Glorioso’s
Italian Market

A legendary Italian Deli on the East Side gets a digital facelift and a big lift in sales.

• Over 500% increase in e-commerce sales over 4 year period
• 165% increase in catering business
• Doubled Facebook audience (6k > 14K)
• Tripled Mailchimp subscriber list (3k > 10.5K)

Glorioso’s is a family-owned Italian grocery store located on Brady Street. Since 1946, they have excelled as purveyors of old-world Italian foods in the heart of Milwaukee's East Side. Fresh, handmade sausages, mouthwatering deli creations and piping hot pizza are just a few of their specialties.

In the past ten years the number of staff has grown to over 60, and their renovated space has expanded the grocery store to over 16,000 square feet of unique products, a larger deli space, as well as more accommodations for their cheese, bakery, and wine sections. The market has won numerous awards over the past 15 years and is frequently mentioned in the list of must-visit places in Milwaukee, with a long tradition of providing quality food and a truly unique experience.

DISCOVERY

In the spring of 2017, Glorioso’s was in the beginning of a growth stage. With plans to expand and improve their e-commerce capabilities as well as launch a new culinary space for cooking classes and private events, the general manager was looking to bring someone on full time to understand the brand and provide strong design direction that would position them for growth in the future and help them adapt to technological innovations in the grocery industry.

The first order of business was updating their website.

ANALYSIS

There was no doubt that Shopify was going to be a part of our tech stack. Although there were dedicated grocery e-commerce sites, they also looked like a monocultural phenomenon, with sterile thumbnails of food products arranged on a grid on top of a sterile white background, with a logo and banner image the only unique distinguishing brand characteristic.

We knew that with Shopify we could use liquid templates to create something that more closely reflected our unique brand and provide the functionality we needed.

We also knew that our customers wanted to be able to browse our deli menu (NOT just some pdf download), and browse our catering menu without the hassle of downloading a messy Word doc. We could use custom fields in WordPress coupled with style sheets and javascript magic to create easy to access catering and deli offerings for people.

IMPLEMENTATION

We built a Shopify/WordPress hybrid. Shopify would handle the e-commerce part of the business, while WordPress would handle our content marketing needs.

With the ability to add custom apps and with some custom development, we could add functionality for:

selling events and ticketing
browsing deli and catering menus
ordering deli food delivery
grocery curbside pickup and delivery
shipping box selection and packing algorithms to maximize our shipping efficiency

The site launched with success, and largely contributed to the 400% increase in e-commerce sales the first year, as well as spurring a 124% growth in catering sales.

It is still one of the few grocery stores that retains a distinctive brand look while providing a lot of function for shoppers.