A Self-Serve Landing Page CMS at Winc

Case Study 3: Winc — Self-Serve Landing Page CMS

Overview

Company: Winc (formerly ClubW)

Role: Frontend Developer

Duration: June 2015 - October 2017

Industry: E-commerce / Wine Subscription

Business Impact

• Enabled marketing to launch 200+ landing pages in 2 months (up from 12/month)
• Tripled weekly page velocity from 3-4 to 8-12 pages without engineering involvement
• Freed 12+ engineering hours per week previously spent on content change requests
• Improved conversion rate from 1.4% to 2.0% through faster iteration on page designs

The Challenge

Winc's marketing team was severely bottlenecked by engineering. Every campaign landing page required developer intervention—from asset collection to deployment. The team could only ship 3-4 pages per week, meaning a 40-page campaign would take 10+ weeks. Meanwhile, the company was undergoing a complete rebrand from ClubW to Winc.

Key Problems:

• Marketing limited to 3-4 landing pages per week
• 40 pages would take 10+ weeks to deploy
• Every page required engineering time
• Simultaneous rebrand requiring a transition that preserved every live URL
• High customer acquisition cost ($47 CAC, break-even at month 3)
• Legacy AngularJS codebase needed modernization

My Approach

First: Pattern Recognition

I started this as a side project during downtime, recognizing the recurring bottleneck. My manager had the idea but lacked technical skills to execute.

Second: CMS Architecture

• Designed self-serve system using Angular 2 (newly released at the time)
• Built form-based interface with input validations
• Implemented AWS S3 integration for asset uploads
• Created database storage for page configurations
• Developed backend service generating static HTML for SEO

Third: Template System

• Created reusable templates with variable asset/content injection
• Built one-off exception capability for custom campaigns
• Enabled immediate deployment without engineering review

Fourth: Team Enablement

• Trained 4 marketing team members on CMS usage
• Created documentation and best practices
• Migrated existing landing pages within 2 weeks

Fifth: Company Rebrand

• Recruited by CEO personally for rebrand project
• Restyled entire website to new Winc branding
• Preserved every live URL during the migration so members never hit a broken link
• Sunset old ClubW application

Sixth: Conversion Optimization

• Joined cross-functional conversion team (designer, QA, PM, developer, data analyst)
• Analyzed member conversion funnels
• Identified and fixed abandonment points
• Implemented UX improvements with A/B testing

The Results

Key Takeaways

• Initiative creates opportunity. This started as a side project and led to a title promotion and company-wide recognition.
• Tooling for teams beats building features for teams. The CMS multiplied marketing's output without adding engineering headcount.
• Technical solutions should serve business velocity. The best code is code that removes bottlenecks.

Technologies Used

Angular 2, TypeScript, AngularJS, RxJS, Node.js, AWS S3, HTML5, CSS3, SASS, Git, Static Site Generation