Free tool
How Many Packing Days Will This Club Run Take
Put in your member count, hold rate, and line staffing to see the boxes, the hours, and the days your next club run needs.
Free tool, no sign up
What Does One Club Box Really Leave You
Enter your own wine cost, packaging, freight, and reship rate to see the true cost of a club box and the margin left underneath it.
Cost per box is the number every other club decision leans on. Whether you can afford a fourth tier, whether the July run should ship two day, whether the shipper upgrade is worth it, whether a partner is right that the club is carrying the winery. None of that can be answered honestly until the box has a real cost attached to it.
The fields below are the ones that actually move the figure. Wine at cellar cost rather than tasting room price, the full packaging stack including the insert and the labor to pack it, freight with residential and signature surcharges left in, the card fee on the charge, and a reship rate for the refusals, bad addresses, and breakage that every club absorbs. Leave the reship line at zero only if you have never packed a box twice.
Your result
Total cost per club box
$71.59
Wine, packaging, freight, card fees, and the share of boxes that get packed twice.
Margin per club box
$63.41
What is left before tasting room overhead and the hours your team spends on the run.
Margin as a share of member price
47.0%
Useful for comparing a three bottle tier against a six bottle tier.
Packaging and freight share of cost
How much of the box cost is getting it to the door rather than filling it.
These figures cover one box on one run, so multiply by your shipping members and your runs per year for the club picture.
The lines wineries forget
Three costs go missing from most club math. The first is the reship: a refused delivery in a signature state, an address that was wrong all along, or a bottle that arrived broken. Each one costs the packaging and the freight twice, and sometimes the wine as well. A club with a three percent reship rate is quietly paying for a run every few years.
The second is pack labor, which feels free because it is your own team standing at the table instead of pouring. It is not free, and the packing day planner on this site turns it into hours you can price. The third is the card fee on a large quarterly charge, which is a bigger dollar figure than the same rate on a bottle sale and deserves a line of its own.
Using the number to shape your tiers
Once you have a defensible cost per box, tier design gets easier. Freight and packaging barely move between a three bottle and a six bottle box, while the wine cost roughly doubles, which is why a larger tier usually shows a healthier margin share even at the same price per bottle. Run both through the calculator before you set the price.
The same figure tells you what a shipping promotion really costs. Free shipping on a summer run is not a marketing line item, it is the freight number on this page multiplied by every box that moves. If that comes to more than the incremental members it holds, put the money into the wine instead.
Questions about this calculator
Should I use cellar cost or retail value for the wine?
Use cellar cost, meaning what the bottles actually cost you to produce and package. Retail value tells you what the member is getting, not what the box costs you. If you want the discount picture as well, run the calculation twice and compare the two margins.
How do I estimate a reship rate if I have never tracked it?
Count the boxes you shipped a second time over the last four runs and divide by the total boxes shipped. Most small clubs land somewhere in the low single digits, with summer runs higher. If you truly have no record, start at three percent and correct it after the next run.
Does this include the cost of the club software or the tasting room?
No, this is the direct cost of one box. Subscriptions, tasting room overhead, and staff salaries sit above it. Work out margin per box first, then check it against your fixed costs and your runs per year.
More free tools and working documents
Working document
The Club Run Sheet: One Page Per Shipment
A fill in working sheet you complete once per club run, so the whole shipment lives on one page instead of four spreadsheets and somebody's memory.
The figure only helps if the next run starts from it
You have a number for this shipment. The harder part is making sure the next one begins there instead of from memory, with the same wine lineup, hold requests and destination states feeding the math. A demo takes about thirty minutes and we use your members, not our defaults.