About The Boston Beer Company

If you’ve ever cracked open a Sam Adams, Angry Orchard, Truly Hard Seltzer, or Twisted Tea, you’ve enjoyed a beverage made by The Boston Beer Company. With several established brands in their lineup, the company, which was launched in 1985, started a subsidiary called A&S Brewing in 2011, featuring newer brands like Angel City Brewery, Coney Island Brewing Company, and Concrete Beach Brewery.

Goals

The mission of The Boston Beer Company is to “seek long-term profitable growth by offering the highest quality product to the U.S. beer drinker.” Having great products is just the start. Launching them into the market requires having a strong internet presence. To bring its new brands online and grow their audience and sales, The Boston Beer Company had to address three objectives:

Branding: The team needed an easy way to sell merchandise for each line, to build brand recognition and loyalty. Each label has a distinct taste and audience, and the websites needed to be customized toward the specific target markets.

Reporting: The company required an accurate inventory tracking system with streamlined reporting. Being able to trust the item catalog, stock count, and dashboard reports was vital to their success to ensure that merchandise was available and not oversold.

Time Management: Timely delivery is an important part of the customer experience. The company wanted an eCommerce tool that would track overall inventory and allow orders to be viewed in one place so employees could quickly fulfill orders.

Solutions

Square Online partnered with The Boston Beer Company to launch eCommerce sites for three of their breweries, meeting the needs of the company and creating a presence for each label’s community.

Streamlined Marketing Tools

The Square ecosystem of tools allowed the team to quickly create shop pages for merchandise at each brewery. Website templates made it easy to create a site that matched each brand. The flexible layouts were updated with logos, photography, and images that helped boost recognition and reinforce brand identity.

Templates also provide a place to showcase featured products. The Boston Beer Company’s brands could highlight new arrivals and top sellers, quickly engaging visitors and encouraging sales.

Square marketing tools helped promote the new merchandise for each brewery. For example, the company could link to its Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter pages to encourage engagement across a variety of platforms. And Square integrated email marketing tools allowed the company to seamlessly create campaigns for each label.

“You can never underestimate the importance of building your brand online,” says Matt Texeira, head of accounting for The Boston Beer Company.

“Our websites were so quick and easy to set up. Moving our eCommerce sites to Square Online was a no-brainer for us.”

Real-Time Reporting

Accurate reporting was a key consideration for launching the company’s new brand websites. Some of the labels had physical locations, and the online store needed to automatically sync inventory with the correct POS system to avoid overselling an item.

Square made it easy to categorize beverages and food as well as merchandise that is also sold in person, including options for buy online pickup in-store. After the initial setup, sales could be automatically synced in the background to ensure availability for online purchases. The integration helped the company streamline procedures and reporting.

Centralized Systems

While each brand had its own website, the Square eCommerce tool integrated orders in one place. Employees could easily track, view, and fulfill orders from a centralized system, cutting down on time spent managing and monitoring multiple pages and helping streamline the fulfillment process.

Additionally, the Square UPS shipping integration allowed The Boston Beer Company to connect their existing UPS account that already came with substantial discounts. Square shipping tools also allow merchants to enable real-time shipping for enhanced automation and speed.

“Our staff managed everything via the built-in shipping tools in Square Online,” says Texeira. “We’re able to purchase discounted shipping labels with the UPS integration. It’s nice to be able to track and fulfill orders in one place.”

Results

Square Online enabled The Boston Beer Company to launch eCommerce for their products with efficient marketing tactics, optimized operations, and a single source of truth for orders and inventory.

The customer experience is vital in today’s competitive marketplace, especially in the food and beverage industry. Customer-facing activities like branding and marketing drive engagement, loyalty, and repeat sales. And operational functions, such as inventory and fulfillment, provide a solid foundation.

Square empowers sellers large and small with tools that work together, saving time and resources. See how Square can work for your business.