Mergers and acquisitions are a key growth strategy for many distributors, but bringing multiple brands together and standardizing technology, processes, and customer experiences can be a major challenge for any B2B digital leader. We recently sat down with Darryl Miller, ADENTRA Group’s Director of eCommerce, to talk about his digital strategy, unifying ADENTRA Group’s different brands under one common digital environment, how he’s tackled AI adoption within his organization, and how Xngage is helping guide the way.
Charbel Abou Chaaya, Chief Digital Officer and Managing Partner of Xngage: Darryl, can you share with us a bit about the digital operations at ADENTRA Group and give us an overview of the business?
Darryl: The business operates in the architectural building products sector. We operate six flagship brands today – actually just acquired a seventh. The ecommerce operation that I oversee is on our industrial side, and we operate under three brands: Paxton, Rugby, and Hardwoods. Our ecommerce operation is just under 10 percent of our total business today and growing fast. We operate in the architectural building products space. It’s essentially lumber, plywood, panels, moldings, cabinets, and hardware.
Charbel: So, Darryl, you have very deep experience in ecommerce. You’ve been around for a long time – you started with Granger. I believe that ADENTRA Group brought you in to think about and plan how to unify those different brands in that digital strategy. Can you talk to us about your approach to bringing together all these brands and refine that digital strategy?
Darryl: That’s exactly what I was brought into do. Like you said, I’ve been in the ecommerce space for a little over 28 years. So, ADENTRA Group reached out to me a few years back and asked me to join the team to really think about how we deliver a unified commerce strategy across three really distinct brands. So, one of the things that we’ve been very deliberate about is recognizing that our brands have strong identities and customer relationships. We didn’t want to lose that across unifying the brands. So, the unification doesn’t necessarily mean every brand is going to look identical. It means building a common digital foundation underneath all of our brands. We worked towards common technology, common product data principals, shared search capabilities, analytics, increasingly common design and customer experience standards – those are the areas that we’re focused on right now in terms of bringing those together. It gives us the ability to innovate once and share that innovation across all of the brands rather than try to solve those problems in three or four different ways. At the customer level, our goal is consistency. A customer interaction with Rugby, Hardwoods, or Paxton should recognize the individual brand, but the quality and ease of the digital experience should remain consistent.
Charbel: I’ve personally worked on the different websites and brands that you have. We’ve had many conversations about how important it is to unify that customer experience because it’s not only going to help your customers to really come in and get that job done, but it’s also going to speed up development because you have one structure. And as you acquire new businesses, we can move faster to build the new website. Can you share one or two of the challenges of bringing these six companies together?
Darryl: I think the biggest challenge is balancing the standardization with the different businesses and the way that those businesses operate. Our brands serve different markets, different customer groups, different product categories, even. They have their own histories and operating practices. It’s easy to say, “Let’s standardize everything.” The harder question is what genuinely should be standardized and what flexibility creates value for those businesses. We’ve tried to standardize things that customers shouldn’t have to think about like usability, search quality, the account functionality, the product information, core commerce capabilities, while still allowing those businesses to preserve the things that make their brands relevant to their customer. The other challenge is organizational change. Technology is usually the easy part. Getting people, process, and data aligned around the customer experience is much more difficult to sustain. It’s an effort that’s ongoing.
Charbel: We always talk at Xngage about what defines a successful digital commerce operation. We say that there are three foundational pillars for this success. Number one is that great customer experience that you’re working toward and also differentiating yourself and being innovative. We have a great team here with Sean Boulter (Xngage Solutions Architect) who has been working for four or five years on this account to help drive innovation faster to the market. Sean, can you share how your team is helping Darryl and ADENTRA Group implement their strategy?
Sean: Yeah, from the beginning, we knew there was an opportunity to have multiple brands under one umbrella and bring together a lot of different identities in their brands under one ecommerce solution. So, the challenge became: how do you do that while maintaining each individual identity without just slapping a new logo on a site and calling it a day. Making sure that we deliver all of the objectives that the stakeholders put in front of us. But more recently, with this [InRiver] PIM implementation, we knew that we had to build a solution that everyone could use across all of the different brands that contained all of the rich content that each brand is going to need and be able to design and deliver a system that can lead you guys forward.
Charbel: That’s a great way to get into the next topic I have for you, Darryl, and that’s the product data governance that you brought to ADENTRA Group. That was an important topic for you.
