CASE FILE 07 — IDENTITY + E-COMMERCE
A 40-year-old natural-wine importer, invisible online. Fourteen weeks to make the cellar impossible to ignore.
Cask & Vine has imported 60+ small-lot natural wines from the Jura, the Loire and Piedmont since 1984. The wine is exceptional. The company was invisible — 92% of revenue flowed through three restaurant buyers, and the "website" was a PDF of a spreadsheet in a browser frame.
"People taste the wine and ask where it came from. Then I showed them the website. The silence was the brief."
ELENA MARCHETTI — FOUNDER
| WINE | REGION | PRICE |
|---|---|---|
| Puligny-Montrachet 2016 | Burgundy, FR | $88 |
| Morey-Saint-Denis 2015 | Burgundy, FR | $120 |
| Etna Rosso 2019 | Sicily, IT | $38 |
400 monthly visits, 0.4% conversion, no email list. You couldn't buy a bottle without calling a restaurant and hoping they had it.
The only identity was a letterhead. Sixty producers, one look. The wines had provenance worth telling — the site offered a table.
92% of revenue through three buyers. In 2023, one of them left. The company needed its own front door.
Turn Elena's eye, 60 producers and the small lots into an identity people recognize at a shelf and on a screen.
A DTC storefront where every bottle arrives with a story, a lot number and a reason — not a spreadsheet row.
A Case Club subscription that makes the relationship recurring, not transactional.
We started in the cellar, not in Figma. Two days photographing all 214 SKUs, mapping producers by region, and recording five hours of interviews with Elena and her two-person team. The pattern was immediate: customers didn't ask "what is natural wine?" They asked "what would you pick for me?"
"Sell the cellar, not the wine."E.M. — DAY 2
INSIGHT
The brand was never the wine. It was the person who chose it. Everything after was about putting Elena's eye on the label.
Before any pixels: names, prices, and a voice. We reorganized the list into three collections buyers can actually navigate, and made the case — not the bottle — the default unit. A case is a decision; a bottle is a line item.
Easy-drinking, zero pretension. The wines you'd open for friends on a Friday.
24 WINES · FROM $38
Age-worthy. Buy one now. Buy one for the wedding.
12 WINES · FROM $64
Orange, skin-contact, slightly feral. Numbered, limited, gone fast.
8 WINES · FROM $52
VOICE — PLAINSPOKEN. NO "TERROIR." IF A WORD NEEDS A FOOTNOTE, IT DOESN'T SHIP.
The identity borrows from the cellar itself: a serif with soft edges and ink traps, a monospace for the data wine people actually read — lot, vintage, ABV — and a quiet grotesque for everything else. The palette is the cellar: bottle green, cork, sealing-wax vermilion, paper.
CLICK A SWATCH TO COPY THE HEX
LABEL SYSTEM — THREE DIRECTIONS, ONE WINNER
A — TYPOGRAPHIC
B — ILLUSTRATED
C — STAMPED
Printed all three on real bottles and ran a blind test with 20 regulars. The stamped label won 14 to 4 to 2 — and it's the one that reads from across a shelf.
Designed end-to-end in Figma, built as a Shopify Hydrogen storefront. Four decisions mattered more than the rest:
THE SAME PRODUCT PAGE — DRAG TO COMPARE
The cellar is open.
60 PRODUCERS · SMALL LOTS · PICKED BY ELENA
LOT 041 · 2023 · 12% ABV · 300 BOTTLES · 61 LEFT
| WINE | REGION | PRICE |
|---|---|---|
| Puligny-Montrachet 2016 | Burgundy, FR | $88 |
| Morey-Saint-Denis 2015 | Burgundy, FR | $120 |
| Etna Rosso 2019 | Sicily, IT | $38 |
We launched to the 1,400 customers we could dig out of old POS exports and restaurant guest lists. Three emails, one night, no ads for 30 days.
EMAIL 01 — MAY 08
The cellar is open.
Fourteen years of notes, sixty producers, one long table. Come in.
58% OPENED
EMAIL 02 — MAY 10
What's in the first drop.
400 cases. Numbered lots. When they're gone, they're gone.
312 CASES SOLD DAY ONE
EMAIL 03 — MAY 12
The Case Club.
Six bottles a month, picked by Elena. Pause anytime.
400 MEMBERS BY FRIDAY
MAY = LAUNCH. THE STEP CHANGE IS THE EMAIL LIST DOING ITS JOB.
"We didn't just get a website. We got a second storefront that never closes — and a list of people who actually talk back."
ELENA MARCHETTI — FOUNDER, CASK & VINE
ALSO: 612 REVIEWS · 4.9★ AVERAGE · ONE RESTAURANT BUYER NOW ASKS US FOR ALLOCATIONS — THE ARROW POINTS THE OTHER WAY.
A story with a name and a face converts better than any adjective. "Elena picked this" outperformed "award-winning" in every test we ran.
Case-first raised AOV 2.3×. Friction was never the enemy — meaningless friction is.
The email sequence and a 120-person launch night did more in the first 90 days than any page we designed. The website is the smallest part of a launch.
NEXT — YOUR PROJECT
I take on one or two brand-and-digital projects a quarter. If your product has a story and your website doesn't tell it — that's the conversation I want to have.
● CURRENTLY BOOKING — Q3 2025 · PORTLAND, OR · WORLDWIDE