Wine Spies

Wine Spies was a growing wine e-commerce business doing solid revenue on a custom Ruby on Rails platform. The founding engineer who’d built everything was ready to move on - and the entire technical operation needed to transfer to someone who could take it further.

Everything that made the platform run lived in one person’s head: the integration quirks, the deploy habits, the reasons behind a hundred small decisions in the code. The app worked, but it had no test coverage, brittle integrations, and an admin backend that would break on high-volume sales days. When the backend fell over on a big sales day, the cost showed up in lost orders and in a team that learned to distrust its own tools.

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The founding engineer introduced us over beers. He needed someone he trusted to take the reins, and Wine Spies needed more than a replacement developer. They needed a team that could own the technical side of the business and scale it: make the architecture calls, run the infrastructure, and answer for the results year after year.

We started by stabilizing what was there. Before building anything new, we added test coverage with RSpec so we could change code without guessing what might break, fixed the fragile integrations, and made the platform reliable under the load of a big sales day. Stabilization work is rarely glamorous, but it earns the right to build quickly afterward. Once we could deploy with confidence, we started building.

Over nine years of ownership, we’ve transformed Wine Spies’ technology piece by piece:

• A modern storefront. We overhauled the entire frontend with a reactive checkout and cart experience built with React, so buying wine feels as quick as browsing it.
• The Locker. We built a first-in-industry capability that became a major inflection point for the business. Features like this only happen when the engineering team understands the business well enough to see the opportunity before anyone writes a spec.
• A native mobile app. We designed and built a standalone iOS app with React Native, bringing the full Wine Spies experience to mobile customers.
• An API and data layer. We built a separate API layer and data analysis services, giving the platform clean boundaries and giving the business better visibility into its own data.
• Re-engineered operations. We rebuilt backend logistics, fulfillment, and inventory management so the operational side of the platform could keep pace with order volume.
• Continuous upgrades. The platform runs on Render with PostgreSQL and Redis, stays current through regular Rails upgrades, and ships through continuous integration and delivery pipelines backed by the test suite we built.

What started as one developer has grown into a team of 3-4 engineers working across the platform daily. The cadence is steady: small changes, tested, shipped, with the platform improving every week while the business runs on top of it.

“The best part about working with Ecliptic Ideas is the ease of communication, such that they deeply understand your business and work as an extension of your internal team. That is a massive force-multiplier and consistently results in shipping high-quality end products which meet the users better than the competition.”

— CEO, Wine Spies

Wine Spies has grown revenue over 850% since the start of our partnership and is now an 8-figure business. The custom software we’ve built powers every aspect of the operation, from product sourcing and inventory management to customer orders and fulfillment. Automated workflows allow Wine Spies to operate with remarkable efficiency, freeing the team to focus on sourcing, buying, and customer relationships rather than fighting their technology.

Growth like that never comes from software alone, and we would never claim otherwise. Wine Spies built the brand, the sourcing relationships, and the customer trust. Our job has been to make sure the technology multiplied those strengths instead of limiting them, and to keep a platform that once broke on busy days running smoothly at many times the volume.

We continue to operate as Wine Spies’ technical department: building new features, maintaining the platform, managing infrastructure, and making the day-to-day technical decisions that keep an 8-figure e-commerce business running. Our founder, Brendan Ronan, is Wine Spies’ CTO, owning technical strategy at the executive level.

What started as a handoff from a founding engineer became a partnership that began in 2016 and is now heading into its tenth year. New features still ship the way the first fixes did: small, tested, and reviewed before they go out.