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A specialty French wine importer rebuilding its distribution network needed more than a product catalogue—they needed a marketing presence. Hypha ran a brand messaging discovery process to establish positioning, then built a full site on HubSpot Content Hub: elevated design, lifestyle imagery, and a trade resources portal housing distributor contacts and sales materials in one place. On the e-commerce side, we built a custom cart handoff that lets visitors browse and build their order within the HubSpot environment before landing on a pre-populated Shopify checkout, keeping the brand experience intact until the moment of payment.
The Challenge
Our client imports and distributes specialty French wines across 43 states. When they came to Hypha, they were in the middle of a brand reboot—re-establishing distributor relationships, expanding their footprint, and repositioning for a market that had shifted around them.
Their online presence wasn’t helping any of that. What they had was essentially a product catalogue attached to a Shopify checkout, which included spec sheets for each wine, transactions handled on a visually disconnected storefront, and nothing that communicated who they actually were, meaning no brand story, no lifestyle positioning, and no way to resonate with first-time visitors.
The distributor side was similarly bare. Trade partners evaluating whether to carry the portfolio had no online home for materials, such as contacts, sales assets, and relevant brand resources. All of that happened offline.
Three things needed to change: they needed a real marketing site, a purchase experience that didn’t drop visitors onto a foreign-looking Shopify environment, and a dedicated space for distributor-facing content.
There was also a strategic nuance worth naming. The goal wasn’t to build two sites for two audiences. The client, drawing on real industry experience, pushed back on early conversations about separate consumer and distributor pathways. A strong consumer-facing brand is exactly what distributors respond to. One site, one consumer-centric presentation—and trade resources tucked in where partners could find them.
The Approach
Before any design work started, Hypha ran a brand messaging discovery process with the client team. The purpose was practical: get everyone to a shared, documented understanding of the brand’s voice, audience, and positioning before opinions about colors and layouts entered the room.
This process revealed the core focus of our work: the client sits in an “affordable luxury” lane. The wines look like a premium French import yet the price point is genuinely accessible. That tension—elevated on the shelf, approachable at checkout—became the north star for every design and copy decision that followed.
What We Built
The Site
The previous site was spare—white backgrounds, bottle shots, not much else. The new site needed to feel elevated without crossing into intimidating: rich color palette, lifestyle video, imagery that puts the wine in context rather than just presenting the product. Hypha built the full site on HubSpot Content Hub from scratch. Design direction involved competitor analysis and multiple concept rounds, with the client providing direct feedback that shaped the final aesthetic.
The result: a site that reads as high-end on first impression, while delivering on the affordable luxury promise when visitors get to product pages.
Trade Resources Portal
One of the clearer gaps in the brand’s previous web presence was a distributor-facing section. Our team built a dedicated Trade Resources section housing distributor contacts, sales materials, and brand assets that can be accessed in one place. For a brand actively re-establishing partner relationships, reducing that friction was as critical as anything we did to make the brand more consumer friendly.
HubSpot-to-Shopify Cart Handoff
The client sells direct-to-consumer through Shopify, and that wasn’t changing. What did need to change was the experience of getting there. On the old site, clicking a product took visitors out of the main environment entirely and to Shopify, where a customer would start a cart from scratch.
The new approach works differently: visitors browse and add items to their cart within the HubSpot Content Hub site. When they’re ready to purchase, they’re taken to a pre-populated Shopify cart. The only Shopify-specific step is payment.
The “build your cart” approach came directly from the Hypha team, who proposed it as a UX solution to a problem the client hadn’t specifically named. Most implementations just send visitors to the Shopify homepage. This one keeps the brand environment intact until the last possible moment, greatly improving the user experience, while reducing the risk of losing the customer during the transition from the main site to the Shopify environment.
Outcomes
The site launched on a deliberate soft roll-out while the client continues rebuilding its distribution network. Hard metrics, such as traffic, conversion, and distributor engagement, aren’t available yet. What is available is qualitative, and it’s significant.
The client has a site that functions as a true marketing asset for the first time. Brand story, lifestyle positioning, and product discovery are in one place. Distributor partners have an online resource hub they didn’t have before. The purchase experience is meaningfully smoother. And the brand system built for this engagement—color palette, typography, lifestyle imagery—now extends to decks, social, and sales collateral. Before this project, the visual identity started and ended with the bottle.
The platform also supports where the business is going, not just where it is. Email marketing, influencer programming, a potential wine club—HubSpot Content Hub handles all of that. And now the foundation is built.
What We Took Away
The brand discovery process earns its value as a shared-baseline tool. It forces clients to make decisions before the build starts and gives the agency a documented reference when feedback gets subjective. That worked here even with a client that struggled to describe their brand in abstract terms, because the process gave them something concrete to react to rather than open-ended questions to answer.
Another thing worth noting: in wine and other multi-tier distribution industries, a strong consumer brand is often what gets a brand taken seriously by trade partners. The site was built for consumers. That’s exactly why distributors will respond to it.
And on the technical side, a HubSpot Content Hub site doesn’t have to mean a hard break with Shopify. With a developer-led approach to the cart handoff, the two platforms can operate as a single experience from the visitor’s perspective. Brand discovery and browsing on HubSpot, payment on Shopify, with no jarring transition between them.
Comparison of two approaches to the HubSpot-to-Shopify cart handoff: a typical implementation that breaks brand continuity versus the Hypha approach that keeps visitors in the HubSpot environment until payment.
⚠ Brand environment ends here
Most implementations send visitors to a Shopify homepage mid-purchase. This one doesn’t. The only Shopify-specific step is payment.
Ready to build a marketing presence that works for your brand and your partners?
Whether you’re relaunching a brand, building your first real marketing site, or looking to close the gap between your main site and your ecommerce platform—we’ve done this work and can walk you through what it looks like for your situation. Get in touch.
