Post-replatform lift
Customer view
Retention
Lifecycle comms
Channel performance
Where the spend actually moved.
Overview
THE CHALLENGE
The brewery had spent years building one of the strongest community brands in the category. The digital operating layer behind it had not kept pace. A basic CRM and a tired commerce setup capped how far the ecom channel could go, and the rest of the customer footprint (taprooms, festivals, membership) sat in disconnected systems that could not talk to each other.
That fragmentation showed up in the comms. Customers who had spent the weekend at a festival or signed up to the membership programme got the same generic email as a first-time online buyer. The brand voice was sharp everywhere except the inbox. The work needed a partner who could hold both halves at once: the engineering rebuild and the brand-aligned craft of how the brewery actually speaks to its drinkers.
THE APPROACH
How the engagement was structured.
We replatformed the commerce experience onto a stack that could carry the brand and migrated the entire lifecycle programme across in parallel. The two moves were sequenced as one project so the customer record, the storefront and the comms layer came online together rather than as a series of patches.
From there we rebuilt the lifecycle programme from the ground up. Welcome, abandoned cart, post-purchase, membership and lapsed flows were redesigned with brand-aligned templates that read like the brewery and not a CRM default. Segmentation was reshaped around how the customer actually behaves (taproom regular, festival-goer, online subscriber, gift buyer) rather than a flat list of email addresses.
The harder layer was integration. We connected the subscriptions platform, post-purchase tracking and event systems into the same customer record so the comms could finally reflect what the customer had actually done. A taproom visit, a festival ticket or a subscription renewal all flowed into the same view, and the lifecycle programme could respond accordingly. Retention stopped being an ecom function and started behaving like a brand function with a full picture of the drinker.
STONE & WOOD · IN THE ROOM
Inside the engagement.
The working moments behind the numbers.
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THE OUTCOME
The brewery ran on a unified customer view that held online, taproom, festival and membership in one place. Lifecycle became a meaningful contributor to revenue rather than a generic newsletter, with comms that sounded like the brand the team had spent years building.
The replatform drove a step-change in ecom performance and gave the operating team room to run comms around real events (releases, festivals, taproom moments) without engineering becoming the bottleneck. Repeat behaviour lifted on the back of segmentation that recognised how the customer actually showed up, and the membership programme had a comms spine that supported it rather than fought it.
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