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A Membership Platform for Craft Beverage Businesses

How SEQTEK became a Kansas City agency’s sole technology partner, modernized its platform, and took a new product from idea to paying customers.

Illustration of a craft brewery tasting room in late afternoon light, a wooden bar with a row of brass tap handles

  • 15 minreleases that used to take a full day

  • 50%less time to set up a new customer

  • 15 to 20customers live on one shared platform

  • 1codebase serving every brand

The client

Our client is a full-service marketing, software, and digital technology solutions agency based in Kansas City, Missouri. Among its offerings, it builds digital coupon, loyalty, and membership programs for businesses, delivered through white-label websites and apps. Its team is strong on business and operations, but it has no in-house development team, so it relies on outside technology partners to build and run its platforms. SEQTEK has supported the agency in different ways for more than a decade, starting with cloud hosting on Amazon Web Services.

The problem

The agency saw an opening: breweries, wineries, and distilleries had built tasting rooms to sell directly to customers, but few loyalty or membership apps were designed for them. A monthly membership could give a single-location brewery predictable revenue. For example, 50 members at $50 a month brings in $2,500 every month before anyone walks in the door.

To get there, the agency wanted to repurpose one of its existing apps, but the foundation stood in the way:

  • Aging code: Parts of the platform dated back to 2008 and ran on frameworks several versions out of date.
  • Manual, risky releases: With no automated deployment, a single production release could take a full day, with every step done by hand and open to human error.
  • A painful admin experience: Setting up a new customer meant entering every membership and offer twice, once as “local” and once as “national,” in a strict order that broke if anything was out of place.
  • A vendor that only took orders: The agency’s previous development vendor did what it was told, but didn’t push back, raise red flags, or help set priorities.

The solution

The engagement started small, with a switch from PayPal to Stripe for payment processing. SEQTEK quickly became much more: a partner that helped shape the product itself, pushed back when something didn’t make sense, and proved itself release by release. Within about a year, the agency made SEQTEK its sole technology partner.

  • A white-label membership platform: Each brewery, winery, or distillery gets its own branded site with customizable membership tiers and offers, all running on one codebase and one database. A new feature is built once and released to every customer.
  • Modernized technology: SEQTEK upgraded the platform’s outdated frameworks, giving users a modern experience and the development team a stable foundation.
  • Automated deployments: Automated release pipelines on Amazon Web Services replaced manual, all-day releases.
  • Location-agnostic setup: Customers’ memberships and offers now only need to be set up once, without breaking legacy features the agency may need later.
  • A new client admin portal: Business owners can see member sign-ups and offer redemptions, and send or schedule campaigns by push notification, email, and text.

A dedicated SEQTEK team of a product owner, lead developer, cloud engineer, and enterprise architect meets weekly with the agency’s operations and quality assurance leads to set priorities and keep testing ahead of development.

Before and after. Before: releases took a full day of manual steps, every membership and offer was entered twice as local and national, parts of the code dated to 2008, and the vendor only took orders. With SEQTEK: automated releases take 15 minutes, memberships and offers are set up once, every brand runs on one modern codebase, and SEQTEK is a partner that helps set priorities.

The results

  • From a full day to 15 minutes

    Production releases that once took eight or more hours of manual work now take 15 minutes or less, with far less risk of error.

  • Half the setup time

    Going location agnostic cut the time to set up a new customer’s memberships and offers in half.

  • Idea to paying customers

    The membership product went from idea to beta to launch, and now serves 15 to 20 businesses, each with its own branded program.

  • Built to keep growing

    Next up: AI-suggested campaigns and send times, and tools that let customers manage their own memberships and offers.

Illustration of a tasting room counter and shelves lined with craft bottles of different shapes in soft window light

Why it worked

The partnership turned an aging platform into a product that is live, growing, and easier to run.

The agency didn’t need another vendor that wrote code to order. It needed a partner that would give honest guidance, fix the foundation, and stay engaged. By earning that trust one release at a time, SEQTEK went from a single project to running the agency’s entire technology platform.