£2m
Annual CRM opportunity
01 Case Study
Waitrose Cellar
Realising a £2m CRM opportunity through MVP redefinition
How I helped redefine the account strategy, leverage existing Waitrose infrastructure and launch faster — reducing delivery effort by over 50% while unlocking the next most requested customer experience.
- Role
- Senior Product Designer
- Duration
- Q1–Q2 2025
- Team
- Product, Engineering, Research, Marketing
- Focus areas
- Product StrategyCustomer AccountsRoadmap PrioritisationDelivery OptimisationLoyalty & CRM
02 Opportunity
Unlocking customer value.
Waitrose Cellar had identified a significant commercial opportunity. Customers purchasing through Cellar remained largely anonymous, limiting CRM activity, personalisation and loyalty initiatives.
The business estimated that enabling customer identification could unlock approximately £2m annually through improved engagement and repeat purchasing.
CSAT
Customer satisfaction improvement focus
Anonymous
Limited personalisation without customer ID
Loyalty
Future retention and repeat purchase growth
03 Problem
Why the original approach was not enough.
While the business identified a £2m CRM opportunity through customer identification, the proposed solution required building a dedicated Cellar account platform from scratch.
This included registration, sign in, account management and future loyalty functionality.
For a relatively small product and engineering team, this represented a significant investment and was estimated to take over a year before customers received meaningful value.
At the same time, customer research revealed something important.
Customers rarely talked about registration itself.
Instead, they consistently asked for:
Original roadmap
- Registration
- Sign in
- Account management
- Preferences
- Loyalty capabilities
Estimated delivery
12+ months
Engineering effort
High engineering effort
What customers wanted
- Access to previous orders
- Easier repeat purchasing
- Better continuity between Waitrose and Cellar
- More personalised experiences
This created tension between business goals and customer needs. The proposed roadmap would achieve the business objective, but it would delay customer value for more than a year.
Business need
Customer identification
Customer need
Order history and repeat purchasing
“The experience worked for customers who already knew what they wanted, but did little to support discovery, confidence or repeat purchasing.”
04 Reframe
Reframing the problem
The challenge was not simply reducing delivery effort.
The challenge was ensuring that engineering investment created customer value as quickly as possible.
The original roadmap focused on building account infrastructure. However, customer research suggested that account creation itself was not the primary problem customers were trying to solve.
Customers wanted easier access to previous purchases, faster repeat ordering and a more connected experience.
Before
How do we build a Waitrose Cellar account platform?
After
How do we identify customers and unlock loyalty as quickly as possible?
That shift fundamentally changed the solution. By leveraging existing Waitrose authentication, we could achieve the business objective while creating enough capacity to invest in higher-value customer experiences within the same roadmap cycle.
05 Strategy
The Strategy.
Reusing existing infrastructure
Rather than creating a dedicated Cellar account ecosystem, I proposed leveraging the existing Waitrose authentication platform.
Customer flow
- Customer visits Cellar
- Select Sign In
- Authenticate using Waitrose account
- Automatically return to Cellar
- Customer ID linked to future purchases
Included
- Shared authentication
- Existing Waitrose credentials
- Customer ID sharing
- Automatic return to Cellar
Deferred
- Full account management
- Marketing preferences
- Saved payment methods
- Advanced account functionality
Trade-off
We deliberately sacrificed short-term flexibility in favour of faster delivery and earlier customer value.
- Faster delivery
- Reduced engineering effort
- Shared customer identity
- Faster CRM value
- Consistent customer experience
06 Rationale
Why existing infrastructure made sense.
Existing customer accounts
Many customers already had Waitrose accounts, reducing the need to create a separate authentication ecosystem.
Shared ecosystem
Waitrose Cellar operated within the wider Waitrose experience, making shared authentication a natural extension of the platform.
Same outcome, less effort
Customer identification could be achieved without building a standalone account system from scratch.
The goal was not to build the perfect technical solution. The goal was to achieve the same business outcome while preserving capacity for customer-facing improvements.
07 Prioritisation
Why order history became the next priority.
One of the strongest themes emerging from customer feedback was the need for easier access to previous purchases.
Customers wanted to revisit wines they had already bought, reorder favourites and maintain continuity between purchases.
By reducing the scope of the account programme, we created enough capacity within the roadmap to begin investing in Order History during the same year.
This transformed the initiative from a purely business-led programme into one that balanced commercial objectives with direct customer value.
Customer identificationOrder historyRepeat purchasingLoyalty
08 Outcome
Redirecting investment toward customer value.
The success of the initiative was not simply reducing delivery effort.
It was enabling the team to achieve the business objective while creating space to solve the customer problems that surfaced most frequently through research.
By reusing existing Waitrose infrastructure, we accelerated access to customer identification, preserved the CRM opportunity and redirected investment toward experiences customers actively wanted.
£2m
CRM opportunity preserved
50%+
Reduction in delivery effort
1
Shared customer identity across Waitrose and Cellar
Next priority unlocked
Order History and loyalty experiences