Breakthru Beverage Group

Breakthru Now

Increasing direct channel revenue with Breakthru Now

Breakthru Beverage Group is the leading North American distributor of wholesale beer, wine, spirits, and non-alcoholic drinks to retail and hospitality businesses.

Challenge

Relying on external partner marketplace channels, Breakthru Beverage Group was limited in ownership of their customer experience, data, and revenue streams.

Solution

I delivered a proprietary commerce platform that successfully transitioned the business away from marketplace reliance to a fully owned, industry-leading product.

Approach

As design director, I led a two-year engagement that defined and delivered a new B2B experience, released across all operating US markets. To accomplish this, my team leveraged agile framework to discover, deliver, and grow the new digital experience:

Discovery: Synthesized primary and secondary research, analytics, market analyses, and benchmarking. Translated insights into user and feature definition.
Delivery: Developed end-to-end experience, inclusive of information architecture, and design system. Validated solution with usability testing prior to MVP release.
Growth: Leveraged real-time data and user feedback to iteratively deliver new features and enhancements as part of larger multi-market release. Partnered with stakeholders to define go-to-market strategies and product roadmap.

Excerpts from discovery readout.

Introducing Breakthru Now

Once we gained executive alignment on the scope of MVP, I led a team of designers and developers through the creation of Breakthru Now, an industry-leading commerce and business enablement platform.

Merchandising

Research showed customers consistently reordered the same products, limiting revenue growth and product discovery.

To influence purchasing behavior, I architected merchandising opportunities across navigation, homepage content, product pages, Quick Order, cart, and saved orders.

Deal selection 1.0

Breakthru Beverage Group offers exclusive quantity-based deals that historically required in-person support rather than self-service.

After bringing this feature to Breakthru Now, we discovered users didn't realize they needed to add deals to their cart after selection. We dedicated a sprint to improve the experience by:

Synthesized feedback and benchmarked
Tested two potential solutions with users
Expanded restrictive business rules

Deal selection 2.0

Efforts resulted in an enhanced feature that optimized wayfinding, clarity, and hirearchy. Most importantly, we enabled customers to add to cart directly from the deal selection experience—remediating the core friction.

The feature’s second release proved successful as we saw immediate increases in conversion, task completion, and user satisfaction.

Expanded product release and enhancements

Following the first market release of Breakthru Now, scope was expanded and I oversaw four parallel workstreams put in place to rollout Breakthru Now across all American markets.

National Release: Sprint planning, backlog execution, and iterative enhancements.
Specific Market Features: Feature development and targeted adoption strategies to support market nuances.
Data & Insights Reporting: Establishing sophisticated data reporting and a holistic validation capabilities.
Growth Strategy: Vision setting, executive planning, and growth planning.