Who manages your digital shelf? That’s a question that Derek Hahm, the former Craft Brew Alliance (CBA) executive who has been tasked with leading the newly formed E-Premise Group, estimated about 80% of suppliers can’t answer.
“When we show them how they look, they’re surprised, and they know they need to get it fixed,” said Hahm, who spent 11 years at CBA, last serving as chief commercial officer, a title he now holds with The E-Premise Group. “It’s not just hoping that it gets done and hoping that it pulls through. You can’t do that online.”
The E-Premise Group was formed by Ethan Stienstra and Dan Kiefer, the founders of Denver-based consulting firm Ahead of the Curve. Stienstra told Brewbound that after founding the agency in November 2020, they realized many of their clients “looked pretty terrible on the digital shelf.”
Stienstra estimated that it would take around 12 hours to update a Drizly shelf in the early days of the project. Now, he estimated it can be accomplished in about 10 hours.
“We’ve really built processes in to basically merchandise shelves based on that,” he said.
The E-Premise Group has zeroed in on working with beverage-alcohol players to update their digital shelf sets — including Odell, Avery, Sierra Nevada, and the CANarchy Craft Brewery Collective — via a subscription model that takes “all of the chaos off [suppliers’] plates” in an “affordable way, Stienstra said.
“It’s a ton of phone calls, it’s spreadsheet work, it’s not sexy work at all,” he added. “It doesn’t dictate that you have a person or a body dedicated to it. That’s where we come in.”
For producers, the opportunity is big, with $6.1 billion in online alcohol sales and 131% growth from 2019 to 2021. Beyond sales, online marketplaces such as Drizly, Gopuff and Instacart are where millennial and Generation Z consumers do the bulk of their shopping, Hahm added. With those two generations set to make up 54% of the population seven years from now, reaching them in the channels they shop is extremely important.
“Not only are they shopping online to either pick up or get delivery, they’re trying to get all their consumer research online,” Hahm said. “So you have to have your story, not just your images online, because that’s their preference, and that’s how they’re moving towards shopping.”
As consumers shop in more nontraditional ways, suppliers no longer need to have hundreds or millions of dollars of point-of-sale items that they hope their wholesaler will put up, Hahm said. While suppliers have relied on distributors and retailers to manage shelf sets, displays and point-of-sale materials, the responsibility falls on the supplier in online marketplaces, Stienstra added.
For example, Stienstra pointed to a smaller client based in the northeast who did 16,000 orders through Drizly even though their digital shelf was just the silhouette of a bottle when the supplier only sells canned products.
“You could just guess how many missed orders they lost out on by just having a silhouette bottle when they only sell cans,” he said.
Rom van der Zee, a digital strategist for The E-Premise Group, noted that a consumer’s first interaction with a brand could be online. He stressed the importance of having images that correspond with the right product. So if you’re selling a 6-pack of cans, the image shouldn’t be a 6-pack of bottles.
“That’s what we’re trying to do, making sure the images are great, they’re crisp and the marketing copy is matching the images,” he said. “So when this consumer has this first interaction online, they will recognize this brand at a bricks-and-mortar store as well.”
Digital shelves also help drive brick-and-mortar sales, as van der Zee noted that many consumers window shop online before going to a store to make a purchase.
Stienstra estimated that it could take 50 hours for smaller companies to clean up their digital profile and up to 500 hours annually for larger companies.
“It’s a long and arduous path to making yourself look good on shelf,” Stienstra said.