Social Design House

08/11/2026

Five generations of winemaking in the south of France. Four websites. One unified digital story.

Famille Gassier farms the Costières de Nîmes, the southernmost stretch of the Rhône Valley. Michel Gassier came home from a marketing career in the States in the early 90s to take over from his father, then built Domaine Gassier from the ground up with his wife Tina. Their daughter Isabel now works the estate as the fifth generation. They were also the first vineyard in France to earn regenerative certification from A Greener World.

We built them a WordPress multisite that holds four brands together without flattening any of them.

▪️Famille Gassier as the parent site
▪️Château de Nages, Domaine Gassier, and Halos de Jupiter, each with its own identity and look
▪️Individual pages for every wine, with tasting notes, terroir, and vintage detail
▪️Featured wine modules that let them spotlight new releases across brands
▪️A press and trade library with tech sheets, bottle shots, labels, and press books
▪️English and French versions of every site
▪️Estate journals for harvest reports and notes from the vineyard

Halos de Jupiter was the one we had the most fun with. Michel started it in 2007 as a tribute to Grenache, and the brand maps the Rhône onto the solar system. Châteauneuf-du-Pape is Jupiter. Gigondas, Vacqueyras, Côtes du Rhône, and Costières de Nîmes are the four moons Galileo found.

We’ve been supporting these sites for years now, along with press releases, sales sheets, and the deeper brand storytelling.

A dream project, and one of the feathers in our cap.

08/04/2026

CASE STUDY | Domaines Albert Bichot - A historic French winery finding a new US home online and in stores.

Albert Bichot USA was founded in 2007 by Alberic Bichot as the US home for the historic French winery, Domaines Albert Bichot. Albert Bichot USA needed its own unique web presence with both a visual and informational nod to its parent company. The new site would also need to serve multi-faceted purposes of showcasing the products of Domaines Albert Bichot, attracting other producers interested in selling their products in the US, and serving as an educational resource for tradespeople.

How SDH Helped:

✅ Worked closely with the marketing team to craft a story that is a nod to the AB roots but defines a new era for the company
✅ Designed the site around the classic brand elements while adding our own spin
✅ Integrated the Wordpress CMS to allow the AB team to make content updates from product to press
✅ Turn-key hosting service and CDN setup and maintenance
✅ Searchable ratings and reviews managed by the AB team
✅ Global site search with advanced admin statistics
✅ CMS powered visual distributor map

By introducing strong visual details and impactful headlines, we were able to establish a connection to Albert Bichot USA’s French forefathers while also setting it apart as an essential part of the company’s future. With a focus on clear calls to action, informational hierarchies, and a thoughtful database, the new website speaks clearly to all of its audience: potential producers, vendors, wholesalers, restaurateurs, and more.

See the full case study at socialdesign.house/albert-bichot

08/03/2026

The deliverable is what you see. The relationship is what you remember 🤝

What we hear most from clients isn't about the final files. It's about the calls returned, the obstacles handled without drama, the process itself. That's the reason people come back!

Find out how we keep them coming back at https://www.socialdesignhouse.com/

07/31/2026

European Cellars website is aging like fine wine. A 10 year partnership has defined European Cellars as the gold standard in wine importer websites.

Eric Solomon founded the company here in Charlotte in 1990 and built one of the most respected import portfolios in the country. Robert Parker’s Wine Personality of the Year, Food & Wine’s Importer of the Year, six James Beard semifinalist nods.

What we built:
✅ Custom WordPress backend, 450+ individual wines with 70+ related producers
✅ Dyanmic and powerful filtering by terroir, region, wine type, portfolio, and farming practice
✅ 2,000+ ratings and press tied back to every wine and producer
✅ Import and export so their team runs the portfolio without calling us
✅ Individual content pages for every wine and producer, which is why they own search for appellations most importers never touch

We are proud to have supported the EC team over the years and are always impressed by the immense knowledge and care they put into their craft.

https://www.socialdesignhouse.com/industry/beer-wine

07/28/2026

A law written in 1967 for wiretapped phone calls is now being used to sue websites over Google Analytics 😬

That's the strange part of C**A lawsuits happening right now. If your tracking tools collect data before a visitor clicks "accept," some courts are treating that the same as recording someone without consent. Statutory damages start at $5,000 per violation, and you don't need to operate in California for it to reach you.

