What is design thinking, and how can it fix your tasting room?

Last year, tasting room visitor numbers across the roughly 500 wineries in Community Benchmark fell 6%, after a 7% drop the year before, and active club members fell 10% (Terrain, March 2026). Tasting rooms and clubs now account for 53% of the average winery’s sales (SVB, 2026). So the couple who taste 6 wines, say lovely things about the view and drive off with nothing cost you more than they used to.

It’s tempting to fix what you can see. New glassware. A different flight. A sharper club pitch at the end. And when none of it moves the numbers, someone in the room says the most expensive sentence in wine: “That’s how we do things here.”

Design thinking is a way past that sentence. Below is how it works, and how to run it with your own team, using one problem all the way through: visitors who taste and don’t buy.

The short answer: Design thinking is a problem-solving method that starts with the people you’re solving for. It runs in 5 steps: empathize (understand your visitors), define (name the real problem), ideate (generate lots of ideas), prototype (build cheap versions of the best ones) and test (try them with real guests).

What is design thinking?

IDEO’s Tim Brown defines it as “a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success” (IDEO).

Strip out the jargon and it asks 3 questions of any idea. Do people want it? Can we make it work? Will it pay? Winery teams spend their working lives on the second question. The first one usually gets answered by the people who made the wine, which is a bit like asking the chef whether dinner was good.

Why does design thinking matter for wine right now?

Gallup’s August 2026 poll found 54% of US adults say they drink, matching last year’s low. Among 18- to 34-year-olds, drinking fell from 58% in 2023 to 50% this year, and wine is preferred most often by adults 55 and older (Gallup, 2026). SVB’s 2026 report puts it plainly: “The older, wine-focused cohort is aging out, and younger adults aren’t replacing them at the same rate” (SVB, 2026). The people walking into your tasting room are less and less likely to be the people it was designed for.

Jeanne Liedtka spent 7 years studying 50 design thinking projects in business, health care and social services, and concluded in Harvard Business Review that the method works because it gets teams past their own biases: “rootedness in the status quo,” “fixation on first solutions,” and norms like “That’s how we do things here.” Its real-world experiments, she found, “help reduce employees’ and customers’ quite normal fear of change” (HBR, 2018).

Wine, an industry that sells tradition by the bottle, has its share of those biases. (Said with love.)

What are the 5 steps of design thinking?

The Stanford d.school calls them 5 “modes”: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test (Stanford d.school). Here they are, applied to the visitors who leave without buying.

1. Empathize: find out what your visitors experience

The d.school describes this as “the work you do to understand people, within the context of your design challenge” (d.school process guide). In a tasting room, that means talking to the people who didn’t buy, which is far less comfortable than surveying your club members (who, by definition, already did).

• Ask 5 or 6 departing visitors, kindly, what they’re taking away from the visit.
• Walk the whole visit yourself, from the parking lot and back again.
• Ask the people who pour what visitors say when the owner isn’t around.

Write down exactly what people say, in their words. You’ll need those words later.

2. Define: name the real problem

Next, turn what you heard into one problem statement, written from the visitor’s side of the bar. An example of what that might look like:

“First-time visitors who enjoy the wines need an easy way to take the visit home with them, because by the last pour they’re thinking about lunch, not shipping.”

Notice what it isn’t: “We need to increase conversion.” That’s a goal. The problem is whatever sits between the visitor and the purchase, and your team will usually disagree about what that is. Good. This is the step where you settle it.

3. Ideate: go wide before you go narrow

The d.school calls ideation “going wide.” Quantity beats quality here, and nobody judges anything until the list is long. Give everyone 5 silent minutes to write before anyone speaks, so the loudest voice (hello, owner) doesn’t set the direction. The person who pours on Saturdays has heard more visitor objections than anyone else in the room, so make sure their ideas get on the wall.

