Andrew Harding, co-founder of Nocking Point Wines, loves to tell stories—especially the one about his brand’s origin. In 2012, Harding and Stephen Amell were on their way to a baseball game in Oakland, CA when they stopped at a winery in Paso Robles. Because the duo made this a lengthy stop—so thoroughly enjoying their experience at the winery— Harding and Amell barely made it to the game. That pitstop made the friends think, “how do we do this ourselves?”
Harding says Nocking Point Wines—made from the grapes that grow in his hometown of Walla Walla, WA—had to be a digital-first brand. In 2013, this was a fairly radical thing—long before many in the industry had to lean into new ways of selling. Nocking Point Wines’ first website was hosted on WordPress before Harding and co. looked at a custom built platform. Harding felt customization was the only option for the brand, but it quickly proved to be a solution that couldn’t sustain the brand’s growth.
“It got to a point where every time we wanted to launch a new feature or iterate on something, it just took time. And on top of that was the cost, right?” Harding says. “We were on one of the largest hosting services out there and it was incredibly expensive. And so, cost was one of the items that led me to start looking at Shopify Plus first. Once I got under the hood, I saw how easy it was to replace our homegrown solution with the out-of-the-box Shopify Plus setup.”
By moving to Shopify Plus and seeing how easy it is to add features and functionality depending on the brand’s need, Harding says he’s able to shift his focus to important customer-related goals, like storytelling. Learn more about Shopify for Wine.
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We’re able to get visibility into Shopify's roadmap so we can align our own business initiatives and goals. It doesn’t fall on me to work with developers to build out our own roadmap, and spend way too much time and money on a platform. We should be focused on customers, creating awesome wines, and developing content and telling stories. Shopify has freed me up and us up to go back to doing what we do best. And, frankly, it's saved us a lot of money.
