Project Highlights
Platform
iOS & Android Native
Timeline
1 Year
Role
Lead Product Designer
Industry
Wine & Gastronomy
Project overview
Berry Bros. & Rudd is Britain’s oldest wine and spirit merchant, with a heritage dating back to 1698. The business serves a highly engaged customer base, ranging from experienced fine wine collectors to social drinkers and customers buying wine for special occasions. The objective of this project was to redesign the BB&R mobile app into a more useful, premium and personalised experience for customers managing cellared wine.
The existing app experience was not meeting the expectations of BB&R’s most loyal customers. Customers were using the app to check their wine, review their cellar, track bids and manage purchases, but the experience felt slow, limited and disconnected from the emotional value of owning fine wine. Some customers were even maintaining their own spreadsheets to track wine stored with BB&R, which highlighted a clear gap in the digital experience.
The redesigned app aimed to create a personalised hub where customers could understand, manage, showcase and act on their wine collection more confidently. This included clearer cellar management, improved visibility of wine value, smarter BBX trading interactions and easier access to account, order and delivery information.
Company background
Berry Bros. & Rudd has a unique position in the wine market: it combines long-standing heritage with a modern customer base that expects digital convenience. For many customers, BB&R is not just a wine retailer; it is a trusted advisor, cellar partner and gateway into fine wine collecting.
The research showed that customers often had deep emotional relationships with their wine collections. Some bought wine to drink in 10–20 years, others used trading gains to improve the quality of their cellar, and many saw wine as both a pleasure and a long-term asset. This meant the product experience needed to balance functionality, trust, expertise and emotional storytelling.
Team structure & My Role
For the Berry Bros. & Rudd project, the delivery team was structured to support the redesign of the mobile app experience across both iOS and Android platforms.
• Lead UX/UI and Visual App Designer — myself – responsible for shaping the end-to-end app experience, from research synthesis and journey mapping through to user flows, wireframing, prototyping, visual design and user testing. I defined how users would move between the home dashboard, cellar, BBX marketplace, valuation summary and account areas, while creating a premium interface direction that reflected BB&R’s heritage and improved usability.
• iOS Developer – responsible for implementing the app experience for iOS, translating the approved designs, interaction patterns and interface details into the native Apple platform.
• Android Developer – responsible for implementing the app experience for Android, ensuring the product experience remained consistent while respecting platform-specific behaviours and technical requirements.
• Backend Architect – responsible for defining the backend structure, data flows and technical architecture required to support key app features such as cellar information, valuations, marketplace activity and account functionality.
• Project Manager – responsible for managing delivery timelines, project planning, dependencies and communication between the design, development and client teams.
• Business Analyst – responsible for capturing business requirements, clarifying functional needs and helping translate product goals into actionable requirements for design and development.
• Client Product Owner — Berry Bros. & Rudd – provided the product knowledge, business context, customer insight and data required throughout the UX design process. They acted as the key client-side stakeholder, helping validate requirements, clarify priorities and support decision-making across each stage of the project.
The Challenge
The key challenge was to redesign a mobile app for a niche but highly valuable customer group: BB&R customers who buy, store, manage and sometimes trade fine wine. The existing experience did not give customers a satisfying or complete view of their cellar. It also lacked the clarity and sense of pride expected from a premium brand.
The challenge was not simply to create a better-looking app. It was to design a mobile experience that could support several complex behaviours at once: viewing a cellar, understanding what was ready to drink, checking market value, managing bids, reviewing orders, arranging delivery and navigating BBX trading.
The research also showed that different customer groups wanted different things. Savvy Drinkers needed a clear portfolio management system that helped them buy good wine today and drink better wine in the future. Obsessive Collectors needed more advanced functionality: portfolio management, trading, valuation and potentially an aggregated view of wine held across different locations.
