Get Wines Direct

The challenge

Get Wines Direct is a well-established e-commerce business with a large portfolio: around 60 private wine labels, each with its own brand, products and customers. Running that many brands online is a serious operational load. Every label needs a store, product pages, email campaigns, content, SEO and reporting, and the same team has to keep all of it moving.

The group's CFO and co-founder could see AI changing e-commerce, but the conversation in the market was mostly hype and vague promises. He came to us with a clear, open brief: show me the future of e-commerce using AI. Show me the art of the possible, on our business, with something real.

That brief set a high bar. A slide deck of ideas wouldn't answer it, and neither would a chatbot bolted onto an existing website. To be useful, the answer had to be a working system, built on one of the group's own brands, that the team could see, use and judge for themselves.

It also had to be fast. The value of a sprint like this is in compressing months of experimentation into days, so leadership can make investment decisions based on evidence rather than speculation.

Our approach

1. Launch a brand from scratch

   The group gave us one of its labels that didn't yet have a store. In three days we stood up the brand and a complete Shopify store, ready to trade.

2. Connect everything to Claude

   We connected the business's systems to Claude through MCP, including Shopify and Mailchimp. The team can now ask for what they need in plain language: generate an email campaign, create a new page, check sales, answer a question about any product or customer.

3. Build a creative operating system

   On top of that foundation we added automated content creation, automated SEO article creation and AI video for brand content, so the whole path from idea to published asset runs through one system.

The results

The sprint delivered exactly what the brief asked for: a working picture of AI-powered e-commerce, running on the group's own business. A new brand went from no store to a live Shopify storefront in three days, a timeline that would normally take weeks of design, setup and content work.

The operating system changed how the team works day to day. Tasks that used to mean switching between several tools and waiting on specialists now start with a request to Claude. Campaigns, pages, product content and SEO articles are drafted in minutes, and sales questions are answered on the spot. Overall, team productivity rose by 80%.

Just as importantly, leadership now has evidence instead of hype. The CFO can see what AI does well across marketing, content and operations, where people still add the most value, and what it would take to roll the model out across the rest of the group's 60 labels.

For Lightning Ventures, this is the clearest demonstration of what we mean by AI integration: Claude wired into the systems a business already runs, doing real work every day.

What this means for your business

If you run an e-commerce business, especially one with several brands, the gap between AI's promise and your daily operations is probably wide. The fastest way to close it is a focused sprint on your own business, with a working system at the end.

We connect Claude to the tools you already use, from Shopify to Mailchimp, and build the workflows that turn requests into finished work: campaigns, pages, content, SEO and reporting. In days, you'll know exactly what AI can do for your team. Ask us for a live demo of the Get Wines Direct system.