From Bottleshop to EveryBottle
Using product discovery to challenge a founder's initial SaaS concept and uncover a new opportunity around knowledge, discovery, and community.
Timeline: Fall 2025 – Summer 2026
Role: Product Strategist + UX Designer
Additional ownership: Client lead / day-to-day account partner
Brand + UI Visual Design: Dmitrii Tereshchenko, Sam Flaherty
The starting point
The founder of Playlist, an established wine events company, came to us with an idea for Bottleshop: an AI-powered SaaS platform for independent wine and spirits retailers. As a two-time founder with previous exits, he had deep experience building businesses and saw an opportunity to modernize a traditionally fragmented industry.
The premise made sense on paper. Product information was fragmented, retailers spent significant time researching inventory and creating marketing content, and many relied on disconnected or manual systems. Bottleshop aimed to streamline that work through enriched product data, automated content, and more personalized marketing.
Testing the premise before designing the solution
Before moving into design, I recommended validating whether the problem was painful enough to justify building the product at all.
I led 1:1 discovery sessions with seven retailers, distributors, winery professionals, and other wine industry experts to understand the journey from new inventory to ready to sell and where existing workflows actually broke down.
The original hypothesis didn't hold consistently. Some businesses already had software that worked well enough and saw our proposed features as nice-to-haves. Others were highly manual, even pen-and-paper, but had little interest in adopting new software. And those who did see a need exposed just how complex a unified solution would be within the industry's disconnected systems and workflows.
The industry’s fragmentation was real. But fragmentation alone wasn’t a strong enough reason to build another SaaS platform.
What we heard instead
The conversations also revealed something more interesting. People in this industry cared deeply about the stories, people, places, and knowledge behind what they sold. One retailer described education, community, and storytelling as central to his business and talked about researching producers, history, regions, and even soil beyond the information supplied with a bottle.
Other conversations surfaced challenges around declining interest in wine in some markets, inconsistent product education, shelf talkers and storytelling, and unpredictable ways for people across the industry to connect and discover what’s new.
The opportunity began to feel less like fixing an operational workflow and more like creating a better way to discover, share, and build knowledge around wine.
Finding the opportunity inside the research
The research didn’t tell us there was no opportunity in wine. It told us we may have been starting in the wrong place.
The operational pain behind Bottleshop varied dramatically by business. But across conversations, other themes kept surfacing: education, storytelling, discovery, connection, and access to better product knowledge.
One retailer described community and education as central to how he sold wine, often researching the people, places, and stories behind a bottle beyond the information provided by distributors. Others talked about declining engagement with wine, the challenge of educating customers, and an industry that still relied heavily on in-person relationships and events to exchange knowledge and discover products.
At the same time, our original research into Bottleshop had already exposed another underlying issue: bottle information itself was scattered across producers, importers, distributors, retailers, spreadsheets, websites, and other sources. The information existed, but there wasn’t a single, engaging place built around understanding and exploring it.
That led me to reconsider the entry point.
From software tool to ecosystem
Rather than asking retailers and distributors to adopt another operational system, what if we started with the thing people were already passionate about: the bottles themselves?
I proposed a broader concept: a community-built “wiki” for wine where people across the ecosystem could contribute knowledge, discover bottles and producers, learn from one another, and find others who shared their interests.
Starting with community and discovery also gave us room to grow. If people built profiles around what they loved, explored, and contributed, and the platform developed a trusted knowledge layer around bottles, those two sides could eventually unlock some of the value we’d originally imagined for Bottleshop.
A local wine shop or restaurant could offer more personalized recommendations. Product knowledge could support education and shelf talkers. New tools for retailers, producers, and distributors could grow from an existing ecosystem rather than requiring businesses to adopt a new operating system upfront.
That broader idea became the seed for EveryBottle. The founder developed it into the initial EveryBottle concept, and from there we worked closely together to define what the product should actually become.
Turning the strategy into a product
EveryBottle became a community-built encyclopedia of wines, spirits, beer, and beyond: a place to browse, learn, contribute, and expand a shared catalog.
I co-owned product definition with the founder, translating the concept into the PRD, sitemap, information architecture, features, and core user flows.
The experience was designed around a few central behaviors: Discover: Browse bottles through categories, regions, producers, grapes, search, filters, and interconnected views. Learn: Move beyond a basic SKU into the people, provenance, geography, and context behind a bottle. Contribute: Add missing bottles, correct information, and build the collective record. Trust: Use community moderation to review contributions and protect the quality of the data. Explore: Use AI as an enabling layer for search and discovery, not as the reason the product exists.
[FINAL PRODUCT VISUALS HERE]
Partnering through Design
I partnered closely with visual designer Dmitrii [Last Name] throughout high-fidelity design. While Dmitrii led the visual system and high-fidelity execution, I stayed deeply involved in each iteration, reviewing flows, identifying interaction and usability gaps, refining UX copy, recommending UI changes, and making sure individual screens continued to work as a coherent product.
As the day-to-day client lead, I also served as the bridge between founder feedback and design, translating evolving product needs into clear direction as we moved from concept to final designs.
Where we landed
By Summer 2026, we had moved from an initially defined AI SaaS product to a fundamentally different product direction, one grounded in what we learned about the people and ecosystem we were designing for.
The work helped the team: avoid investing further in a weakly validated SaaS MVP; uncover and articulate a more differentiated opportunity; create a product direction that aligned more naturally with Playlist’s existing community; define an MVP and complete product experience; establish a foundation that could eventually connect consumers, product knowledge, and local businesses in more personalized ways.
The founders are now building EveryBottle, with an early version of the product live.
