From catalogues to clicks: Digitising St Austell's wholesale estate

The Challenge

St Austell Brewery has historically relied on traditional sales methods and a team of telesales operatives to manage and process orders, an out-of-date process that needed innovation. They embarked on a complete overhaul transitioning from a traditional catalogue-based system to a fully functional ecommerce platform, significantly enhancing the customer experience as well as opening new avenues for sales and marketing initiatives, like merchandising and product promotion.

The Solution

true embarked on an overhaul of the brewery’s digital infrastructure to launch a robust ecommerce platform that supported St Austell’s growth ambitions, and also set a new standard for customer engagement and operational efficiency across the business.

The solution’s success was grounded in a few key factors. The first was the progressive technological architecture in which it was built. true were early adopters of Umbraco as an ecommerce platform and combined it with AI recommendation engine, Algolia, to create a solution that’s not only robust but is actively getting smarter over time by learning from user behaviour to make better product recommendations. That makes it quicker and easier for St Austell’s wholesale shoppers to find the beers, wines, spirits, and mixers their customers want. 

The second distinctive feature of this project is the cultural transformation that accompanied it. Many of St Austell’s business customers have personal relationships with the brand that go back decades, and business relationships that go back multiple generations. Any changes to that relationship came with risk. Many of them weren’t natural users of digital service channels, and there was some trepidation around adopting the platform. But, by engaging users in research, keeping processes simple, designing with a user centric approach in mind and carefully managing the onboarding process, we’ve helped them see the advantages of shifting to a digital-first approach: saving time and being available around the clock to better fit around their daily service times.