Case study · Retail & food

Brown Brothers: a digital home for a family of wine brands.

Brown Family Wine Group needed a way to introduce a recently-acquired boutique wine brand in a way that would be well-received by their established customer base.

Sector: Retail & food
Service: Website design and development
Channels: Website

Website projectDigital experience

Guests seated at a Brown Brothers wine-blending table.

The challenge

What needed to change.

Brown Brothers had grown into a family of wine brands, and the business needed a way to showcase each new addition without losing the presence it had already established. Customers needed to be able to buy across all of the Brown Brothers brands, and both staff and customers held different memberships across the websites.

Ordering had its own complexities, including a minimum number of bottles per purchase, and without inventory syncing stock levels would drift and customer satisfaction would suffer. The team also wanted to manage and update content themselves, which meant the CMS had to be flexible.

Approach

How the work took shape.

We developed a strategy to overhaul the website and online store so that the purchasing journey worked as one, whichever brand a customer started with. The first decision was to bring every brand website under a single CMS through a multisite build, which gave the team one place to manage content across the whole group.

Purchasing had to become easier. We set out to remove the friction in buying, so that a customer could move from browsing to checkout without the usual hurdles, and so that the ordering rules the business relies on would be enforced quietly rather than getting in the way.

Automatic inventory sync was central to the plan. With stock levels aligned across every website, the team would be spared the hassle of manual reconciliation and customers would never order a wine that was not there to ship.

Consistent branding and a considered visual design across the group would help customers understand the relationship between Brown Brothers and its additional brands, so that each brand kept its own character while clearly belonging to the same family.

Brown Brothers website on multiple devices.

The shift

One core running four brand websites let each label keep its character while the group sold as one.

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The work

The work, up close.

We created a unified multisite that runs all four brand websites off the same core. Brands can be cross-sold across each website, and shoppers get a consistent experience that still keeps each brand’s individual character.

Order rules were built in without the usual customer frustration. A live countdown shows shoppers how far they are from the six bottle minimum before they reach checkout, and exceptions can be set for specialty products, so the system is easy to adjust as the range changes.

Stock control across the four websites runs from one centralised database. The stock master acts as the single point of communication, so stock levels and product information are managed in one spot and update instantly everywhere. Each website is built from the same template and a collection of pre-designed modules, fully customised for each brand, so the team can assemble custom pages themselves.

Two years on, the numbers show what a unified store has done for the group.