Dallas Fine Wine and Spirits
Role: UX Researcher, UI/UX Designer and Developer
A B2B wholesale platform designed to simplify how licensed restaurants, bars, clubs, and retailers discover fine wines and spirits, manage wholesale orders, access account-specific pricing, track deliveries, and handle invoices, all through one streamlined digital experience.
A sneak peak of the screens
Dallas Fine Wine & Spirits needed more than a website , they needed the operational backbone of their B2B business rebuilt. Retailers were placing orders, negotiating custom pricing, and managing invoices through a patchwork of manual processes, and there was no single system tying inventory, pricing, retailer accounts, and fulfillment together.
What started as individual features a barcode scanner, an invoice page, a pricing table grew into something much bigger: a full B2B commerce and operations platform, and eventually the seed of a broader idea. Watching how much structure DFW needed just to run its own retailer relationships made it clear the same architecture could serve other distributors facing the identical problem, which is what later shaped my thinking around a multi-tenant, white-label version of the platform.
Project Background and Personal Journey
DFW's retailer relationships ran on manual, disconnected processes: pricing was negotiated and tracked ad hoc per retailer, purchase requests and invoices moved outside any central system, and inventory data lived in spreadsheets rather than a system anyone could trust. There was no self-serve way for retailers to place orders, check pricing, or track invoices and no way to manage licensing, pricing sets, or retailer accounts from one place.
The platform needed to solve for three audiences at once retailers, internal admins, and end customers (via the companion DFWB2C storefront) without becoming three disconnected products.
Problem
Research: Competitive and SWOT Analysis
Provi- A leading B2B beverage marketplace connecting buyers with a wide network of distributors, but its marketplace model isn't built for a single distributor's ecosystem, offering limited flexibility for distributor-specific pricing, licensing, or invoice workflows.
SevenFifty- A comprehensive B2B platform offering strong sales enablement, account management, and analytics for beverage alcohol professionals, but it carries a steep learning curve and leans more toward supplier/distributor tooling than a simplified, self-serve ordering experience for retailers.
To understand how DFW's retailers and internal team actually worked, I conducted discovery conversations across the key groups touching the platform daily retailers of varying size, DFW's internal operations/admin staff, and the sales team managing pricing relationships. The aim was to uncover where the manual process was breaking down and where an automated system could remove friction without adding complexity.
Discovery covered questions about:
How retailers currently placed orders and tracked what they'd purchased
Current workarounds used to manage pricing, invoices, and licensing (spreadsheets, phone calls, email threads)
Comfort level with the existing manual process versus a self-serve system
Interest in features like barcode scanning, real-time inventory visibility, and digital invoice access
In addition, conversations with the DFW admin team gave deeper insight into operational contexts where control mattered most like needing different pricing per retailer, tracking licensing compliance across accounts, and keeping invoice records audit-ready without manual reconciliation.
User Surveys and Interviews
Card Sorting and Affinity Mapping
Through affinity mapping of insights gathered across retailer and admin discovery conversations, I identified three key themes: Pain Points: Retailers and admins were frustrated by an all-manual process pricing, orders, and invoices lived across phone calls, spreadsheets, and email threads with no central system to rely on. Shared visibility was nonexistent, and no one had a single source of truth.
Desires: Users wanted a self-serve middle ground—the ability to place orders, check their own pricing, and pull invoices instantly, without waiting on a phone call or learning a complicated new system.
Behaviors: Retailers kept personal spreadsheets of pricing, called ahead to check stock, and re-explained the same order details on every interaction—manual workarounds revealing a clear gap between how the business ran and how it needed to run. These insights validated the need for a unified, self-serve platform with familiar, low-friction ordering and admin control built in from the start.
Pain Points
Desires
Behavious
Meet the Users: Personas, Task Flows & Journeys
Based on stakeholder discovery and affinity mapping insights, I developed two key personas representing the two core user contexts for the platform. These personas aren't just role labels they represent real patterns observed across retailer and admin conversations, embodying the operational pain points, workflows, and motivations that drove the need for a unified, self-serve B2B system.
Each persona was crafted from recurring themes in those conversations: Marcus's need for fast, self-serve reordering, and Priya's need for centralized control over pricing and compliance. These personas guided every design decision, from dashboard structure to feature prioritization, ensuring the platform addressed genuine operational pain points rather than assumed needs.
Exploration, Ideation: Wireframes
With a clear understanding of retailer and admin needs, I began translating those insights into tangible design solutions. The ideation phase focused on exploring how ordering, pricing, and account management could work together as one cohesive system, without turning three distinct workflows into three disconnected products.
The wireframes prioritized:
Discoverability – Ensuring retailers could find pricing, place orders, and access invoices without hunting through menus
Consistency – Mirroring the same interaction patterns across the retailer storefront, admin portal, and mobile app so the platform felt like one product
Clarity – Making it obvious what pricing applied to each retailer, and clearly separating admin-only controls from retailer-facing actions
Reversibility – Providing safe, auditable paths to edit orders, adjust pricing, and manage account status without risking data integrity
Instead of a prototype test, this platform was validated through Google Play's closed testing and Apple's App Store review — real users and strict evaluators, not simulated ones.
Scenario: A retailer needs to log in, scan a barcode, reorder, and check pricing — all from the store floor, on mobile.
Test 1: 12 testers used the live app over Google Play's 14-day closed testing period, surfacing real usage issues before release.
Test 2: Apple's review flagged unclear camera permission labeling and an incomplete account deletion flow — both fixed before approval.
Test 3: Post-launch use surfaced session-handling issues on sign-in — the kind of bug that only shows up under real traffic.
Usability Testing
DFW B2B Platform taught me
This project was a lesson in building systems that have to actually hold up in a real business, not just look right in a design file. It grew from a real operational gap pricing, orders, and invoices scattered across calls, spreadsheets, and email — into a unified platform serving retailers, admins, and customers at once. Working closely within DFW's real day-to-day operations shaped every decision, and getting the system to feel native to how the business already worked was what made it usable from day one.
Key Lessons Learned:
Real Businesses Don't Tolerate "Almost Right" Wrong pricing or a missing invoice isn't a minor bug it's lost trust and lost revenue. That pressure shaped how carefully every flow was built.
Three Products, One System Keeping the admin portal, retailer storefront, and mobile app consistent while serving different needs showed how much a shared design system holds a multi-surface product together.
App Store Review Is Real Testing Apple and Google's rejection cycles weren't red tape they forced real improvements to permissions and account flows that users would've hit anyway.
Infrastructure Is Part of the Product Email deliverability, session handling, SDK compliance invisible until they break. Treating that work as seriously as features kept the platform stable at scale.
Small Systems Reveal Bigger Opportunities Solving DFW's pricing and retailer management surfaced a pattern bigger than one client the seed of a multi-tenant, white-label idea.
Learnings
