Surdyk's

WHY The Surdyk family has been serving the community of Northeast Minneapolis since 1934. Surdyk’s Liquor has an impressive array of wine, spirits, beer, mix, and cigars in the Liquor Store. The store’s superior service from knowledgeable staff keeps customers strolling down the many aisles of this Minneapolis store; truly a food and drink lover’s destination.

HOW Surdyk’s was faced with a problem in 2019, their site was built on Magento 1 and were facing end of life in June of 2020. They found their platform difficult to make changes to, requiring outside resources to make simple updates. This process took days and they didn’t feel in control of their site. They wanted to spend their time on building strong marketing, not wrangling their website. Diving into their roots as a neighborhood liquor store and cheese shop, they wanted to increase local pickups, deliveries, and customer loyalty to their brand. Before the replatforming, Surdyk’s had a very simple loyalty program, 1 point for $1 spent. It was significantly underperforming and holding their growth back.

WHAT After a consultation and a full strategy audit with Irish Titan, they decided to move from Magento 1 to BigCommerce. This would make site changes much easier and faster but could still handle the thousands of SKUs that they needed. They refreshed the site with new branding and new iconography to reflect changes since their last site. During the upgrade, we built a custom connector from CounterPoint POS to BigCommerce and tapped Annex Cloud for loyalty.

Annex Cloud is a much more sophisticated loyalty program (social follows, email, more info, more rewards) that was a great fit for Surdyk’s. Members can use points flexibly for things like free delivery, class purchases, join lotteries for allocated items, like limited-release bourbon or beer. Leaning into their significant brand loyalty, Annex Cloud is helping accelerate growth.

RESULTS Surdyk’s moved to safety off of a platform experiencing end of life, meaning they’d continue to be protected with security updates. They found BigCommerce made their site significantly easier to control, especially being more flexible with controlling their stock amounts. They were able to move faster, and their site wasn’t throttling their growth anymore.

After their site refresh, their branding matched across web and print material, reinforcing and strengthening their image in the neighborhood.

Moving to Annex Cloud has been a massive success. They’re able to understand and engage their customers much deeper than before. They’re seeing huge increases in email engagement (and sales) for their loyalty program. They’re also offering exclusive access to specialty bottles, sales, and memberships that they weren’t able to before. This has solidified Surdyk’s as the best liquor store in the Twin Cities.