In this ecommerce podcast, James spoke to Beer Hawk by PerfectDraft MD Alex Nelson about building a D2C brand on the Adobe Commerce (Magento) platform, leading a team of product managers, why they stuck with the platform and adding additional 3rd party tech such as Algolia for search.
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Beerhawk by Perfect Draft is a fast growth DTC business selling craft beer and a beer dispenser to bring the pub vibe to homes and offices. Given how many DTC brands use the leading SaaS vendors Shopify and BigCommerce, it’s interesting to see a business driving ecommerce growth using Magento and managing an internal engineering team.
In this ecommerce podcast, James interviews MD Alex Nelson to understand what’s driving the sales growth, how the business operates its ecommerce stores, how and why it’s using Magento and how it is balancing the use of development resources between its in-house engineering function and external partners.
Tl;dr – what we cover:
- Why did Beerhawk stick with Magento for its ecommerce platform
- How is the business managing its in-house engineering team?
- How does the business decide when to build vs. when to invest in 3rd party tech?
Key Discussion Points
- What’s your background and how did you end up at Beerhawk?
- Perfect Draft is still relatively new to market, how much potential does it have?
- What led the decision to go with Magento as the ecommerce platform?
- You have an internal development team and supplement with external resources when needed; has this approach allowed you to balance BAU and new feature work / innovation etc?
- What have been some of the biggest operational challenges handling growth over the past few years?
- Beerhawk has always been very good with testing new features and approaches etc.; what have been some of the most impactful things you’ve done?
- How do you decide when to build vs. when to invest in 3rd party specialist vendors e.g. you’ve got Algolia, Nosto, Feefo
- Beerhawk has run a POC in subscriptions; how has that performed and will it remain a big part of the strategy?
- What’s the overall growth strategy with Perfect Draft? What have you learnt since the launch?
- What else do you have on your roadmap?
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