Home Industry News Releases Wine Industry Veterans Karin Ballestrazze and Sheri Hebbeln Join Forces with Stephen...

Wine Industry Veterans Karin Ballestrazze and Sheri Hebbeln Join Forces with Stephen Mutch, Founder of simplyCMS, to Launch truvi Commerce

82
0
Advertisement

The truvi all-in-one direct-to-consumer (DTC) platform is backed by a team with a history of putting customers first, both in terms of service and product development

Napa, CA – September 16, 2018 – Karin Ballestrazze and Sheri Hebbeln, long-time wine industry executives, have teamed up with Stephen Mutch, a former colleague and founder of simplyCMS, to launch the next generation commerce platform.

The cloud-based truvi platform allows winery customers to manage their businesses across multiple sales channels, including the wine club, tasting room, web, and mobile; all while providing a single view of the customer. Some of the platform’s advanced features include robust reporting tools to analyze performance across different sales channels (many of the company’s reports can be filtered by purchase date, settlement date, or shipment date to aid in month-end accounting reconciliations), a streamlined subscription module with the option to allow customers to modify their own wine club selections, an advanced shipment manager which is integrated with UPS, FedEx and GSO, marketing tools to help them develop deeper customer relationships, and a full set of API’s and best-of-breed integrated partners.

Seeing the problem and offering a solution, truvi proudly puts customers first

After speaking with numerous customers, partners, and vendors about what was needed to deliver something of extraordinary value to the industry, the team realized that customer service was the missing link.  As a result, one of the company’s core values is to start with the customer, or “walk a mile in their shoes.”  The founders have placed a strong emphasis on building what they like to refer to as “the DTC Dream Team” and the company’s business model places the people who are on the frontline with customers first – building systems and processes around them to ensure their success.

truvi was founded by industry veterans committed to delivering an innovative product and exceptional customer service

Karin Ballestrazze, with over 25 years of experience in operations and customer success, is passionate about building strong partnerships based on respectful and honest communication and listening to the needs of customers. Her focus is on building a team dedicated to delivering absolute best-in-class service. She came to truvi following 10 years at WineDirect, where she was Senior Vice President of Fulfillment Operations and Customer Success.

Sheri Hebbeln has 30 years’ experience in marketing and finance roles, primarily in ecommerce and DTC.  She founded a successful online luxury retailer in 1994, was a co-founder of eWinery Solutions (now VinSuite), and joined the truvi team following 10 ½ years at WineDirect, where she served as CFO. Sheri’s passion lies in expanding DTC capabilities through measurement, analytics, and marketing, to deliver bottom line results.

Stephen Mutch is a commerce expert with a passion for customer-centric product development that meets the expectations of modern, connected and empowered consumers. In 2011, Stephen founded simplyCMS, the foundation of the truvi platform. Prior to that, he was VP of Client Services at Inertia Beverage Group (now WineDirect), where he worked closely with Karin and Sheri.

Joining the truvi founders as Customer Success Manager is Dereka Binstock. With 10 years’ experience in ecommerce and client services roles, Dereka is a powerful customer advocate who is highly respected and admired by the customers she supports. She is involved throughout the customer lifecycle to ensure that all customers have an excellent experience with truvi. Dereka’s experience includes 5 years at Crimson Wine Group and 5 years serving clients at WineDirect.

 “This is an incredibly exciting time for us,” commented Stephen Mutch. “Between us we have deep roots in developing world class commerce applications for the wine industry. Our goal with truvi is threefold: 1) to build an amazing team, 2) to build a great product with faster development cycles, and 3) to make sure we are always in lockstep with the needs of our customers.”

New branding, website, and strategy

simplyCMS’ software forms the core technology of truvi. As part of the launch and revised strategy, customers will immediately benefit from:

  • Quick and intuitive setup coupled with a responsive (and growing!) support team to help them get started with truvi
  • A full selection of integrated partners. At launch, truvi integrates with CardConnect, Authorize.net, Stripe, ShipCompliant, UPS, FedEx, GSO, and Google Analytics. A two-way integration with MailChimp allows customers to dynamically sync new customers and corresponding data to their email marketing lists. In addition, a full set of JSON REST API’s means customers can easily connect data to other platforms.
  • Streamlined club tools that are simple, flexible, and fast. Current customers easily process hundreds of orders per minute.
  • A secure platform that was engineered for reliability and scale, with uptime of 99.9%. truvi also employs superior security measures, including tokenization of credit card information to prevent data theft.

For more information regarding the truvi platform visit www.truvicommerce.com, or to schedule a demo, visit www.truvicommerce.com/lp.

About truvi commerce

truvi commerce is a cloud-based multi-channel technology platform that enables direct-to-consumer (DTC) sales for wineries and wine retailers. Clients use the software to manage their businesses across multiple sales channels, including web, mobile, wine club, and tasting room; all with a single view of the customer. With a full suite of tools to manage customers, orders, inventory, and fulfillment, truvi provides everything they need to grow their DTC programs. truvi’s founding team combines decades of experience in DTC with a passion for providing honest and transparent customer service.  truvi proudly puts customers first!

Advertisement

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.