Darryl: It really was – and Sean’s been around longer than I have with the account. Sean and I had some conversations early about the implementation practices that happened up front and some areas that could’ve gone smoother. One of the key areas that I identified was a true lack of data governance within our organization, specifically around products. When you think about our business, we really sell the human interaction. So, our sales reps every day are out on the road, stopping by our customers' shops, talking about what the product needs are, and really selling in person. The idea of data and data governance has never really been a core thought process for us because the sellers know the products, they know them well. They could speak to them all day. They are experts when it comes to wood, right? So, there’s never been a lot of thought about how detailed does that description need to be for a specific panel when, “I know what that panel is, and I’m going to go sell it to the guy, and I’m going to finish the sale right then and there.” So, when we went to an ecommerce solution and customers were starting to see the mess that was in our backend system – which is just a lot of short forms to fit into an ERP – it became a challenge to really push digital forward without addressing the underlying issue which was content and data governance around that content. So, Sean and I have been working on this together. We recently went through a PIM RFP and selection process, and we’re in the middle of implementation right now. That PIM is really going to set up that foundation for us as we think about data governance moving forward and great product information which is at the core of everything we want to do moving forward into the next phase.
Charbel: You’ve always been forward thinking, and you want to leverage technology to move the business forward and really move the needle. With your future strategies and forward thinking, you always talk to us about AI. We have to talk about AI in this podcast – you can’t have a podcast and not talk about AI! You always talk about how you want to leverage this technology to bring new features, help your customers to be more efficient, help your sales team to be much more productive. What are you looking for when it comes to your AI strategy and how is ADENTRA Group as a whole adopting it?
Darryl: Yeah, so, we did the crawl-walk version of a strategy when it comes to AI. We really didn’t dive headfirst in two years ago when everyone else did. We really wanted to be intentional about: where does AI fit for us? Our AI strategy really comes down to practical business outcomes. We want to find practical use cases that deliver for the business. There is a tremendous number of tools out there right now – an enormous amount of tools. It’s really easy for organizations to end up experimenting with dozens of tools – or even hundreds of them – without creating any real enterprise value. We’re trying to take a more structured approach: where we can implement AI to improve the customer experience, employee productivity, and decision making. In digital commerce, that includes areas like search and discovery, product descriptions, enrichment, SEO, personalization, and eventually more conversational and agentic-based commerce capabilities and experiences. So, we’re really focused on the foundation. AI is only as effective as the data, processes, and systems behind it. I’ve said this to you before and on a number of different platforms, but it really does require good data. It’s getting better and better, and you can do more with less, but if you really want to be ready with AI, I believe you have to have that foundation. So, that’s really been our focus in setting up that foundation, and that’s an area where Xngage continues to play an important role. You guys have been a strategic partner in our digital commerce evolution. And as AI capabilities become embedded deeper in platforms like Optimizely and even the broader ecommerce ecosystem, we need a partner in you guys that understands both the technology and our business architecture. The opportunity is not just implementing the newest AI feature; it’s in helping us determine whether these capabilities belong in the customer journey and how they connect with the rest of the ecosystem.
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Charbel: We really appreciate that you have put this trust in us. And I know Sean and the team will continue to work every day to earn this trust that you’ve put in us. Darryl, before we wrap it up, can you share with us what’s next for ADENTRA Group in terms of digital strategy and how you see it evolving in the next three to five years?
Darryl: Yeah, so, I think I group it into three distinct areas for us, looking ahead into 2027 and beyond. First is customer adoption – for us, that’s first and foremost. We want to continue to increase digital engagement making our digital experiences valuable enough that customers naturally choose to use them more often. Today, we really rely on a re-buy, and we want to make that experience a little more connected and a little more seamless for our customers, so it feels like an extension of dealing with our business rather than just an ecommerce site that’s off to the side. Second is our data foundation. We continue to strengthen product information and the governance that we’re putting in place now, so that customers can find, understand, and confidently purchase increasingly complex products digitally. Third is AI and experience innovation. For us, that’s key. We want to start translating the AI foundation we’ve been building to meaningful customer-facing and employee-facing capabilities. And so, underneath all three of these is our broader goal of creating a more unified digital experience across the ADENTRA Group. The exciting part of all of this is that many of these initiatives reinforce one another. Better data improves search. Search improves customer experience. Better customer experience increases adoption. Strong adoption creates more data and insights that allow us to continue to evolve the experience even better than it is today.
The partnership [with Xngage] continues to grow. And that’s the great thing about partners. It’s not just a contract that we have in place and we work with each other. We truly partner in figuring out ways to make our businesses better. We spoke at the last conference we were at together about some AI ideas that I had floating in my head. Sean and I continue our great relationship together, really trusting one another in the things that we’re trying to accomplish. I appreciate the partnership and look forward to seeing what we can do in '27.