30,000 STRANGERS SAW IT BEFORE I DID
Madeline Puckette spent years chasing a credential to prove she belonged in wine. What actually opened the door was a skill she already had — and a drawing she almost dismissed as a side project. A story about outsider eyes, and why they're often the asset, not the apology.
Thirty thousand strangers looked at my little drawing in a single day. I was exhilarated. I was also panicking.
I kept doing a double-take at the screen, refreshing, not believing the number. Thirty thousand, in a day, on a wine infographic I'd thrown together to save our struggling little wine club. And not one of those thirty thousand people bought a membership. But they loved the picture! The thing I was selling sold nothing. All I could think, watching that number climb, was: we are wasting eyeballs by the minute.
I was so busy panicking about our product I almost missed the one I'd just made.
To understand how I nearly missed it, you need a little background about how I started Wine Folly.
Long before wine, I was a designer. I studied fine art and music at CalArts, produced electronica music, and paid rent doing graphic design — I made convention posters and layouts. Wine came later when I lost my design job during the market crash of 2008. I got a job as a "wine glass washer and polisher" at a wine bar in Reno for under-the-table cash. I became an uncultured pirate sommelier which ultimately meant I cut off drunk people rather than swirling anything grand. Still, it was the most fun I'd had at a job in years.
I fell in love with wine. And the second I did, I decided the way to belong to the wine industry was to earn my stripes with the Court of Master Sommeliers. Surely those two letters, "MS" for "master sommelier", would mean that I belonged.
It nearly broke me. The harder I chased the credential, the less joy I felt. Every glass became a test. Every bottle, a performance review. By trying to assimilate into a world on its terms, I started to get hollowed out.
Meanwhile, the wine club my friends and I had launched was nearly stillborn. On our first month live, we sold just three subscriptions. Two of them were my parents. So out of pure desperation to get anyone to notice us, I made an infographic. A fun little thing to throw up on Facebook in 2012.
That illustration got 30,000 views in one day. Wowsa.
The next morning, we threw up a link to sell my little drawing as a poster and our little bank account tripled in size. The infographic wasn't an advertisement; it was the product. Turns out my value was never the sommelier pin I'd been killing myself to earn. It was the thing I could already do. I just had to watch it work, exactly once. This gave me the courage to start to let go of what I thought my career was supposed to look like.
That drawing became Wine Folly. Since then, there have been two award-winning books, maps, a YouTube channel, and a whole way of making an intimidating subject feel like a fun adventure.
Here's what I'd hand you. If you've ever felt like you slipped in the side door of your own field and you keep apologizing for your outsider's view. Stop it. Your fresh eyes on the topic and the clarity you have about what makes your field confusing might just be your most valuable asset. The craft is just making it consumable.
You are not the impostor in the room. You are the bridge.