What Wineries Are Learning About Retention from LEGO and Starbucks

Every industry has moments where an outside perspective changes how it operates.

Restaurants borrowed reservations software from airlines. Fitness studios borrowed subscription models from streaming platforms. Hotels borrowed loyalty tiers from credit card companies.

The wine industry is due for a similar borrow.

At the recent Beyond Wine webinar with WISE Academy, Jimmy Wu and Liz Mercer walked through seven customer growth strategies that high-performing industries have quietly mastered. Three of those stood out as immediately usable for winery DTC teams, and none of them require new technology or a bigger budget.

Former members are alumni, not ex-customers

The sharpest moment from the session was Liz Mercer's reframe of how wineries treat cancellations.

"Ex-boyfriend is a negative connotation," she said. "Alumni is a positive one."

Most wineries treat a cancelled member like an ex. Paperwork requirements. Charge-back threats. Forced final shipments. A cold "please put your cancellation in writing" email.

The industries with the highest re-engagement rates have flipped that entirely. Universities send alumni magazines for decades after graduation. Fitness studios keep sending curated content and reactivation offers to former members years after they cancelled. The relationship stays open even when the transaction stops.

The mindset is simple: just because a member quit the club doesn't mean they quit the brand.

Jimmy Wu shared his data from his time working in other industries. Companies that continue thoughtful, high-quality communication with former customers see about 4% reactivation. Companies that cut them off see less than 1%. That's a fourfold difference on a segment most wineries treat as dead.

The winery version doesn't require a new system. It's a segment in your CRM, a quarterly "we miss you" touch, an invitation to a release party, or a mailing list for their favorite varietal. It's making cancellation itself easy. Skip. Pause. Downgrade. All the options that let a member step back without stepping out.

The wineries who do this well know that a member who leaves warmly often comes back. The ones who make cancellation feel like a bad breakup rarely see them again.

Give customers ownership, not just discounts

The second mindset shift is about how loyalty actually works.

Jimmy told the story of LEGO Ideas, the program that lets fans submit original designs, rally community support, and see winning concepts become real products. The reward isn't the discount or the finished set. It's the pride of having helped create something.

Liz translated it to wine immediately. What if your top 10 club couples helped blend a wine before release? What if your best members previewed a new tasting experience and gave feedback before you launched it? What if a small group voted on the theme of the next release event?

The winery version doesn't need to be a full program. It can start with one experiment. Invite five loyal members to preview an unreleased wine. Ask ten club members to weigh in on the next pickup party format. Let a member group name a proprietary blend.

The mindset behind all of it: participation says "you belong here" in a way that discounts never can.

Discounts train customers to wait for the next promotion. Ownership creates evangelists who tell their friends about the wine they helped make.

That kind of loyalty compounds. Discount loyalty doesn't.

Feedback is a competitive edge, not a nice-to-have

The third mindset that stood out was continuous customer feedback. And it stood out partly because of how few wineries are doing it.

The Wine Club Scorecard data we've been reviewing shows the same pattern the webinar surfaced. Very few wineries have any formal customer feedback loop. Not a transactional survey after a pickup. Not a relational NPS check every six months. Not a single qualitative conversation with a top member.

Think about how Starbucks Rewards works. Every purchase generates a data point. Every visit gets a receipt that invites feedback. Every star earned toward a free drink is a small signal about what the customer values. Starbucks isn't running the world's most sophisticated loyalty program because they got lucky. They built feedback into every touchpoint of the customer relationship, and they act on it.

Jimmy laid out three layers of feedback that industries with strong retention run consistently:

Transactional feedback. A short survey after a tasting, a pickup, or a customer service interaction. "How did we do?" One question, sent in the moment the experience is still fresh.

Relational feedback. A recurring survey like Net Promoter Score, sent every six to twelve months, asking a single question: how likely are you to recommend us to a friend? The number itself matters less than the trend.

Qualitative feedback. Actual conversations with top customers. Not a form. A phone call, a private tasting, a 20-minute chat that surfaces the "why" behind the numbers.

The wineries with the strongest retention are running all three, quietly, as a Monday morning habit. Most wineries are running none of them.

Feedback is one of the cheapest, highest-signal tools a winery has. It gets skipped because nobody built it into the operational rhythm.

Where to start

If all three mindsets feel like a lot to tackle at once, Jimmy's closing advice from the webinar was the most practical thing said the whole hour.

Aim small. Miss small. Experiment.

Don't build a full alumni re-engagement program. Send one warm email to your ten most recent cancellations and see what happens.

Don't launch a full LEGO Ideas equivalent. Invite five members to preview one wine and see how they respond.

Don't roll out an enterprise-wide NPS system. Send a one-question survey to your current club members and see what the number tells you.

The wineries doing this well started small. And then they iterated.

The full Beyond Wine webinar with WISE Academy is available now: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/recording/3496552986470931033

Book a demo with vinSUITE to see how the platform surfaces the data behind these mindsets.