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. The app worked, but it had no test coverage, brittle integrations, and an admin backend that would break on high-volume sales days. It was built for where the business had been, not where it was going.

The founding engineer introduced us over beers. He needed someone he trusted to take the reins. Wine Spies needed more than a replacement developer - they needed a team that could own the technical side of the business and scale it.

We started by stabilizing what was there - adding test coverage, fixing the fragile integrations, and making the platform reliable under load. Then we started building.

Over 7+ years of ownership, we’ve transformed Wine Spies’ technology:

• Overhauled the entire frontend with a modern, reactive checkout and cart experience
• Built their Locker feature - a first-in-industry capability that became a major inflection point for the business
• Designed and built a standalone mobile app for iOS and Android, bringing the full Wine Spies experience to mobile customers
• Built a separate API layer and data analysis services
• Re-engineered backend logistics, fulfillment, and inventory management
• Scaled the platform from handling modest daily traffic to supporting an 8-figure operation

What started as one developer has grown into a team of 3-4 engineers working across the platform daily.

“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.

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. What started as a handoff from a founding engineer became a partnership that’s now in its eighth year.