Pernod Ricard knows that directly embracing consumers is the deciding factor for which company will lead the adult beverage market. The new Drinks & Co meets customers where they’re at — the brand’s D2C wine and champagne play engages millennials on their native turf and inspires sommeliers with all the juicy details.
About the project
Buying any kind of alcohol online has some barriers, but it shouldn’t feel that way to customers. The discovery process highlighted a common thread that we could rally behind — the need for a shopping experience that helps customers find new wines and quickly place orders without any hassle.
A better Contextual Commerce experience that’s faster to market
Pernod Ricard wanted to launch this new wine brand as soon as possible (read:yesterday). To save about a third of the development budget during the initial launch, we built the site using Drupal (content) and Shopify Plus (commerce). The result is a best-of-breed solution — a scalable commerce platform with the content editing fluidity of Drupal.
A contextual commerce experience is best when you think through the entire customer journey — the marketing team can create a variety of educational and promotional content which has been naturally designed to convert visitors to customers.
Cheers to an unprecedented integration
The beauty of the Shopify platform is a large ecosystem of apps that can slash project costs and significantly speed up time to market. The leading wine shipping tool (ShipCompliant) was an absolute requirement but there was no existing integration because it was believed to be too difficult to build.
We ignored the warning signs and engineered a solution that overcame the biggest hurdle of the project. Drinks & Co is now positioned to engage their audience across the entire customer journey without technical limitations.
Back to topWhy Drupal was chosen
- Better for content experience layer: Shopify is great at what it was made for: ecommerce. But when engaging, complex content experiences are crucial to your sales process, you need to bring in a platform like Drupal which is focused on content.
- Save $$$ for other initiatives: Drupal is open source, so you are getting it without a license fee. Drupal has 10,000+ free modules which can result in better functionality that would be costly or lengthy for us to build from scratch each project.
- No compromises on capabilities: Drupal may be free but it can do what more expensive CMSs, such as Sitecore and AEM, can do.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Fantastic Shopify allowed easy synchronization to Drupal. We were able to manage the setup in under 2 days.
Bricks Layouts enabled us to build pages with reusable chunks of the design in a way that any editor could build new pages without developer intervention. This is a huge advantage to their marketing team.
SimpleSAMLphp Authentication let us integrate into the Drupal accounts, reducing how much would need to be implemented if we had to do it through the full custom middleware. This allows the administrators to automatically log in on their Pernod issued equipment which makes it a lot more efficient for their team.
