Designing and building an in-home tasting service

Company: Decanto
Role: Founder, designer and developer
Team: Just me
Timeline: May to October 2026
Outcome: Live in Stockholm, first tastings delivered

TL;DR

Decanto brings a sommelier to your home in Stockholm for a wine tasting. I did the end-to-end product design and built it myself: brand identity, site, booking and back office.

Manual before marketplace

The obvious move was a marketplace, where sommeliers log in and guests book themselves. I didn't build that. I started with service design, mapping how guests, sommeliers and I talk to each other, and matching by hand won: a faster MVP, and nicer for guests. The emails run themselves, and I do the matching.

The start of the booking flow across three parties. Every silent step became an automated email or a task for me. Click to see all of it.

Fewer, clearer tastings

Too many themes make people hesitate, and each one needs a sommelier who can deliver it. So the content strategy is eight tastings, with a standard one nobody has to choose. Every page comes from one template, so a new tasting is a few lines of text.

A tasting page, built from the same template as every other tasting.

One page to book

Booking is a one-page checkout flow with a fixed price: 599 kr per person, paid when you book. A request form would have let me price each group by hand, but a fixed price lets people book without asking first, one step less before conversion. Below the button sit only the payment methods we accept.

The booking modal. A fixed price, one page, and the ways to pay right next to the button.

On a phone the address search opens full screen, so the keyboard never hides the results.

A separate path for companies

Companies don't buy like friends planning a birthday. Group size and theme vary, so they get their own B2B page built for lead generation: the whole quote request is the first thing they see. No checkout. I started on a business login too, but it was overkill before we'd proven the value, so I cut it.

The business page. The quote request is the first thing a company sees.

A shopping list instead of delivery

In Sweden, guests buy their own wine at Systembolaget, so I leaned into it. After every booking, the sommelier fills in a shopping list on one page, with the guest count, budget and wishes right above it. The list then goes to the guest by email, so the end-to-end experience carries on after payment.

The sommelier's side: one block per wine, with the bottle, how many and the article number.

The guest's side. Each item links straight to the bottle at Systembolaget.

The back office

I run everything from one back office, designed as internal tools: bookings arrive paid, I assign a sommelier, and payouts and gift cards run through Stripe. It's a static site with a Next.js back office on Supabase, Stripe and Resend.

One booking, from matching to payout. I designed my side and the guest's side together.

In short

Key decision: Matching by hand instead of a marketplace. It was faster to launch and nicer for guests.
Changed course: I started on a business login, then cut it. It was overkill before we'd proven the value.
Outcome: Live in Stockholm, with the first tastings delivered. Designed and built solo. Partnership talks are in progress.
Takeaway: Launch the manual version first. Automate the parts that repeat, like the emails.

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