Steal This Play · Oct 14, 2026
How a 7-day trip turned 60 guests into a 33% club conversion
A 60-minute tasting appointment gives you one shot at a signup, and tasting room traffic keeps sliding. Eleven Eleven Wines bought seven days of proximity instead and converted 33% of the non-club guests on the trip.
Boutique Napa producer Eleven Eleven Wines went to sea this past June, joining a seven-day Mediterranean sailing on the 200-passenger Scenic Eclipse II, as Kelly Magyarics reports in SevenFifty Daily. Roughly 60 guests, a mix of existing club members and new customers, came along.
The play had three moving parts. The winery hosted its own tastings and a dinner, gifted swag, and then got its wines placed at the ship's regular bar and lounge so passengers who had never heard of the brand kept bumping into it all week. Cofounder Ellie Anest put it plainly: seven days of traveling and dining together builds a different relationship than a 60- or 90-minute winery visit.
The result: a 33% conversion rate among the non-club passengers, plus two referrals. Anest says next time she would add dedicated QR codes for club members, cruise-specific offers, and referral codes to track acquisition, purchases, and later winery visits.
Scale up and you get Cooper's Hawk, which chartered Virgin Voyages' Valiant Lady for a four-night club cruise. It sold out, and more than 30% of those members signed up again for the February 2027 sailing.
Scale down and the mechanism still works without a ship: multi-day proximity, plus your product poured in rooms you don't control. A distillery can run a three-day hosted trip, a retail shop a weekend bus, a brewery a group ski or river weekend.
Pick your 2026 date now, cap it at 20 guests, and build the tracking codes before anyone boards.