Corporación Hijos de Rivera has been brewing beer in Galicia since 1906. This independent, family-owned company has built a diverse portfolio encompassing beer, wine, mineral water, cider, kombucha, and craft spirits, led by its flagship brand, Estrella Galicia. To bring that entire universe directly to the public, four years ago the company launched Bigcrafters.com, its official direct-to-consumer (D2C) channel that brings together its own brands along with a curated selection of independent producers who share the same commitment to quality, authenticity, and origin.
The Challenge: A Diverse Catalog and the Pursuit of Technical Agility
Selling food and beverages directly to consumers involves managing constant operational complexity. Bigcrafters offers Hijos de Rivera's complete portfolio, artisanal food and drinks from independent makers, and innovative concepts such as Huebox—a draft beer dispenser for the home—as well as personalized Estrella Galicia labels. To showcase this wide offering, the team continuously creates bundles, promotional offers, and seasonal campaigns, where every product launch or traffic surge tests the store's resilience.
Maintaining an agile, stable catalog requires significant engineering effort—time the team prefers to invest in business growth and customer insights. Furthermore, the digital business division requires a technological foundation capable of keeping pace with Hijos de Rivera's ongoing portfolio expansion.
"One of the biggest challenges in online food and beverage sales is managing a diverse catalog with distinct product types, coupled with running multiple monthly campaigns and keeping up with the relentless pace of ecommerce innovation," says Francesc Pumarola Campeny, Direct to Consumer Director at Corporación Hijos de Rivera. The challenge was finding a more efficient technological structure to support these ambitions.
The Solution: A Resilient Platform that Empowers Business Growth
Hijos de Rivera migrated Bigcrafters to Shopify and seamlessly connected its existing ecosystem: SAP ERP via Smartie, Gigya SSO, Oct8ne chatbot, Connectif personalization, Selligent marketing automation, the Reskyt mobile app, and backend SSO with Microsoft Entra ID. Most of these tools provided native integrations, keeping the scope of the migration well-contained. "Compared to other migration projects we have undertaken over the years, this one was remarkably smooth and fast," explains Pumarola Campeny.
With a solid, reliable foundation powering the storefront, the team shifted away from building and maintaining proprietary software and began reinvesting that time into elevating the customer experience.
Thanks to the stability Shopify provides, we can dedicate more time to crafting personalized user experiences
The platform continuously rolls out new features, allowing the team to adopt innovations out-of-the-box rather than developing them from scratch. The same applies to artificial intelligence: "Shopify allows us to easily and rapidly absorb ongoing innovations, such as new AI-driven capabilities," says Pumarola Campeny.
The Outcome: Rapid Integrations, Customer Loyalty, and Community Focus
Following the launch, the most notable gains include superior scalability during high-traffic peaks, reduced development costs, fewer checkout drop-offs, a growing subscriber base for recurring purchases, and far more efficient content management across the entire store.
The platform has also streamlined multi-category catalog management while ensuring a smooth shopping experience during peak demand. Backed by an already mature analytics strategy, Shopify now enhances data handling, complementing the company's existing reporting dashboards.
Ecommerce enables us to build a direct connection with consumers, better understand their needs, and experiment with new value propositions—such as the Huebox home draft system or personalized labels
Nurturing that direct relationship represents the next frontier. Bigcrafters has launched its loyalty program, La Tribu, offering exclusive perks to boost retention and conversion. As digital commerce evolves toward AI-powered and agentic shopping, the team is equipped with a platform designed to seamlessly adopt these advancements as they emerge, rather than requiring future re-architecting.
For the team behind Bigcrafters, the vision extends far beyond transactional sales. "We want our ecommerce store to be more than just a sales channel; it should serve as a stage for discovering authentic craft products, supporting value-aligned artisans, and deepening the direct bond between our brands and consumers," concludes Pumarola Campeny.