Leader Spotlight: Unifying two halves of digital brand experience, with Jessyca Frederick
Jessyca Frederick is Director of Digital Product at Wine Enthusiast, leading strategy, UX, and analytics to unify the brand’s media and ecommerce experiences. Previously, she held senior roles at WineClubReviews.net, ThisNext, Edmunds.com, and Shopzilla, where she focused on digital product, SEO, and user experience.
In our conversation, Jessyca shares the outcomes and learnings from a large digital transformation initiative that involved integrating Wine Enthusiast’s media and ecommerce divisions into one cohesive site. She reflects on the challenges her teams faced and discusses the qualitative and quantitative signals they monitor to determine if digital experiences, like this one, meet user and revenue expectations.
The unification project and its business outcomes
Wine Enthusiast went through a significant digital initiative in 2023, bringing media and commerce onto a single site. Can you share a little background on the company and what drove the decision to unify those experiences?
Wine Enthusiast was founded by Adam and Sybil Strum in 1979 as a print catalog. At that time, it was very difficult to find even a corkscrew or a decanter in the U.S. They were both wine lovers, and with the catalog, they hoped to bring wine-related products to more people. A few years later, they expanded into publishing with Wine Enthusiast magazine.
While they were under one brand, the two divisions had separate goals and operated alongside each other. When the internet came along, each division created its own website. Over time, we realized that many catalog customers didn’t know about the magazine, and many readers of Wine Enthusiast's ratings and content weren’t aware of the catalog.
The goal behind the transformation project, which we have come to call our “Unification” internally, was to be able to expose these gaps and introduce each customer segment to the rest of the brand. The primary business objective was to say, "If you’re buying these products, you might also enjoy reading this content. And if you like reading this content, you might also want to buy these products."
For clarification, I joined the company in May 2024 as an SEO consultant, about 11 months after Wine Enthusiast launched Unification. I transitioned to my current digital product role in November 2024. So while I didn't work on the unification initiative, managing its outcomes is my daily reality.
How did the business objectives for the unification translate to specific outcomes, like UX goals, that the company aimed to deliver?
One of the primary goals of the initiative was to leverage our brand expertise for all of our customers at every stage of the journey. A great example is the wine fridge. Say you’re in the market for a wine fridge, but don’t feel confident about making the purchase. We can provide on-the-spot information to help you make an informed decision, as we have articles on deciding whether you need a wine fridge and which one is right for you.
The flip side of that also applies. If you’re reading content about wine collecting and starting to realize you might need a fridge, we can show you relevant products. That was a standard example of what drove the decision to bring the two sites together.
Another specific UX goal was ease of navigation. In my research, I haven’t found many media companies that have a robust commerce business. One challenge was how to expose users to both types of content in a single navigation. Normally, on a storefront, you see commerce categories; on a media site, you see editorial categories. We had to combine them into one global header. That was a significant UX challenge, and it came with technical challenges too.
Bringing systems thinking and SEO background to product
How does your background in building out full systems impact and drive the product decisions at Wine Enthusiast?
I started building websites in 1998 when HTML was pretty much all we had. Since then, I’ve kept up with modern web technology, including writing my own code.
When user experience design and research became popular,I jumped into that at Shopzilla to learn more about how technical systems impact user experience. That was when I really understood that if you don’t think about the user first, you might not build the right thing.
I also have design expertise, along with hands-on experience with CSS, publishing, images, SEO, and optimization. Whenever a new project comes our way, or I initiate one, I look at the whole picture. What are the business goals? What are the user goals? Do these things align? Sometimes they don't. What technology do we have available to build this? Is this going to be a problem for SEO? For crawling?
Crawling is really the thing of the moment right now, with both LLMs and traditional bots crawling content. This holistic view helps ensure that when we ship products, they aren’t missing a piece. For example, every product goes out with analytics on it now. Previously, the focus was on getting things out quickly, and tracking was not always built into the specifications. Then, three months later, someone would ask, "How is this performing?" and we wouldn’t have the answer because we didn't build the analytics.
Things like that — thinking from top to bottom, working with the QA team to develop a test plan to cover the obscure or edge cases — and having that 10,000-foot view into all the pieces that bring a product to life has been really useful.
What role did internal linking, search behavior, and taxonomy restructuring play in making the unified site perform well for SEO and UX?
The SEO side of the unification is an interesting story and a lesson. There is a best-practices way to do an SEO migration; SEOs have codified it. We didn't do it that way, but we made other decisions that turned out to be really good.
For example, on the media site, the old URL structure was date-based, which is common for publishers, and WordPress is set up to follow this structure by default. When we moved the site, we built a category taxonomy and rewrote all URLs to fit the categories, rather than keeping the date structure. If I were advising at the time, I would have recommended leaving the URLs as they were and then figuring out another way to add the categorization. But rewriting the URLs worked out great. Now, different pieces of content relate to each other in ways they did not before; it’s no longer chronological. When bots recrawled the site following the URL structure change, they discovered those relationships and attributed topical value to each individual piece — and that is good SEO.
