Case study — Famille Hugel
A pioneering culture
A historic Alsace wine house that has always anticipated changes in the industry — and approaches the digitization of its catalog in the same spirit.
A historic Alsace wine house that has always anticipated changes in the industry — and approaches the digitization of its catalog in the same spirit.
The Hugel family, pioneers of Alsace winegrowing whose wine business dates back to 1639, is a leading estate with an annual production of around 110,000 cases, 85% of which are exported and available in more than 100 countries.
The family remains traditional in the way it makes its wines, but embraced digital very early in its communication. "We have had a showcase website since 1996, followed by an online store in 2002; that was very early to go digital in the wine world," notes Jean-Frédéric Hugel.
Hugel is a family house that manages a large number of products across many export countries. "We have a large range structure with 20 different wines, some of which are wines for aging. We needed to be able to find product information several years later." The Hugel family looked for a suitable solution to best manage this structure and save time updating product information. It joined the vin.co platform in 2011.
To meet these various needs, the Hugel family decided to centralize its product data to obtain a product catalog in 9 different languages. "The current website is in 9 languages, as are our technical sheets. The interface is very easy to use, especially for translation," explains Jean-Frédéric Hugel. "Moreover, for the same product, only the analytical data changes; the winemaking is always the same, so being able to duplicate our sheets is a great help."
"Making information accessible to everyone"
"We have a lot of visual material available on our website in open access; we don't want to limit information but rather make it accessible to everyone." The Hugel family therefore chose to use the media library management tool to bring together its various visuals.
Hugel also uses the "Our wines" tab on its Facebook page to increase its visibility. The family also includes QR Codes on its back labels, technical sheets and various product materials, in order to control its 360° communication and enrich the informational content about the wine.
Fast access to information and ease of use are two important factors for Jean-Frédéric Hugel. "If I'm on the other side of the world and need to present a product I hadn't planned on, I just have to go into my database and save my product sheet on my iPad." Finally, "sales have increased thanks to the Scan & Buy tool, which redirects directly to our online store."
"We are planning to redesign our website with vin.co as the back office," explains Jean-Frédéric Hugel. Since all the information about its various products is already in the vin.co platform, the wine section will integrate automatically into the new site thanks to the WordPress plugin. This will allow the Hugel family to focus on developing the design and writing additional content.
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