Website Design and Development
Forty years of distribution, working online
Frank B. Fuhrer Wholesale has distributed beer and beverages across Southwestern Pennsylvania since 1982. They are the link between the brands people drink and the retailers who sell them, running a fleet and a warehouse operation at real scale.
A distributor's website serves three audiences who want completely different things, and most distributor sites serve none of them well.
Retailers need to place orders and reach the portal. Suppliers are sizing up whether this is the distributor to carry their brand in the region. And because warehouse and driver roles turn over, the site is also a recruiting tool that has to work on a phone.
A fourth constraint sat underneath all of it: the company runs more than one distribution brand, and they needed to look like one operation without pretending to be one company.
The site is organized around those audiences rather than around the company org chart. Retailers get the portal and the ordering line in the header on every page, where somebody who calls in weekly can find it without hunting. Suppliers get the scale of the operation shown rather than claimed. Open positions are a permanent fixture, not something added when someone quits.
The design uses the warehouse and the fleet as the imagery, because in distribution the trucks and the racking are the credential. A photograph of the actual operation does more than any paragraph about commitment to service.
It is built as a system that carries across the group's brands, so a sister company gets its own site and identity without a separate build from scratch.
Retailers, suppliers and job seekers each get a clear path, instead of one homepage trying to talk to everybody at once.
The order line and retailer portal sit in the header on every page, because a retailer placing a weekly order should never have to look for them.
The same system runs the group's sister distributor, so a second brand is a configuration rather than a second project.
Every project here started with a conversation about what the business actually needed. Yours can start the same way.
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