From website relaunch to portal project
During the website relaunch, one thing became clear: the portal needed more than an update.
The Discover & Define phase for the public BWGV website surfaced what had long been felt internally: years of organic growth had made the member portal cluttered and unfocused. Every member saw the same content – although a bank supervisory board needs fundamentally different information than a goods cooperative. The search hit its limits with thousands of documents. The portal lacked responsiveness and accessibility. And the tech stack – it was holding back any future-ready development.
Clerk consolidates two authentication sources into a unified SSO – goods cooperatives directly, bank cooperatives via Atruvia. The fine-grained role and permission concept controls who sees which content and functions in the portal.
A system that doesn't design away the differences
All cooperatives in one portal – without making a single one of them the same.
The central decision came early: don't simplify, differentiate. Instead of forcing target groups into broad categories, we developed a fine-grained role and permission concept. From supervisory board to individual committee – every role sees exactly the content, data and functions relevant to them.
On top came a technical challenge that defined the heart of the project: two completely different login paths needed to converge in one unified system. Goods cooperatives sign in with email and password. Bank members get access automatically through the Atruvia hub. BWGV-internal staff are set up as their own organisation in Clerk with dedicated permissions. The solution: a unified SSO via Clerk that brings both sources together.
User administration at a glance: roles, activities and contacts of all members – manageable directly by BWGV.
Built for thousands of documents and real processes
Thousands of documents, configurable notifications, digitised reporting processes.
For BWGV, we expanded our proven 21TORR Hub into a complete organisation and user management system – for around 890 organisations and up to 10,000 users. But administration alone doesn't make a good platform. What turns the portal into a working environment are the functions behind it.
Topic-specific content, served to the right audience: members from wine growing see circulars and news that matter to them – filtered by topic, sorted by date.
Algolia search makes thousands of documents – circulars, evaluations, statistics – findable in seconds and reliably. The notification system built into the portal lets users configure what they want to be informed about: by topic, at a self-chosen frequency, as instant alert or as a digest. The data transfer service digitises statistical reports to BWGV – with intermediate save and divisible workflow. On top of that come committee management, a document shop with paid downloads, and event administration.
The design system we developed for the BWGV website relaunch forms the visual foundation – transferred to a functionally completely different context. The portal connects seamlessly to the public website, even though the requirements are fundamentally different.
The data transfer service digitises statistical reports directly in the portal – cooperatives transmit data structured to BWGV, with deadlines and versioning per report.
Live – but not finished.
The strongest signal for project quality is when the client keeps building.
The member portal has been live since March 2026. Communication between BWGV and members is more direct, data exchange simpler, content management more comfortable for the internal team. On this foundation, BWGV is actively building further – an extensive backlog of new ideas shows that the platform isn't seen as an endpoint, but as groundwork.
What makes this case special: technical complexity and design quality don't exclude each other here. SSO integration, sophisticated permission concept, system integrations, functional depth – and at the same time a portal that feels as if none of that were complicated.
"Projects like this rarely run in a straight line. What convinced us: even through difficult phases, 21TORR never lost sight of quality – and kept the shared goal clear."