We also introduced two new taxonomies, which are domain-specific: grape varieties and wine regions. This provides us with more flexibility to connect content. For example, we can connect an article about a winery in Chile that produces Chardonnay to another piece about Chardonnay and a third article about Chile. That thematic domain expertise builds topical authority.
What signals, either qualitative or quantitative, do you monitor to evaluate whether this combined experience continues to deliver for both users and revenue goals?
We don’t use an out-of-the-box metric; we use one that we created and termed the content-commerce overlap. It looks very closely at the behavior of customers who start out as readers and become paying customers, and vice versa. The company monitors that metric carefully, and we've been happy to see the chart tracking these metrics going up and to the right. That validates the hypothesis that we were looking to prove with unification.
As a product manager, I also think deeply about customer experience and customer journey. We have media, we have commerce, and within media, we also have our ratings business, which is also a critical component of our brand and how we interact with both customers and the industry. If I come to the site to learn something, to check whether a wine I want to buy scored well, or to buy some new wine glasses or a wine refrigerator, my task at hand is different — but my underlying interest in wine is the same.
I also look at overlaps between those segments. For example, are ratings readers interested in editorial content? Are they interested in the storefront? And vice versa. That's the evolution of that original content commerce overlap metric — getting a more fine-grained understanding of cross-interest and behavior.
Challenges and hard-won lessons
What technical challenges did Wine Enthusiast face during the unification process, and what learnings would you share with companies doing something similar?
In retrospect, it's easy to pinpoint things we might have done differently. One of the biggest challenges was that it was a very ambitious project. We merged our media property, Wine Enthusiast magazine, and our ecommerce property into one site. At the same time, we re-platformed our ecommerce property and redesigned everything. This was a total redesign, bringing both technologies together and swapping out one of the major components. That created a lot of time pressure on developers.
The lesson here is that by taking on too much at once, a residual technical debt was inadvertently created. Now, every time we work on something that we previously didn't have a chance to finish, it adds extra time.
Another big challenge was our ERP, or enterprise resource planning system, where our finance, inventory, order management, customer records, and sales records live. Our ecommerce platform was originally part of our ERP, and rethinking a different format was not applied when moving the ecommerce property to an external platform. Instead, we just applied the same rule set. This resulted in a lot of mapping and translating, instead of rebuilding natively in the new platform.
While this has proven to be challenging, we're working through solutions that enable us to easily set up items and get products into the storefront. The hard part, when you're planning a project like this, is contextualizing the impact of a bandage versus dedicating the time to rebuild it the right way from the beginning, in the most flexible way. Sometimes you don't have the luxury of that time, so you have to go a different route.
Have you established a cadence for addressing your technical debt?
This is one of the big things I wanted to take on when I moved from the SEO role into digital product: help eliminate the technical debt. I've approached it from two perspectives. First, anytime we encounter something that could be running better, it gets a ticket and gets prioritized accordingly. Second, whenever we touch a product, we fix any associated technical debt as part of the project. It's kind of luxurious that I get to do that — that our leadership has given me the freedom to take this approach.
At a lot of companies, if you have a fixed amount of time to build a thing, you might need to put off addressing the technical debt. We want to build a more stable and agile environment for upcoming projects, so taking care of the technical debt is something we're baking into the requirements.
Outcomes, cross-divisional wins, and E-E-A-T
What key outcomes or wins have you seen from the unification initiative — both immediate and over time? And how did factors like expertise and authority play into those results?
The biggest early win of combining the content and ecommerce into one site was a large SEO lift. The existing authority of the ecommerce site helped the media, and the existing expertise of the media helped the ecommerce. That was evident pretty much immediately.
Longer term, one of my favorite outcomes is that this very mature business, which has two different divisions that were operating separately, now works together on the same brand goals. It’s always been one brand, but the effort of making sure that customers are aware of all we do has also led us to think across divisions in our day-to-day work.
My role contributes to that, because it’s my job to gather business requirements and make sure whatever we're building works across teams and systems. But now, that kind of cross-divisional collaboration is happening throughout the organization, which is really great.
Another outcome came about eight months ago when I created an initiative system to support that shift. The initiatives are our broader business goals, things like strengthening the brand, growing revenue, or saving money. When projects compete in the normal prioritization process, we can use our content-commerce overlap metric to compare, say, two projects that could both help us grow our brand, versus weighing a brand project against a revenue project. It allows us to prioritize all the different facets of the business and all the components that make a business grow, rather than just division-specific goals.
And yes, SEO frameworks like Google’s E-E-A-T played a role. Of the different criteria — experience, expertise, authority, and trust — expertise was the biggest driver. The brand is very mature; it existed before the internet. Pre-internet brands have a certain built-in authority and trust. They built out early Wikipedia pages, which is largely what early search engine algorithms were based on.
Authority is harder to hold onto now, with more companies publishing programmatic or automated content and more voices competing for mentions. We still own the space in pretty much every playground we play in, but it's harder to hold onto the authority. Expertise, though, was really the biggest lift. Before, we had high-quality content on one topic here and another there. Now, we can connect the dots and say, "These two things are related." That connection is what helps us demonstrate expertise.
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