Challenge
The Heart Cut isn't a typical whisky retailer. Founded by Georgie and Fabrizio, it's an independent bottler releasing one-off single cask and small batch whiskies from distilleries around the world, limited to a few hundred bottles at a time, with new releases dropping frequently throughout the year.
That model creates a particular kind of customer: one who comes back release after release, builds a relationship with the brand over time, and increasingly wants to feel like part of something, not just a one-off purchase. The Heart Cut had no way to recognise or reward that behaviour. There was no loyalty or membership infrastructure in place at all, just individual transactions with no thread connecting them.
With the Slow Whisky Club already giving customers a reason to subscribe long-term, the brand needed a loyalty and membership layer that recognised those subscribers properly, built natively into Shopify, and reflective of a brand built on storytelling and discovery.
The solution
A loyalty and membership platform built from scratch, native to Shopify.
Glu worked with The Heart Cut to build their loyalty and membership programme from the ground up, rather than retrofitting an existing system. That meant starting with what makes The Heart Cut's customers distinct: collectors and explorers, drawn to rare releases and new distilleries, not just repeat buyers of the same bottle.
The result is a Shopify-native programme that sits inside the existing buying experience, rewarding the behaviours that matter to the brand: trying new distilleries, building a collection, and subscribing to the Slow Whisky Club.
For The Heart Cut, that means turning a base of one-off buyers into a recognised, rewarded community. For members, it means every bottle adds up to something, not just a purchase, but a growing relationship with a brand built around discovery.
Rather than trying to own communications itself, Glu sends triggers straight into Klaviyo whenever a member hits a milestone, earns a reward, or moves through the programme. That means The Heart Cut's team can handle all outbound messaging properly, in the tone, timing, and format they already use for the rest of their marketing, instead of members receiving a disconnected, generic notification from a separate system.
