ROOT Experience — gift finder and visit requests for a winery
A companion product beside the winery's shop: it helps pick a wine gift and request a visit without disturbing the commerce that already works.
- A guest picks a gift by occasion and budget instead of wandering a catalogue
- Requests for tastings and vineyard tours are collected in one place
- The existing shop is untouched: a chosen wine hands off to its own pages
The problem
An Italian winery already has working commerce and a site. Touching either for the sake of a new scenario risks the thing that earns money. Meanwhile two guest requests — 'help me choose a gift' and 'I want to visit' — are not served by a catalogue at all.
How it works
A companion product rather than a rebuild: the gift builder leads to existing shop product pages, the visit assistant creates a request. The boundaries are deliberately hard — no payment, no instant booking confirmation: a request, then a human. Data and files sit on a managed backend, and the flows are covered by browser tests.
The hard part
The hard part was not building, but not building more. The pull to finish booking properly — calendar, payment, confirmation — meets reality: the winery confirms a visit, not a form. A product that promises a booking it cannot honour is worse than one that honestly files a request.
Evidence
- The gift and request flows pass browser tests rather than manual clicking
- Product boundaries are written into the repository docs — visible before reading code
- Hand-offs into the existing shop run on real product links