Marathon in Trellis has two screens and one big idea: you plan the whole sale up front, then the system runs it wine-by-wine while you watch (and steer) from the Live Board. Exactly one wine is up for sale at any moment — when it sells out or slows down, the next one takes its place automatically, with no gap in between.
Planning happens in the Planner (Marathon → Planner). Everything after launch happens on the Live Board (Marathon → Live Board). Anyone can watch the board; making changes takes Marathon edit access.
Open the Planner, hit + New, and give the event a name — that's all creation asks for. From there the planner walks you through six steps. They're tabs, not a one-way street: hop between them in any order, and your work saves automatically as you go.
Search the catalog and pull in every wine you might run. Nothing in the pool touches the storefront — this is just gathering, so gather generously. Each wine shows its Shopify and Linnworks counts plus revenue potential to help you weigh candidates.
You don't have to add wines one by one. The picker has filters — type (red, white, rosé, sparkling…), country, varietal, region, vintage, and minimum units on hand — that stack with the search box. Narrow the list to what you're after, then hit Add all to pull in everything that matches, and optionally type a label in tag them as… first so the whole batch lands already tagged. "All Italian reds with 20+ units, tagged italians" is one filter and one click.
The pool is a whiteboard, so hash things out right here: drag wines to sketch a rough running order, and tag them to cluster ideas — hit + tag on a wine and label it "reds", "day one", "openers", whatever fits how you think. A wine can carry several tags, and the tag bar above the list shows a count for each — click a tag there to see just those wines. To tag a bunch at once, hit Select, check off the wines (or select all shown while a tag filter is on), type the label, and Apply tag.
Blocks are the chapters of your sale — the "hours." Create them, give each a title and description, and pull wines in from the pool — one at a time, or a whole tag at once: the add-wine menu leads with Add everything tagged…, so "reds — 5 wines" drops all five in together, in pool order. Order is everything: the top block runs first, and within a block wines go up for sale top to bottom. Drag to reorder blocks or wines until the story reads right.
A wine can hold slots in more than one block — plan a favorite for a morning run and an encore in the finale. The planner won't stop you; it just flags repeats (also in #1 on the wine's row, and a note in the add menu) so deliberate encores are easy and accidental doubles are obvious. Keep in mind a later run sells whatever the earlier one left behind — if the first run drinks the well dry, the encore comes up, hits the stock-out floor, and swaps right past. You can also always bring a wine back on the fly — see adding a wine mid-sale.
You can also set up a safety net: mark one block as the default block (the Set As Default Block button on its card). It leaves the running order and gets no time slot — instead, whenever a block sells out before its time is up, the default block takes the stage and cycles through its wines, swapping on stock-out, until the next scheduled block starts right on time. It remembers its place: if it was cut off mid-wine filling one gap, the next gap picks up with that exact wine. Think of it as the house pour that covers every intermission.
For each wine, choose what makes it step aside for the next one: run until it's gone, step down at a threshold, or wait for a human. The rules are explained in plain English in the next section. There's a set all in block to… shortcut when a whole block shares one rule.
Verify makes sure each wine's product details are complete enough to sell: title, price, producer, vintage, varietal, and a country or region. Hit Verify All and watch the progress count. When a wine falls short, open it right there, fill in the gaps, and save — Trellis re-checks it instantly.
Timing comes last on purpose: shape the whole sale first, then commit to a clock. Set the event window and each block's start and end. The distribute evenly button splits the event window equally across your blocks — a fast starting point you can then nudge.
The Launch step shows a checklist of everything the sale needs — blocks titled and timed, every wine ruled and verified. When it's all green you have two buttons: Activate Now starts the sale immediately, or Schedule arms it to start itself on time.
A swap rule answers one question: when should this wine hand off to the next one? There are three policies, and one of them has three flavors.
Once the sale is live, the board is mission control. Reading it top to bottom:
The event cards across the top hold the vitals: the event clock, bottles sold with the current pace, revenue, and the time of the last order that came through. On a real sale those numbers come straight from orders as customers check out — they move within seconds, not minutes.
The current-wine card is the star of the screen: what's up right now, how many bottles it has sold since it went up, how fast it's selling right now, and the rule that will eventually bring it down ("Advance: on stock-out", "Advance: at threshold — 90% sold", and so on).
The block columns show the whole running order as a checklist: a struck-through wine has had its turn, the pulsing garnet dot marked LIVE is on stage now, and hollow dots are waiting in the wings. Each block has a progress bar, and finished blocks tuck themselves away behind a toggle.
Every waiting wine also carries its own intel, right on the row: the bottles it has left (refreshed about once a minute), ran earlier if it has already had a turn this sale (with how many it sold — hover for where and when), also in … if it's queued in another block too, and on stage now if that same wine is the one selling right now. No more guessing whether the encore pour still has bottles behind it.
The Recent elevation log on the right is the sale's play-by-play, written in plain sentences with who (or what) did it:
▼ Domaine Verte Sancerre came down — sold out
▼ Bodega Roja Malbec came down — hit its swap rule
It scrolls back through the last 200 entries, so the whole day's story is always at hand.
What happens on its own: blocks advance on schedule with no gap between wines. If the last wine in a block sells out early, the next block starts early rather than leaving a dark storefront. When the event's end time arrives, the sale wraps itself up and the board becomes the recap.
The board runs the plan by itself; these controls are for when the room reads differently than the plan predicted. All of them need Marathon edit access.
Before running a real sale — or when training someone new — run a fake one. Tick the Test event box when creating the event and you get the entire Marathon experience with zero storefront involvement: same planner, same verification, same Live Board, same swap rules, but the bottles are pretend.
You choose the pretend starting bottle count and how fast stock drains on its own. Then, on the Live Board, the Sell 1 / Sell 5 / Sell 25 buttons let you play customer — hammer a wine with orders and watch its swap rule fire exactly as it would live. Test events wear a TEST badge everywhere so no one mistakes the rehearsal for opening night.