Designing and Building Decanto, a Premium Tasting Platform

Where it came from

My fiancée and I love wine, and we've visited vineyards on four continents. We kept wishing we could have that at home: someone who knows their stuff, good bottles, friends around the table. Nobody in Sweden offered it across wine, beer, and whiskey, so I built it myself.

Keeping it lean on purpose

The obvious build is a full marketplace: expert logins, self-serve booking, ratings. I skipped all of it. A marketplace is an empty room until both sides show up, and I wasn't about to spend my evenings on a cold-start problem. So Decanto looks finished but runs by hand: customers get a polished booking flow, and I match each request to an expert myself. Faster to launch, and more personal anyway.

Mapping it before designing it

Before drawing a single screen, I mapped the whole journey: who does what, who gets which email, and when. Three parties (me, the customer, the expert) and plenty of moments where things can go quiet. Seeing it as one flow showed me where to automate emails and where to stay hands-on. Most of my later decisions trace back to this map.

Figma and Claude, back and forth

The fun part. I used the Figma MCP to let Figma and Claude talk directly, then bounced between them to find the look: sketch a direction, ask Claude to push it or pick holes in it, pull the good bits back, repeat. I could try wildly different moods fast, a bright version next to a darker, cellar-like one, before committing.

Tokens first

The bit I'm quietly proud of. Before building for real, I nailed down the tokens: the burgundy and cream palette, the Playfair and Lato type scale, spacing, radii, shadows, button and form rules. Slow at the time, but it meant everything was consistent once I started building. New pages just fell into place.

The site customers see

With the system in place, the public site came together fast: a homepage that sets the mood, category pages that double as SEO, gift cards, a corporate page, and editorial guides, all in Swedish and English. Smooth transitions keep it feeling alive. And since this is Sweden, guests buy their own bottles from Systembolaget, so I made that part of the experience: book a tasting and you get a tailored shopping list.

The small touches I cared about

I sweated the small, user-first details, the kind you only notice when they're missing:

• A live price that updates as you add guests. No surprises at checkout.
• An expert onboarding form that pre-fills from the invite link, so nobody retypes what I already know.
• Timed reminder emails before the tasting, and a gentle "how was it?" the day after.
• My favourite: the expert tags each item with its Systembolaget article number, turning the shopping-list email into deep links, one click from inbox to the exact bottle.

The half nobody sees

The manual model only works if the back office is good, so I built one. A separate tool where every booking moves through its stages: new, matched, intro sent, paid, done. From there I match experts, send the emails, take payment and pay experts out through Stripe, and handle gift cards down to partial redemptions. I designed the experience twice: once for the customer, once for me.

Building it and running it

I shipped all of it: a static HTML site with compiled Tailwind, a separate Next.js back office on Supabase, Stripe for payments, Resend for mail. Plus the growth side: SEO, Google Ads with proper consent handling, analytics, an expert sign-up funnel, and a couple of Claude tools for my weekly industry reading and social posts. Decanto soft-launched in Stockholm in spring 2026, ads live and the first expert deals coming together. It started as a hobby and still feels like one, in the best way: proof that one person on evenings and weekends can still build something that feels properly premium.