Southern Glazers

Southern Glazers is the largest distributor of wine and spirits in the U.S. With the help of Publicis Sapient they have built a new e-commerce site known as Proof with the goal of empowering their customers and sales people through more strategic purchasing and the sharing of market insights. During a time of transition within the project, I helped the design team work through a few pages/problems.

To truly benefit from the Proof site, the customer needs to log in. Once logged in Proof can provide detailed information about the clients past purchases, pending orders, and recent market insights, among other things. That said the site still needs a homepage for a customer who hasn’t not logged in or who may have not yet signed up. This unauthenticated state was one of my tasks on this project. During the design process we as a team along with our clients debated the pros and cons of how much information we should allow a user to see without signing in. The pro for letting a user widely navigate the site without signing in is that they get to see all what the site offers; the con is that it blurs the line of being signed in and not and the user may find the site frustrating because they are only given limited information. The pro for a limited unauthenticated version is that the user won’t get confused on if they are signed in or not; the con is with limited visibility into what the site offers they may not realize the benefit to signing in. Ultimately we went with this second option using the unauthenticated homepage as a gateway that informs the user on the benefits of signing in while not allowing them to move beyond the page without taking this step.

Proof wanted to allow each of their brands to have a page where they can tell their story and highlight their products. The greatest challenge of this page was how to create a design that would fit a brand like Tito’s Vodka, who has a single product and Yellow Tail Wine, who has twenty-one products. For all of our product listing pages we had created a product card that shows the product and lists its relevant information. This option would not work for brands with many products as the page would prove to be too long and many of their products would never get seen by the user. My answer was to create a new component that allowed the brand to simply line up all of their products (bottles) in a single line. For a brand like like Tito’s they could choose to use the component for their one bottle or not and for Yellow Tail they have plenty of room to display all of their products with plenty of room to grow.

Proof is proud of the large amount of brands they carry and they wanted us to create a brand search that would allow their customers to better find all that they have to offer. At first this problem seemed to have a simple answer as through research we found plenty of good examples of “All Brands” pages on other sites. However, after finally receiving the full list of brands that I had requested, I realized that nothing we had looked at or created was up to the task, because SG carried over 19,000 brands. Most of our examples had listed their brands alphabetically, but even if we created a page for each letter these pages would still be too long. In the case of “C” there were over 3600 brands and in fact 2000 of those began with the word “Chateau”. Because of this obstacle we created an all brands page that requires the user to select three different filters before they will be given a list of brands. While this limits the kind of exploration the owner had previously envisioned, it did allow the site to produce user friendly page lengths.