Edge of the Lake Vineyard & Winery

Edge of the Lake holds a set of assets almost no winery in North Texas can match: a lakefront estate with its own vines, a real medal record, and four distinct private rooms under one roof. The opportunity in front of you is not to become something new. It is to stop giving those assets away for free, and to let people actually buy the things you already sell. Most of that work is plumbing, not positioning — which means it is fast, cheap, and can be done before the fall rush.

1 · What you have

Every recommendation in this document leans on assets that already exist and are already paid for. Nothing here asks you to build, rebrand, or advertise.

2 · Where the revenue leaks out

The assets are doing less than they could because the site asks for a phone call or an email at nearly every point where money would change hands. We walked the live site on July 23 and confirmed the pattern first-hand:

• The homepage does no commercial work. Above the fold: an aerial photo and nothing else — no hours, no prices, no reserve button. Below it, a founding story most visitors never scroll. The first thing a phone visitor sees gives them nothing to act on.
• The wine club — your best retention asset — can't be joined. No price is published and there is no join button; a prospective member is asked to send an email and wait. This is the single most valuable fix in the plan.
• Your highest-value rooms show a price but no way to book. The experiences and venues are listed with photos and prices, then "reservations required," with no calendar and no deposit path. A group of eight — the most valuable inbound you get — is asked to leave a voicemail.
• A promotion that ended July 5 is still the headline event three weeks later. Content gets added and never retired.

3 · The fix, in one idea

This is a conversion problem, not a positioning problem. You don't need more visitors. You need the visitors you already get to be able to say yes.

National data makes the stakes plain without any guesswork about your books. Across the industry, the top-quartile wineries grew sales 8% by investing in experience and making guests feel like insiders. The bottom quartile fell 10.2% competing on price. You have the assets of the first group; the current promotional posture and booking friction are doing the work of the second. Tasting rooms and clubs are now ~72% of direct-to-consumer revenue — so the club and the rooms, not shipping, are where the next dollar is.

4 · The medicine is already made

Rather than describe the fix, we built it. A working demo of the rebuilt site is live — same estate, same facts, same rooms — with the conversion machinery in place:

5 · The first five moves

In priority order for the next 30 days. Every one is low-cost and judged against the same constraint: your time.

1. Protect the price ladder

   Retire the standing weekly bottle discount and replace it with a margin-protected "Winemaker Thursday" — a $30 guided flight with a family member pouring. Same traffic goal, better story, full margin. Confine any clearance to named wines with a published end date, and never to the estate or award wines.

2. Open the club to online joins

   Publish both tier prices, add a join button, and present the value math before the ask. Credit today's tasting fee toward the first shipment for anyone who joins during their visit — it turns the ask into an obvious yes at the moment of peak enthusiasm. This has to be live before the October trail.

3. Put the private rooms on the shelf

   Give every space a photo, a price, an availability calendar, and a book-now button that takes the deposit. The capability is fully built and priced — only the shelf is missing. Fall party inquiries arrive now for November and December dates.

4. Give the website one owner and one job

   One named person, thirty minutes a week: fix the pricing typo, delete stale promos, add hours and a reserve button to the homepage, route every booking into one path. The demo does most of this already.

5. Capture a contact on every check

   An email or mobile on every ticket, with one reason to return, plus a single automated note 72 hours after each visit. Without this, October's trail traffic walks out the door unrecorded — the largest qualified audience of the year, lost.

A realistic, measurable 90-day result — with no new traffic, no new staff, and no meaningful capital: club conversion moving from unmeasured to 3–5% of parties, three to five fall event bookings closed, contact capture above 50% of checks, and bottle margin restored to full-price levels.

The full analysis follows — SWOT, strategy portfolio, revenue engines, the 90-day experiments, the weekly scorecard, and your platform plan.

A · SWOT

B · Strategy portfolio

The intersections that matter, scored and ranked. Ranking is judgment-weighted toward margin protection and speed — the top item costs nothing and every other strategy earns less without it.

C · The five revenue engines

Where to focus: the club is the compounding engine (each member = recurring quarterly revenue + up to four guests every visit) and the fixes are cheap and fast — put it first, with a hard Sept 25 deadline ahead of the trail. Events & experiences are the secondary focus: highest revenue per hour, capability already built, and the cleanest replacement for discount-driven revenue. Deliberately not the focus: online shipping (constrained until mid-September) and longer public hours (cost against unfilled capacity).

D · 90-day experiments

Each has a defined budget, a success line, a failure line, and a next move either way. The three under $500 are the priority tests.

E · Weekly scorecard

Ten numbers, reviewed each Monday for the prior Thu–Sun week. Targets are starting points — reset after four weeks of real baseline. Followers, page views, and impressions are deliberately excluded: they don't move revenue.

F · What we saw on the current site

Walked live on July 23, 2026. The point isn't criticism — it's to show exactly where the paying guest hits a wall.

A few items in this plan are drawn from the site as of July 22 and should be reconfirmed against what's live before you act — standing promotions and a menu pricing typo among them, since promotional content changes week to week.

G · Your platform — keep the engine, replace the wrapper

We looked under the hood. The good news: the hard, expensive part is already best-in-class and already yours. The gap is only the layer wrapped around it.

You're paying for a great commerce engine and letting a free theme waste it. The fix isn't to replace the engine — it's to replace the wrapper.

The build: a custom site you run yourself

The recommended path pairs a fully custom design — the one in this demo — with an editor as simple as the site builders you already know, sitting on top of the Commerce7 you already have.

• Your commerce doesn't move. Club joins, shop orders, gift cards, and table reservations keep running through Commerce7 — same members, same inventory, same checkout, same deposits. Nothing about it changes.
• The design stays locked and on-brand. You edit content through a click-to-type editor; you can't accidentally break the layout or the look.
• One fewer thing to maintain. The WordPress theme and its upkeep go away.

When it's built, it's yours to run. The content is yours to change any day, from any browser, with no code and no phone calls.

H · Investment & timeline

The design, the words, and the structure are already done — that's what this demo is. What's left is building it in Webflow and connecting your Commerce7. Because the creative work is finished, this is a focused build, not a project from scratch.

The build — one time

The full site in this demo, every page, built custom in Webflow, with your Commerce7 club, shop, and reservations embedded and styled to match — plus a short training session so you can run it yourself.

What it costs to keep running

Net monthly is about what you pay today — for a site you can actually update yourself.

Timeline — about 2 to 4 weeks

The design and the words are already done, so this is a focused build. The time that remains goes into two things a demo skips: making every page editable by you in Webflow, and wiring it to your live Commerce7 without disrupting the store — the one part whose length depends on your current Commerce7 setup.

Faster if photos and content are ready. If you'd like the ideal golden-hour lakefront photos taken first, add about a week for the shoot.

One midweek buyout, or a handful of new club members, covers the build inside the first season — and everything after it is upside.

Club memberships and event bookings are recurring revenue that compounds quarter over quarter. The site isn't a cost line; it's the machine that captures them. This is the plainest money in the whole plan.