Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits is looking for modern solutions to get ahead, and those fall into the domain of David Chaplin, the company’s chief growth officer.

More B2B sellers are re-inventing how they do business to meet the needs of more digitally driven business buyers. Family-owned Southern Glazer’s is one place where this is happening. The distributor is out to gain market share. It wants to do so by enhancing its collaboration with buyers and trading partners through digital and offline channels.

It took a significant step in that direction in 2023 by announcing several appointments to key positions. Those include vice presidents in ecommerce and omnichannel development, customer and supplier relations, and national retail sales.

Now, Southern Glazer’s has a new enterprise-wide initiative called 2030 Vision. The initiative aims to transform how the distribution company does business offline — and online.

Digital commerce and new digital technology play crucial roles in Southern Glazer’s new initiative. In this question-and-answer session, Digital Commerce 360 sits down with Chaplin. He updates us on the progress to date with its digital transformation, along with the opportunities and challenges ahead.

Interview with Southern Glazer’s David Chaplin

Digital Commerce 360: What is 2030 Vision, and what role does digital commerce and transformation play in it?

David Chaplin, chief growth officer, Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits

David Chaplin: Our 2030 vision is to be the hospitality industry’s most valued selling, logistics, and insights provider. Digital plays a significant role in equipping our employees, suppliers, and customers with the world’s best digital capabilities, tools, and data. Specifically, our focus in the short term is directly tied to driving commercial success in the market.

DC360: You are making a sizeable investment in digital transformation. What are the specific goals and objectives Southern Glazer’s seeks to achieve? Please be specific.

Chaplin: Our investments in digital ladder up to our 2030 vision “to be the hospitality industry’s most valued selling, logistics, and insights provider.” For example, the team will build on the success of Proof Commerce by continuing to enhance its capabilities and features and has invested in a new Enterprise Data Center of Excellence to leverage the power of data, analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI). We are now looking at data as one of our products, bringing insights to life and driving better outcomes for our teams and trading partners.

Digital sales at Southern Glazer’s

DC360: What are you projecting digital sales across all channels to in 2025 vs. 2024? How will you achieve this growth?

Chaplin: As a privately held company, we don’t disclose specific financial information or forecasts. Our objective is to achieve growth is on enhancing digitally influenced sales, meaning we don’t have a preference where the transaction occurs (either online or offline). However, we want to ensure that our sales force and our customers are utilizing our best-in-class digital capabilities and insights to help them succeed in the market. What we can say is that we see evidence that it is working for our customers and sales consultants — those using our digital tools are seeing growth, even in an otherwise tough year for the industry.

DC360: What initiatives are planned or underway to improve Southern Glazer’s digital user experience for omnichannel B2B buyers?

Chaplin: Our focus is on making Proof Commerce the easiest platform that our customers use to order or run their business, across any industry. Personalization is a major priority for Proof Commerce to enable that. And providing a simplified, tailored experience to our customers is the goal. This personalization will be powered by AI/ML technology.

Southern Glazer’s use of AI

DC360: Can you cite some examples of how you incorporate artificial intelligence into your digital commerce initiatives?

Chaplin: We are also incorporating AI and Gen AI into our existing tool sets to simply give the experience to our users. As part of the new enterprise data center of excellence (COE), we have hired a dedicated head of data science, AI and machine learning as well.

DC360: You are building a more than 350-member digital team, which is a big expansion. Where are you expanding and hiring?

Chaplin: The roles we are adding are primarily in product, engineering, design, data science and architecture.

DC360: What are your biggest digital challenges and how are you overcoming them?

Chaplin: The biggest change is the agility of having a “progress over perfection” approach. Specifically, we are now working together in a resolute product and platform model where digital and information technology (IT) are one team building, delivering, piloting, iterating and scaling technology at a much faster pace than ever before. We are confident this new way of working will further accelerate our digital progress, and will provide significant benefits to our employees, suppliers and customers.

Sign up

Sign up for a complimentary subscription to Digital Commerce 360 B2B News, published 4x/week. It covers technology and business trends in the growing B2B ecommerce industry. Contact Mark Brohan, senior vice president of B2B and Market Research, at mark@digitalcommerce360.com. Follow him on Twitter @markbrohan. Follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.