A wine club that stopped renting its customers
Vessel & Vine had grown to €4.1M on paid social alone. When iOS attribution degraded and CPMs climbed, the whole model wobbled. We rebuilt the business on demand it owns.
The problem
Ninety-six percent of revenue came from Meta and Google Shopping. Every euro of growth cost more than the last, and a single ad account suspension in March would have taken the quarter with it.
The site had 240 product pages and eleven blog posts, nine of which were press releases. There was nothing for a person researching natural wine to find, and nothing for Google to rank.
Worse, the category pages were client-rendered. Googlebot saw an empty div where the wines should be.
What we did
- 1
Fix what the crawler sees
We moved category and product rendering server-side, which alone surfaced 240 pages that had never been indexed. Before writing a single new word, we made the existing catalogue legible.
- 2
Build for the question, not the keyword
People do not search 'natural wine ecommerce'. They ask what orange wine tastes like, whether biodynamic means organic, and what to bring to a dinner party. We mapped 340 real questions from support tickets and search console, and answered them properly.
- 3
Let the sommelier write
The founder had spent nine years in restaurants and could not be replaced by a content mill. We built a workflow where she talked for thirty minutes a week and our editors shaped it. Nobody else in the category could publish what she knew.
- 4
Connect content to the cellar
Every guide links to the specific bottles it describes, and stock status is live. A guide to Jura whites that recommends a sold-out wine is worse than no guide at all.
What it returned
Organic went from a rounding error to the largest single channel by revenue in nineteen months. Paid spend did not decrease — it now buys growth on top of a base rather than the base itself.
The blended CAC fall matters more than the organic number: it means the paid channel got healthier too, because it stopped carrying the whole business.
“We used to refresh the ads dashboard every morning with a knot in the stomach. Now the floor under the business is ours. That is a different company to run.”