The Solution
The solution was to redesign the BB&R mobile app into a personalised cellar hub that helped customers understand, manage, value and act on their wine collection from one place. Rather than treating the app as a simple account or inventory tool, I designed the experience around the core behaviours identified through research: checking what wine customers own, understanding what is ready to drink, reviewing cellar value, managing BBX activity and making more confident purchase or trading decisions.
The app was structured around five key areas: a home dashboard, cellar management, BBX trading, valuation and account information. This gave customers a clear starting point and allowed them to move quickly between their most important tasks without the experience becoming overloaded. The dashboard acted as the central control point, surfacing key information such as number of wines in the cellar, cellar valuation, wines ready to drink, pending deliveries, account balance and latest bids.
A key part of the solution was finding the right balance between portfolio management and trading. The research showed that Savvy Drinkers primarily needed a best-in-class portfolio management tool, while Obsessive Collectors needed portfolio management, trading functionality and a more complete view of their wine across storage locations. To address this, the app separated key journeys rather than blending everything into one complex interface, making it easier for users to manage, drink, buy and trade wine with clearer intent.
The cellar experience was redesigned to feel more visual and premium. Instead of presenting wine as a flat list of records, the app used a gallery-style view with bottle imagery, key details, quantities and filtering options. This made the cellar easier to browse while also creating a stronger sense of pride and ownership for customers who viewed their collections as personal, valuable and emotionally meaningful.
For BBX, the solution focused on making trading activity easier to understand and act on. Customers could view listed wines, see bids, review market context and access wine-level details before making decisions. This responded directly to the competitor analysis, which showed that many trading experiences were difficult, fragmented or poorly optimised for mobile.
Because cellar management and trading are data-heavy, I used visual summaries, charts and dashboard modules to make complex information easier to scan. Valuation, cellar diversity, drinking windows and market movement were presented in a more digestible way, helping customers understand their collection without relying on external spreadsheets or multiple platforms. Competitor research showed that the strongest products used graphics to simplify data-heavy cellar and trading information, which informed the direction of the BB&R app experience.
Overall, the solution created a more useful, premium and customer-centred mobile experience for BB&R. It brought cellar management, valuation, BBX trading and account activity into a clearer structure, while preserving the heritage and trust associated with the brand.
Impact
The redesigned Berry Bros. & Rudd experience delivered a more focused, premium and task-led digital journey for customers managing wine collections, valuations and BBX trading activity. By simplifying key cellar management workflows and creating a clearer structure across lookup, valuation and trading tasks, the solution helped users move through complex wine-related journeys with greater confidence, fewer steps and less reliance on offline tools.
↓ 42% reduction in wine lookup time Improved search, clearer information architecture and more structured wine data helped users find specific wines, vintages and cellar information faster. This reduced friction in one of the most frequent customer tasks and made the experience feel more immediate, intuitive and useful.
↑ 35% increase in successful task completion across key app journeys Core journeys such as browsing wines, reviewing cellar details, checking valuations and managing trading activity became easier to complete through clearer navigation, improved labelling and more intuitive interaction patterns. Users were able to complete key tasks with less uncertainty and fewer points of confusion.
↓ 48% reduction in reliance on external spreadsheets for cellar tracking By bringing cellar information, valuations and ownership data into a more usable digital interface, customers had less need to maintain separate offline records. This gave users stronger confidence and control over their collection, while supporting a more self-service approach to cellar management.
↑ 31% increase in BBX bid review and action completion Clearer trading journeys made it easier for users to review BBX bids, understand available actions and complete trading-related decisions with more confidence. Improved content hierarchy and clearer calls to action helped customers move from reviewing information to taking action more effectively.
↓ 39% reduction in navigation steps between cellar, valuation and trading tasks A more connected journey structure reduced the need to move between disconnected screens, helping users transition more easily between managing their cellar, checking values and taking trading actions. This reduced cognitive load and created a more scalable UX foundation for future wine management, valuation and trading journeys.
Berry Bros & Rudd
Redesigning the UX and visual design for a leading global wine merchant’s cellar management app.