Wine & Spirits Tonite: Marketing, E‑commerce and In‑Store Systems
Built the brand, a subscription wine club, and the marketing and in-store systems behind a boutique wine shop
The challenge
Wine & Spirits Tonite is a family-owned boutique wine and spirits shop in Woodbury, NY, known for storied, hard-to-find wines. The website needed work and the social accounts had been silent for years. I was brought on as the shop’s marketer and site improver while also running the floor and register, so every idea got tested against real customers the same week.
What I did
Strategy and brand
- Audited wine-tonite.com and wrote a 90-day plan to fix it.
- Unified the brand: a voice guide, an approved tagline sheet (“Find something you’ll love, Tonite.”), a type system built on Cormorant Garamond headlines, and a cream, black and gold palette.
- Set the marketing strategy on “jab, jab, jab, right hook”: steady value content, with the wine club as the ask.
The Shortlist: a subscription wine club
- Named, branded and positioned a six-bottle club shipping across New York State: “A great wine shop, wherever you are in New York.” and “Thousands tasted. Six chosen.”
- Researched 28 wine clubs to decide what this one should be.
- Designed and wrote the landing page, plus nine coded transactional emails (welcome and terms, shipped, upcoming charge, receipt, payment failed, skip, cancel, price change) and the custom event spec that connects them to the site.
- Designed the member kit: printed inserts (tasting menu, tasting card, food pairing card), a laminated wet-erase tasting mat, and a coil-bound tasting journal set up for print-on-demand.
- Built the launch push: a paid social campaign on Facebook and Instagram, and a creator partnership brief.
- A biweekly newsletter that alternates with tasting event emails, built as an image-based system with a reusable template and build script, so rich designs work inside Square’s single-column editor.
- Set up Klaviyo and built its email templates.
Social, relaunched
- Brought the accounts back with a repeatable weekly rhythm (wine of the week, staff pick, short videos), with drafts generated into Buffer automatically each week.
- “Label up close” short videos on the stories behind bottles, with word-by-word animated captions and branded end cards.
- A browser-based video maker that writes the script and shot list, then assembles and captions the finished video.
In-store merchandising
- Reorganized the wine wall into 13 category bays by grape, the way customers actually shop, with a planogram and a cubby-by-cubby move guide.
- Color-coded shelf tags that mark organic, vegan and kosher wines.
- Designed for the floor: flyers and social sets for in-store tastings, signage concepts, a floor mat and staff shirts.
Internal tools
- Shelf Finder: a searchable staff catalog synced to the site inventory that shows where every bottle sits and suggests trade-ups and substitutes.
- Stock check: logs shelf tags from photos and flags prices against other New York stores.
- Post Maker: branded social posts and print signs from one place.
- Voice concierge (prototype): an ElevenLabs voice agent on a Cloudflare Worker that points customers to bottles in stock.
How I build
I’m a marketer, not a programmer. Every build on this page, from the club emails to Shelf Finder, I made with AI-assisted development in Claude and Claude Code. I decide what the shop needs, design how it should work, then direct and test the build until it does. That’s how one person covers brand, e-commerce and in-store systems for a small shop.