Southern Glazer’s  
Wine & Spirits

I oversaw a team of designers tasked with reimagining Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirit’s digital experience. Our goal was to elevate SGWS’s brand in the digital space, improve site usability, and create a flexible design system that could scale as the company expanded its offerings and services.

Role

Design Director, Design Lead

Employer

Goods & Services

Platforms

AEM

Area

Website design, Design systems

Background

My team was tasked with modernizing and elevating the digital presence of Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits (SGWS). Recognized as a global leader in beverage alcohol distribution, SGWS had an established brand identity and a strong market position. However, their existing website struggled to communicate the company’s breadth of services, rich industry insights, and corporate values.

Our goal was to enhance the overall brand experience and ensure that the website served as a trusted resource—offering relevant insights, tailored services, and thoughtful guidance for three distinct audience segments: Customers, Suppliers, and Employees. The project would encompass a full design overhaul: from the initial look and feel, to page-level information architecture, to a modular component system integrated into Adobe Experience Manager (AEM). We had to carefully balance the established brand personality with a more contemporary, engaging, and intuitive user interface.

The original SGWS homepage

Research & discovery

To build a solid foundation, we initiated a research phase that included competitive analysis, stakeholder interviews, and experience workshops. In workshops we spoke with internal teams, select partners, and a subset of end users to understand their priorities and the factors that influenced their decision-making. This phase allowed us to shape the site’s strategic direction around three key experience pillars:

Attract: Elevate brand visibility and highlight SGWS’s solutions.
Engage: Present compelling, relevant content and resources that encourage deeper interaction.
Capture: Build trust and confidence that SGWS is the go-to expert, offering valuable industry insights and opportunities.

Enhancements user journey workshop

Brand immersion workshop

Early visual concepts and design direction

Site design

The team created multiple design directions that explored how SGWS’s brand elements—its color palette, typography, and photographic approach—could be refined and extended into a more contemporary, digital-friendly language. We experimented with new graphic elements that conveyed both the heritage of the brand and its forward-looking stance in the industry. Our visual direction elevated SGWS’s identity, using a refined color palette, modern typography, and a purposeful photographic and illustration style.

We redesigned the site to address the needs of three core user types: Customers, Suppliers, and Employees. The navigation system was restructured to surface relevant pathways for each audience segment, ensuring they could quickly find what mattered most to them. We designed a modular page layout system that could flex to highlight timely messaging, share thought leadership articles, and guide users toward value-added tools or services.

To support this flexibility, we developed a comprehensive component library for Adobe Experience Manager (AEM). Each component—such as media carousels, utility banners, and content grids—was crafted with both scalability and consistency in mind.

System guidelines

To ensure longevity and clarity, we documented the entire component system and visual language in a comprehensive digital styleguide. These guidelines included usage examples, constraints, and instructions for integrating components into the AEM environment, and integrated with both Figma and Storybook resources. This documentation became the north star for SGWS’s teams, ensuring they could maintain consistency and quality as they evolved the site over time.

SGWS digital styleguide

Impact

Following the redesign, the site experienced a substantial improvement in user engagement, with more visitors delving deeper into SGWS’s thought leadership content and taking steps to connect with sales teams:

35%

More site visits within the first three months. Unique visitors climbed by 28%, reflecting a broader reach and more engaged audience.

20%

Increased session duration, signaling that users were exploring more content and spending additional time on key pages.

15%

Combined lift in new customer sign-ups and supplier inquiries, underscoring the site’s value as a key gateway for both buyers and partners