Cienfuegos Membership Site

Cienfuegos is a members-only tequila club: one release at a time, bottled in custom ceramic and numbered by hand against a thousand-count run. Members never find it in a store, so the bottle arrives as an object before it is ever a drink, and the packaging carries the entire brand argument on its own.

Membership is the product. A Bottle Right is a seat license held in perpetuity, tradeable between members, and the club had no system that could issue one, track it, or forfeit it. Every off-the-shelf answer was a storefront, and a storefront treats a member like a shopper. The job was a site that behaves like a club: invite-only at the door, and a working ledger behind it.

Designed the front door to withhold rather than sell, one wordmark on ember and no product grid, because the brand's whole argument is that you cannot buy your way in from a homepage. Built three separate entries behind it, a public waitlist, an invite-token bypass for founder-issued members, and a member dashboard, so the same site serves a stranger and a seat holder without either seeing the other's version. Wrote the bottle-rights engine into the build, including forfeiture, so the rules of the club are enforced by the site instead of by the founder's memory. Designed and shipped in code on a headless stack, direction through deployment.

Homepage withholds: wordmark on ember, no product grid. Three flows off one build: waitlist, invite-token bypass, member dashboard. Bottle-rights ledger with a forfeiture engine, enforced in code. Headless Next.js with Shopify for commerce and Resend for member mail. Admin side covers releases, members, invites, and sales.