Capitol Cellars
Capitol Cellars is a wine retailer whose entire history lived in a twenty-year-old point-of-sale writing binary files no other software could read. I reverse-engineered the format, built a secure daily sync into a proper customer database, and put two decades of purchase history back to work.
The data sat in binary flat files on a Windows machine behind a third-party IT vendor. Getting it out meant reading the format nobody documented — then keeping it flowing: a secure sync lands every day’s sales in Postgres without touching how the shop works.
On top of the recovered data sits the marketing system: campaigns drafted by AI agents overnight, reviewed and sent by a person in the morning. An email editor, queue-based send workers, auto-tagging, and a run ledger for every agent. Deliverability is engineered, not hoped for — domain warmup, circuit breakers, suppression lists, clean opt-in, one-click unsubscribe.
