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WINC (formerly ClubW)

Forground of vineyards with a sunset shining on the mountains in the background
Jun 1, 20152 min readAngular, HTML5, CSS, Express

WINC (formerly ClubW)

Duration: June 2015 - October 2017

Role: Intern → Junior Frontend Developer → Frontend Developer

The Context

This was my first engineering role, joining as the 7th engineer at a wine subscription startup. Over two years I grew from intern to mid-level developer while the company itself transformed, rebranding from ClubW to Winc and scaling up its marketing operations.

The Challenge

Marketing was bottlenecked by engineering. Every campaign landing page needed a developer to hand-build it, which capped output at 3-4 pages a week. The business ran on seasonal campaigns and wine club promotions, so that pace just couldn't keep up; a backlog of 40 pages would take 10+ weeks to clear.

My manager had an idea for a self-serve CMS but didn't have the technical chops to build it, so during the downtime between sprints I picked it up as a side project.

The Solution

I built a self-serve landing page CMS in Angular 2, which was still in release candidate back then. The architecture included:

  • Marketing dashboard for non-technical users to create and manage pages
  • Template system allowing asset and copy swaps without engineering involvement
  • AWS S3 integration for image uploads with validation
  • Static HTML generation on the backend for SEO optimization
  • One-off exception handling for pages that needed custom layouts

The Impact

  • 200+ campaign pages launched within two months of the CMS going live
  • Marketing velocity jumped from 3-4 pages/week to 8-12 pages/week
  • 12+ hours/week of engineering time freed up
  • Existing landing pages migrated to the new system in under 2 weeks
  • Presented the project to the entire company; promoted from Junior to Mid-level Developer

Other Contributions

  • Company rebrand: The CEO pulled me in to lead the frontend work moving ClubW to Winc; I restyled the entire site in ~1 month while keeping every live URL intact
  • Conversion team: Worked in cross-functional squads tuning the purchase funnel, which contributed to a ~43% lift in conversion rates (1.4% → 2.0%)

What I Learned

This role taught me that a technical solution is worth the most when it takes friction off another team. The CMS wasn't technically groundbreaking by any stretch, but it changed how fast the whole business could move, and that lesson has shaped how I've approached every role since.

Tech Stack

Angular 2, AngularJS, TypeScript, AWS S3, HTML5, CSS3