Century Cellars
Century Cellars had a WooCommerce store with a broken search, dead sliders and a checkout nobody liked. We fixed it, carried it through a rebrand to Century Wines and ran it as the retailer's web team for three years.
A WooCommerce store inherited in poor shape in 2019, stabilised, rebuilt around how people shop for wine and relaunched as centurywines.com.sg, with Chillybin as the web team until 2022.
What we were solving
Century Wines & Spirits is a Singapore wine and spirits retailer with shops and an online store. In 2019 it traded online as Century Cellars, on a WooCommerce site holding the business back. Search returned an error. The homepage was a stack of sliders with broken links. Products were missing images, titles and descriptions. The checkout asked for more than it needed and the theme had display bugs throughout.
Priyanka Natarajan and IT manager Abdul Aziz did not want a new site. They wanted the one they had to work, and a partner who kept improving it. Their wish list ran to more than twenty items, from plugin updates to Google Ads landing pages and a domain change. The last line was the real one: a long-term relationship where the agency came to them with ideas.
Priyanka asked for a short first block of work "to see how we work together before committing to a longer term relationship". Success meant earning the second block.
How we tackled it
Stabilise first
The first engagement was a fixed block of hours and a technical audit. We moved the site to managed hosting at WP Engine with a staging server, so changes could be tested before they touched a live store. Then we worked down the list: search fixed, sliders removed, broken links cleared, theme bugs patched, every product checked for an image, title and description. The homepage was reworked to lead with products, and the checkout cut back to what the business needed to fulfil an order.
Rebuild navigation around how people buy wine
A wine store lives or dies on its menu. We built a mega menu that organises the catalogue by country and region, by varietal, and by type (wine, champagne, whisky, gin, rum and the rest). The client supplied the full list of grape varieties, so a shopper can reach a Barossa Shiraz or a Japanese whisky in two clicks. The new categorisation went live in September 2021 after testing with the Century Wines team.
Run it like a web team, not a help desk
In 2020 the business moved from Century Cellars to Century Wines. We handled the switch to centurywines.com.sg, with a new logo, DNS, SSL and redirects, and the store did not go dark. From 2020 to 2022 we were the retailer's web team on a monthly care plan. We wrote a marketing and content strategy covering SEO, shopping feeds, abandoned-cart email and a wine club idea, set up Google Merchant Center, and produced monthly WooCommerce reports so the owners could see new customers, top products and top categories.
What we delivered
Century Wines now runs its online store in-house. By the end of 2021 the store worked the way a wine shop should: findable products, a clean checkout, a menu built around country, grape and type, and reporting the owners could act on. The monthly reports through late 2021 and early 2022 show steady trade and new customers every month.
Our engagement ran from October 2019 to May 2022, when the client brought the work in-house and we handed over with a full Website Owner's Manual. The store kept running on the WooCommerce build for several years afterwards.
What we learned
Sometimes the right first job is to fix what is broken. Century Wines did not need a redesign pitch in 2019. It needed search that worked and a homepage without dead links. Doing that well, inside a fixed block of hours, turned a trial into a three-year relationship.
Navigation is the product in a large catalogue. The mega menu by country, varietal and type did more for the store than any visual change, because it matched how the owners and their customers already talked about wine.
