Generating direct revenue with Breakthru Now
Breakthru Beverage Group is one of North America's leading distributors of beer, wine, spirits, and non-alcoholic beverages, serving retailers and hospitality businesses.
Challenge
Breakthru relied on third-party marketplaces, limiting control over the customer experience, customer data, and digital revenue.
Solution
I led the creation of Breakthru Now, a proprietary commerce platform that transitioned the business from marketplace dependence to a fully owned digital commerce experience.
Results
$8.4M generated in incremental revenue
50% growth in online revenue
27% growth in sales across local customer locations
Source: SAP Customer Experience Value Stories for the Wholesale Distribution Industry (2025).
From sales-led to self-service
As Principal Product Designer, I led research, strategy, and design for the launch of Breakthru Now. Our research revealed a significant shift in B2B buying behavior, with customers increasingly wanting to move away from sales representative hand-holding to researching, comparing, and purchasing products through self-service digital experiences.
To remain competitive, Breakthru needed to evolve from a distributor supported by digital channels into a digitally enabled commerce business. The opportunity was to create a self-service experience that strengthened customer relationships, increased customer lifetime value, and scaled alongside evolving customer needs.
Delivering the MVP: Breakthru Now
Discovery provided a clear understanding of customer needs and market opportunity. To accelerate delivery while reducing risk, I aligned stakeholders around a crawl, walk, run approach that prioritized a focused MVP, validated business assumptions, and established a foundation for future growth.
The result was Breakthru Now, a proprietary B2B commerce platform designed to provide customers with a modern self-service ordering experience while establishing a direct digital sales channel for the business.
To bring the vision to life, I facilitated solution workshops, partnered with product managers and engineering leads to define platform requirements, established the information architecture, and led the design of a scalable library of components and page templates.
Shifting from habitual reordering to product discovery
Research showed that customers frequently reordered familiar products, limiting product discovery and incremental revenue opportunities. To shift purchasing behavior, I architected dynamic merchandising capabilities across key customer touchpoints, including navigation, homepage content, product detail pages, quick order, cart, and saved orders.
Scaling across all 13 U.S. markets
Following a successful beta launch and market rollout in Maryland, Breakthru Now was positioned for expansion across all 13 U.S. markets. To support this growth, my role evolved from defining the MVP to establishing a continuous delivery model that enabled the platform to adapt to customer needs and accelerate adoption across each market.
Partnering closely with the Product Manager, I helped transition the team from MVP delivery to an agile product model focused on continuous customer value. By translating product insights and customer feedback into strategic opportunities, prioritized enhancements, and refined user stories, I guided designers and developers through planning and execution, delivering the capabilities needed to support adoption and ongoing platform maturity.
Turning complex deal selection into intuitive self-service
One of our highest-priority enhancements focused on deal selection, Breakthru's quantity-based promotional program. Because of its complexity, customers often relied on sales representatives to build qualifying orders on their behalf.
Deal selection 1.0
One of our highest-priority enhancements focused on deal selection, Breakthru's quantity-based promotional program. Because of its complexity, customers often relied on sales representatives to build qualifying orders on their behalf.
Our first release enabled customers to build deals digitally, but feedback quickly revealed that although customers could successfully configure deals from the product page, many did not realize they needed to add to cart.
Deal selection 2.0
To address this gap, we synthesized customer feedback, behavioral data, and usability findings to identify the root cause. We then aligned stakeholders around changes to business rules and technical constraints, enabling customers to add qualifying products directly from the deal-building workflow. The enhancement improved conversion, task completion and customer satisfaction.
Defining vision and strategy for long-term growth
With Breakthru Now successfully established in the market, I partnered with product leaders, business stakeholders, and executive leadership to define the platform's path to digital maturity. Through additional discovery and a series of product strategy workshops, we identified future opportunities, aligned on a long-term product vision, and established measurable business objectives.
Using these insights, I worked with my team to define a set of strategic pillars and success metrics that informed five product investment areas: Identity & Awareness, Content & Engagement, Personalization & Marketing, Merchandising, and Testing & Insights. I then partnered with cross-functional subject matter experts to create a multi-year roadmap for each initiative, presented recommendations to executive leadership, and guided ongoing product investments through the agile delivery process.
In addition to roadmap planning, I served as a trusted strategic advisor to the business, helping teams navigate market-specific challenges and identify opportunities to accelerate adoption while maintaining alignment with the platform's long-term vision.
