Productized retainer
Club Ops
A monthly retainer that runs your wine club’s back office — signup, shipment cycles, declines, address changes, hold-shipments, and early-warning churn flagging — on an Airtable base you own.
For wineries who don’t want a Commerce7 AI Stack engagement yet, but whose club ops are the thing breaking. The retainer is the product. The build that gets the retainer working is a small, fixed implementation cost.
Retainer
From $350 / month
Cadence
Weekly check-in + ad-hoc
Format
Remote + on-site week 1
Who this is for
You probably recognize at least two of these.
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You run a wine club between 100 and 2,000 active members, and the operational load — declines, address changes, hold requests, comp tracking — runs on email and the GM’s memory.
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You don’t need the full Commerce7 AI Stack yet. You need the club back office to stop being a fire and start being a tracked workflow.
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The platform-native dashboards (Commerce7, WineDirect, Vin65, Vino7) tell you who’s active and who cancelled, but not the in-between work that produces those cancellations.
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You want someone running the workflow weekly without hiring a full-time club coordinator.
What’s broken right now
Three club-ops failures every winery with a club has.
01
Email as the database
Decline emails sit in an inbox; address changes are replied-to but never updated; hold requests get acknowledged and forgotten. No log, no audit trail, no way to tell whether anyone followed up.
02
The cancellation surprise
A member churns and nobody saw it coming, because the signals — declined cards, skipped shipments, unopened emails — were never aggregated against a single member view.
03
Recovery on the back foot
Win-back happens after the cancel email arrives, which is the worst possible time. The retainable window was 30–90 days earlier; nobody had visibility into it.
What the retainer covers, every month
Four workstreams. Weekly cadence.
Decline recovery
Every declined card hits the workflow within hours. A first-touch reach-out goes out the same day, a second touch at day 3, a final touch at day 7. Every step is logged on the member record. The decline backlog stops being a thing.
Shipment ops
Address changes, hold requests, comp adjustments, ship-date overrides — handled within the workflow, logged on the member record, surfaced to you on the weekly check-in. No more ‘did anyone reply to that email?’
Early-warning churn flagging
A weekly view of members trending toward cancel — declined card history, skipped shipments, unopened emails over 60 days, allocation passes. Flagged 30–90 days before the cancel email so you can intervene when it matters.
A weekly 30-minute check-in
What was handled, what’s at risk, what needs a decision. You get a written summary in your inbox the same day. The check-in is the operating rhythm.
How it starts
Four weeks to live. Then the retainer.
Week 1
Discovery
On-site day, current-state walkthrough, member-list import, club-platform API access. We’ll map what each workflow looks like today before changing anything.
Week 2
Base + workflows
Airtable base provisioned on your billing. Workflows for declines, address changes, holds, and the churn-flag view built and tested against last month’s data.
Week 3
Shadow mode
Workflows run live but no outbound touches send yet. You and I review what would have happened for a full week before anything customer-facing goes live.
Week 4
Go-live + retainer
Outbound touches turned on, weekly cadence established. The retainer clock starts the Monday after.
What it costs
Lead with the monthly. The build is small.
Foundation
$350 / month
Up to 500 active members. Decline recovery + shipment ops + weekly check-in. Churn flagging via heuristic view.
Growth
$650 / month
Up to 1,200 members. Everything in Foundation + AI-personalized win-back drafts + monthly cohort report.
Plus
$1,100 / month
Up to 2,000 members. Everything in Growth + allocation-round support + on-site quarterly review.
One-time implementation: $5,500. Covers the Airtable base, the workflow build, the four-week run-in, and the documented runbook. Payable 50% on signing, 50% at go-live.
Pass-through costs:Airtable Team seat (~$24/mo per editor), n8n hosting on a $10/mo VPS. SMS sends (Twilio) at cost if the Growth tier’s win-back uses SMS.
Minimum term: three months on the retainer. After that, month-to-month with 30 days notice either way.
What’s not included:club acquisition campaigns (different work), brand strategy, or replacing your club platform. We’re the operating layer on top of whatever DTC platform you already use.
FAQ
Things people ask before booking.
How is this different from the Commerce7 AI Stack?
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Different shape, different commitment. The Commerce7 AI Stack is a software install — you own the warehouse and the workflows and run them. Club Ops is a service — I run the workflow weekly on your behalf. Many wineries want the second before they’re ready for the first, and a Club Ops engagement can graduate into a Commerce7 AI Stack engagement when you are.
Do I own the Airtable base and the workflows?
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Yes — always. The Airtable workspace is on your billing under your admin seat. n8n workflow JSON lives in a GitHub repo you control. If we stop working together, nothing leaves with me.
What does the AI actually do at the Growth tier?
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One thing, concretely: drafts the 80-word body of personalized win-back emails that reference what the member actually drank, their last visit, and their allocation history. You approve every send for the first 30 days. After that, it’s opt-in whether to keep human approval on the hot path. We use Claude Haiku 4.5 — about $0.001 per draft.
What if our club is on WineDirect / Vin65 / a custom platform?
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The pattern is platform-agnostic — the workflow lives in Airtable + n8n, with API connectors to whatever club platform you use. We’ll confirm fit on the intro call. If your platform has no API at all, this won’t work; we’ll tell you why.
Do you have references?
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Not yet for a wine-club retainer specifically. The Airtable + n8n operational pattern is in active use with a Sonoma wine bar pilot, and the Commerce7 AI Stack’s churn scoring sits on the same data shape. I’ll be honest with you about what’s a first-time shape vs. what’s already running somewhere.
Can you do this on-site?
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One on-site day in week 1 is included for Sonoma, Napa, and Marin counties. The Plus tier includes a quarterly on-site review thereafter. Additional days $750/day plus mileage.
What happens if we want to stop working together?
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30 days notice after the three-month minimum, no exit fee. The Airtable base and n8n workflows are yours; any competent Airtable consultant can take the operating rhythm over within a week. You don’t need permission to leave.
Founding-client honesty
What it means that you’d be the first.
Club Ops as a productized retainer hasn’t been deployed to a winery yet. The operational pattern — Airtable + n8n, weekly cadence, logged-everything — is what I’m running with a wine bar pilot right now, just shaped for retail and tasting-room volume instead of club ops.
If you’re comfortable being the first wine-club deployment: retainer discount for the first six months, more access to me, and your operational reality shapes the productized version everyone after you buys.
Ready?