SocialGrapes: Wine for Everyone
Founding designer on a consumer social app that was doing for wine what Untappd eventually did for beer — before the infrastructure existed to support it.
Validation
Scale
110K potential early adopters via partnership with Moms Who Need Wine Facebook community
Innovation
Featured by Robert Scoble for pioneering scan-to-lookup UX using RedLaser barcode scanning
Real-World Testing
Validated in the wild at the 2010 SF Vintners Market across 100+ wineries
What We Shipped
A full consumer social product across mobile and web, including:
Barcode scan-to-lookup — point your camera at a bottle to instantly surface ratings, reviews, and nearby sellers. Ahead of its time given 2010 hardware constraints, but the right instinct.
Social activity feed — friend check-ins and ratings surfaced over expert scores, creating a lower-intimidation entry point for casual drinkers.
Nearby sellers integration — closed the loop between discovery and purchase, turning the app into a commerce surface as well as a social one.
Wine Flight gamification — my design: a stamp-based learning experience inspired by Gowalla and Foursquare, turning wine education into a series of achievable social milestones. Retention through learning, not just feed scrolling.
Why It Failed
Data Was the Real Product
Our biggest problem wasn't the UI — it was structured wine data that hard to come by. We were building a discovery engine on a foundation the market hadn't built yet. No matter how good the experience was, we couldn't deliver on the core promise without data we couldn't get. The infrastructure problem should have been solved — or validated as unsolvable — before the experience was designed.
Tech Reality Didn't Match the Vision
The core promise — point your camera at a bottle and instantly know everything about it — was right. But smartphone cameras in 2010 struggled with low-light performance and barcode scanning wasn't always reliable enough to deliver the magic we'd designed for. The lesson isn't that the idea was wrong — Vivino proved it wasn't — it's that timing is everything.
Strategic Fragmentation Killed Momentum
When resources were diverted to bespoke solutions for partners like the SAQ, the core product stalled. It's the clearest example I have of what happens when a startup chases adjacent revenue before the core product has found its footing.
Toward the end we were even exploring a wine video channel with a well-known winemaker — which in another context might have been a smart content play. But when your core product hasn't found its footing, every pivot just accelerates the drift.
What I Took from It
UX cannot solve for a lack of product focus. No amount of clever mechanics rescues a product the organization has stopped betting on. Focus is a strategic decision — and the earlier it's made, the better.
Let's connect
I'm always up for a chat about design, working together, and .
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