Gliding Eagle.

Gliding Eagle is a cloud technology company based in the San Francisco Bay Area, building software to transform global trade.

Their focus is the premium wine industry, moving ultra‑premium wineries away from a fragmented, paper‑driven export process and into a connected digital ecosystem. The system today serves 700+ wineries across 65+ global destinations, with 250+ ultra‑premium producers running their international operations on it.

I've worked with founder Jack since 2015. What began as a single application is now a system of multiple integrated apps. Ordering, operations, consumer verification, mobile data capture, an internal CRM, and the core engine that ties them together.

The challenge

The global wine supply chain is fragmented and opaque, and at almost every step between the cellar and the collector, visibility is lost.

A bottle leaving a Napa winery may pass through brokers, freight forwarders, customs authorities, and final‑mile carriers before reaching the end consumer. Each handoff introduces a new system, a new format, and a new opportunity for something to be misfiled, delayed, or simply lost in a folder on someone’s desk.

For premium wineries, three problems made this especially painful:

• No bottle‑level transparency. Producers couldn’t tell a buyer where their wine was, when it would arrive, or what condition it shipped under, and once a label left the winery, its provenance became someone else’s problem.
• Compliance was manual and high‑risk. Each destination demands its own documentation, in its own language, with its own deadlines. A single error can delay a shipment for weeks, or lose it entirely.
• Direct‑to‑consumer was effectively closed. The operational complexity of selling internationally pushed wineries to rely on distributors, surrendering margin, brand voice, and the relationship with the very collector buying their wine.

Gliding Eagle needed a technology that could absorb the entire complexity of international wine logistics and present it to wineries, operations staff, and end consumers as something simple, elegant, and trustworthy.

The solution

A complete system, architected from a blank canvas and built around a single connected core. One source of truth for inventory, orders, customers, and compliance state. A winery placing an order, an operations manager packing a pallet, and a collector scanning a label half a world away are all looking at different views of the same living data.

At the centre sits the EID system: the core engine and shared database that holds business logic and the single source of truth for inventory, orders, customers, and compliance. It orchestrates business flows between every app and every external service, manages settings and user access, and keeps real‑time data flowing across every integrated app.

Layered over it is a proprietary identification system that assigns unique 12‑digit alphanumeric IDs and QR codes to every bottle, package, shipment, and order, the spine that makes end‑to‑end traceability possible, from the cellar door to the collector’s hand.

The version live today is the fifth full version of the system, with every line rewritten from scratch in pursuit of code efficiency and a calmer, faster user experience.

The most recent release, version 5 of EID and the International App, is the result of a decade of refinement. Each rebuild is informed by everything the previous one taught us about how wineries, operations teams, and consumers actually move through the product, and each one tightens the system on performance, polish, and the breadth of what wineries can do without ever picking up the phone.

The complete system

Six purpose‑built applications, each designed for a specific user, all reading and writing against the same core.

Outcomes

• Order fulfillment time reduced by 75%, freeing the operations team to focus on business development rather than paperwork and processing.
• 99.91% delivery success rate across 65+ international destinations, driven by automated customs compliance and end‑to‑end visibility.
• Real‑time quotation in the International App lets customers get an instant price and pay to place their order, eliminating phone calls and back‑and‑forth entirely.
• Bottle‑level transparency, end‑to‑end. Unique IDs and QR codes for every bottle, package, shipment, and order, letting wineries, partners, and consumers all trace the same physical object through the same live record.
• Infrastructure costs cut by 60% through ongoing system optimization and the right cloud‑tool choices for each workload.
• 700+ wineries and brands served, from Ultra-Premium to Iconic, with long-term relationships built over years that remain the team's greatest source of pride.

Trusted with the full stack

Being trusted to own the entire stack of a system this central to the business has defined the relationship from the start.

Working with Jack since 2015, that trust has meant full responsibility, and a free hand to evolve the product deliberately. Every part of the system is built, maintained, and continuously reshaped end-to-end. There is no legacy layer untouched, no feature that hasn’t been carried from idea to production within a single, coherent view.

That continuity is what allows this system to stay sharp as it grows. Each release is an opportunity to reach for the best tool for the job. A newer framework where it earns its keep, a more efficient infrastructure choice where it reduces cost or latency, a third-party service where it removes an entire class of work.

The standard is consistent across every surface. Operations teams move through their day without friction. Winery clients get a quoting and ordering experience that feels effortless. Consumers scan a label and see a bottle’s journey unfold without ever thinking about the machinery underneath.

A decade in, the system remains cohesive not by constraint, but by design. Shaped, challenged, and rebuilt continuously with the same level of care.