experience that keeps customers coming back. An updated ratings system and My Wine personalization reduced abandonment and increased engagement throughout the funnel. A streamlined checkout, paired with smarter onboarding and contextual recommendations, cut friction at every step. The outcome: consistent improvements in conversion, customer satisfaction, and a measurable reduction in support requests.
For the second version of Wine.com we designed a fully responsive website, to our surprise the mobile version quickly matched desktop sales and within two years overtook it in sales. We decided to create a stand alone app with the addition of a wine scan feature. Today the Wine.com app is the second most popular wine app on iOS and accounts for over two thirds of all sales.
The wine subscription space was crowded and getting louder. Standing out required more than a good curation algorithm. Months of customer research and rapid prototyping led us to a clear differentiator: radical personalization, built around a direct relationship between the customer and their personal somm.The brand we built around it leaned into a cross-generational, mid-century illustration style that felt warm, editorial, and decidedly un-tech. It gave Picked a distinct identity within the Wine.com family while carving out its own shelf space in the category.
