Crafted Demand is built around a growing need for genuine human recommendation and useful content as generic AI content multiplies. Crafted Pour is the first live vertical: a working proof of how earned expertise can become a product experience.
The Challenge
Niche liquor brands struggled with fractured digital distribution and had no way to acquire customers through earned content. They lacked the engineering resources to build modern, high-converting retail discovery tools that performed well on search, and entirely lacked an authentic content marketing strategy.
The Approach
I conceived, directed development of, and shipped a comprehensive B2B marketing ecosystem. The consumer-facing platform (craftedpour.com + iOS/Android apps) serves as the organic discovery engine, featuring 5,800+ original cocktail recipes with localized Drizly/ReserveBar checkout. I created the Tastemaker Program (a curated network of 600+ creators, from bartenders to spirit educators) to produce authentic branded content. After the move to server-rendered, SEO-optimized recipe pages, organic search traffic in Q4 2024 was 4x Q4 2023. The embeddable Vue 3 widget lets brands drop a single line of code onto their sites to surface local inventory data and recipe pairings with server-side rendering for crawlability. WordPress plugin built; Shopify plugin in progress.
Impact
The platform served over 1.5M interactive widget views. Across 56 valid product pages, pages with the widget rose 1.4% versus their prior period while comparison pages fell 35.5%, a 57.3% relative difference in sales performance. This observational comparison does not establish causation. Presented at the DISCUS Innovation Showcase (Oct 2024). The full stack spans five codebases: Next.js 14 (Vercel), Vue 3 widget (Firebase Hosting), Firebase Cloud Functions (Node 20), React/FireCMS admin CMS, and Flutter mobile app.