4. Prototype: build it cheap and fast

Early prototypes should be “quick and cheap to make (think minutes and cents),” according to the d.school. For our tasting room, that could be:

• A printed card listing the wines each guest tasted, with a QR code to order them later.
• Moving the club conversation from the end of the flight to the second pour.
• A “pick your 3” order sheet on the bar.
• A rewritten welcome, so every guest hears in the first minute how shipping works.

None of these needs a budget meeting. That’s the point.

5. Test: try it on real guests

The d.school’s rule for this step is the best line in the whole method: “prototype as if you know you’re right, but test as if you know you’re wrong.” Run one prototype for 2 weekends and count one number, such as purchases per visiting group. Then go back and talk to the visitors who still didn’t buy.

A caution from the source: the d.school says the steps can be used “in various orders,” and in 2016 it wrote that “the problem with the hexagons is that they’ve created THE design process” (d.school, 2016). Treat the 5 steps as habits, not a recipe. If testing sends you back to empathize, the method is working.

How do you run a design thinking workshop with your winery team?

Who’s in the room. The owner or GM, at least 2 people who pour, whoever runs the club or DTC, and whoever handles bookings. The winemaker too, if they meet visitors. Aim for 5 to 8 people.

Before the day. Each person talks to at least 3 visitors or recent visitors and writes their exact words on cards. Without this, the workshop is a meeting about opinions.

A half-day agenda:

• 9:00 Share what you heard (45 minutes). Every quote goes on the wall. Group them into themes.
• 9:45 Define (30 minutes). Write 3 problem statements, then vote for one.
• 10:15 Ideate (45 minutes). Silent writing first, then share. Aim for 50 ideas.
• 11:00 Break.
• 11:15 Prototype (60 minutes). Build 2 or 3 of the best ideas: print the card, rewrite the script, mock up the page.
• 12:15 Plan the test (30 minutes). What you’ll try, on which days, what you’ll count, who owns it, and when you’ll review it.

Ground rules:

• The owner speaks last.
• “We tried that in 2019” doesn’t count as a reason.
• Every idea gets written down, including the silly ones.
• Nobody leaves without a test date in the calendar.

And yes, sticky notes are fine. They just aren’t the point.

What does design thinking look like beyond the tasting bar?

The same thinking has reached academic research on cellar doors. In 2011, Carlsen mapped the cellar door visit in 3 stages, “approach and entry; the cellar door; departure and other observations,” with student observers at 3 wineries noting what they experienced through all 5 senses (International Journal of Wine Business Research). Try it on your own site: what does a first-time visitor see, hear and smell before anyone says hello?

Your conversion problem may also start before anyone arrives. A 2026 study of wine tourism booking pages found the features most sensitive to improvement included clear inclusions and exclusions, cancellation policies, all payment methods, booking changes, accessibility and opening schedules (Papantonopoulos et al., 2026). That sample was 38 Greek participants, so treat it as a checklist to test, not a verdict. If your booking page is where visitors hesitate, that’s your next workshop.

Why do design thinking workshops fail?

Mostly, nothing happens afterwards. MIT Technology Review’s 2023 look back at the method noted that “execution has always been the sticky wicket for design thinking” (MIT Technology Review, 2023). IDEO itself cut about a third of its staff in 2023, and critics complained the term had become a buzzword (Fortune, 2025). You know the pattern: a lovely day, a wall of sticky notes, a team photo, and nothing different on Saturday.

To avoid it:

• Take one problem per workshop.
• Get the owner to agree before the day to act on whatever the test shows.
• Run the test within 2 weeks, while people still care.
• Count one number, and put the review date in the calendar.

When should you bring in a facilitator?

When the owner can’t be neutral about the problem (which is hard for anyone who built the place), when the team has been arguing about the same issue for a year, or when past workshops ended with the sticky notes in a drawer. That’s the part we do: we run the session, keep the owner quiet (politely), and make sure the test happens. It’s part of our strategy work, or you can tell us what’s stuck.

Your homework this week

Ask whoever pours on Saturday to jot down the last thing 5 non-buying visitors say before they leave. Don’t fix anything yet. Read the list together on Monday, and you’ll have finished step one.

Frequently asked questions