Development Shopify Plus Replatform Salesforce Integration Food & Beverage

Ardbeg

Replatforming an Iconic Islay Single Malt from Salesforce Commerce Cloud to Shopify Plus

INPUT · THE CHALLENGE

The Challenge

Ardbeg's SFCC implementation had become a drag on the brand. Releases were slow, regional teams were locked into a shared template, and the storefront couldn't keep pace with marketing's ambition for richer storytelling and controlled member experiences.

The brief was demanding: ship region by region without disrupting markets already trading, keep every launch compliant with local alcohol and privacy rules, and deliver a storefront that feels every bit as crafted as a 25-year-old expression from the distillery.

STATUS · DIAGNOSING

Overview

Owned by The Glenmorangie Company and part of the Moët Hennessy portfolio, Ardbeg is one of the most revered single malt Scotch whisky brands in the world. Its direct-to-consumer ecommerce footprint spans multiple regional storefronts and a fiercely loyal global membership program, the Ardbeg Committee.

DYODE partnered with the Glenmorangie team to retire a legacy Salesforce Commerce Cloud (SFCC) experience and rebuild Ardbeg's storefronts on Shopify Plus, holding the brand's premium positioning while giving regional teams a faster release cycle and room to scale internationally.

Our Approach

DYODE structured the engagement as a phased replatform, starting with a discovery and theme audit, progressing through a global design system, and rolling out market-by-market with Ardbeg France as the pilot before extending to UK, Germany, and the global storefront.

Discovery and code audit of the existing staging theme. Global design system built as a custom Shopify theme by DYODE. Componentized section library reusable across markets. Phased market rollout: France pilot, then UK, Germany, global.

Technical Implementation

The build is a multi-store architecture: Shopify Markets plus per-region instances, so each market keeps its own merchandising and compliance controls while sharing one theme codebase. A custom country and markets selector handles geolocation and persists the visitor's choice across sessions.

The Ardbeg Committee keeps its Salesforce dependencies: Marketing Cloud and the Engage API drive the membership program, and members-only products are gated on the visitor's Salesforce account status so the storefront honors membership without duplicating it.

Compliance and regional requirements (age gating, OneTrust consent, GDPR-compliant newsletter opt-ins) were built in from day one so each market launch was production-ready. The stack includes region-specific age gates and OneTrust cookie consent; rebuilt order confirmation email templates per market; and Shopify-native inventory replacing legacy stock-level logic.

Custom Storefront Experience

Beyond the migration plumbing, DYODE rebuilt the storefront as a flexible content system the Ardbeg team can run themselves. A library of bespoke Shopify sections gives marketers the building blocks to tell Islay's story without development work for every campaign.

The Outcome

Ardbeg now runs a modular Shopify Plus stack across its key European markets. Marketers can ship campaigns and storefront updates without engineering bottlenecks, the Committee membership program has a dedicated home with a clean sign-up funnel, and regional teams share a common design system while keeping the local compliance and merchandising controls they need.

With the migration foundation in place, DYODE continues to partner with the Glenmorangie and Ardbeg teams on performance, new sections, and ongoing UAT, the kind of long-haul relationship we build with every brand we work with.