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Forground of vineyards with a sunset shining on the mountains in the background

@marcojodoin,

WINC (formerly ClubW)

Duration: June 2015 - October 2017

Role: Intern → Junior Frontend Developer → Frontend Developer

The Context

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

The Challenge

Marketing was bottlenecked by engineering. Every campaign landing page required a developer to build it manually, limiting output to 3-4 pages per week. With seasonal campaigns and wine club promotions driving the business, this pace couldn't keep up with demand; a backlog of 40 pages would take 10+ weeks to clear.

My manager had an idea for a self-serve CMS but lacked the technical skills to build it. During downtime between sprints, I took it on as a side project.

The Solution

I built a self-serve landing page CMS in Angular 2 (which was still in release candidate at the time). 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: Recruited by the CEO to lead the frontend work transitioning ClubW to Winc, restyled the entire site in ~1 month while maintaining seamless UX continuity
  • Conversion team: Worked in cross-functional squads optimizing the purchase funnel, contributing to a ~43% improvement in conversion rates (1.4% → 2.0%)

What I Learned

This role taught me that technical solutions are most valuable when they remove friction for other teams. The CMS wasn't technically groundbreaking, but it transformed how fast the business could move. That lesson shaped how I've approached every role since.

Tech Stack

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