The fix isn't complicated. Check whether your tracking fires before consent. If it does, fix the setup or drop the tools that require consent in the first place. We wrote up exactly how to test your own site in a few minutes, plus what a cookieless analytics setup looks like if you'd rather sidestep the issue entirely.

Full breakdown ➡️ https://www.socialdesignhouse.com/resource/is-your-website-breaking-cipa-cookie-consent-rules-every-business-should-know

07/21/2026

Good wine sells itself at the tasting counter. Everywhere else, it needs some help. That's where branding, web, and marketing come in, and it's where we've spent the last 15+ years working with breweries, wineries, and beverage brands.

We've spent 15+ years working with breweries, wineries, and beverage brands, including Domaines Albert Bichot, European Cellars, and Ekos, on the identity, web, and marketing work that turns "we make something good" into "here's why you should care." Tasting notes that are actually easy to find. Websites that do more than exist. A brand voice that reads as confident instead of generic.

Good beverage branding is the part people don't notice, because it's doing its job quietly in the background while the product gets the credit.

See more of what we can do at https://www.socialdesignhouse.com/industry/beer-wine

06/25/2026

CORE Culinary Academy puts young people ages 11 to 18 in a working kitchen alongside an executive chef for six weeks. What they learn goes well beyond knife skills.

SDH built the brand identity for CCA, a Mason Legacy for Learning program, around that idea. Warm, grounded, and serious about what it stands for.

06/22/2026

Is the traditional SaaS era winding down? In this episode of Inside Scoop, our Founder & Creative Director, Ben Visser is joined by our Operations Lead, Chelsea Pagliuca to discuss their latest experiment: Vibe Coding.

Discover how a non-technical project manager was able to spend ~65 hours over 4 weeks using AI tools like Claude and Lovable to build a customized internal project management system from scratch—effectively replacing massive external software.

We dive deep into:
🔺 What "Vibe Coding" actually is and how it empowers non-developers.
🔺 The real costs behind building your own tools (credits, hours, and technical debt).
🔺 Moving away from clunky SaaS systems to a single source of truth.
🔺 The Jevons Paradox: Why AI won't take our jobs, but will change how we work.

🎧 Listen to the full episode here:

Is the traditional SaaS era winding down? In this episode of Inside...

06/18/2026

Our Project & Ops Lead, Chelsea, had never heard of Supabase six months ago. She's now the lead architect of Swirl, SDH's fully custom agency management platform, built on Lovable.

Project management, time tracking, a client portal, proposals, CRM, EOS tools, meeting intelligence, and integrations with Google Workspace and Slack. All shaped around how an 8-person studio actually runs, not how a broad-market SaaS product assumes it does.

The honest numbers: $788.85 in Lovable credits and 65+ hours of Chelsea's time. A beta that's actively running, still being built, and already replacing tools we were paying for and half-using.

The argument for building your own software used to be reserved for teams with engineering departments. That math has changed. The gap between "has a dev team" and "can build software" has never been smaller, and Swirl is proof.

Full breakdown at
https://www.socialdesignhouse.com/resource/meet-swirl-our-vibe-coded-agency-management-app-built-on-lovable

06/17/2026

Say hello to Swirl! 🍦✨

We’re excited to give you a behind-the-scenes look at Swirl, our custom-built agency management hub created on Lovable! 🚀

We designed Swirl around our team’s actual workflows to completely replace fragmented tools. From seamless Google integrations and real-time project budgeting to tracking our EOS® metrics and managing our entire client pipeline, Swirl brings everything into one unified, scannable dashboard. No more endless digging for tasks or disjointed spreadsheets—just pure, streamlined efficiency.

Watch the full walkthrough to see how we keep our agency organized, motivated, and moving forward! 💻👇