David Feinleib: My guest today is Dean McElwee, author of E-Commerce for CEOs and a digital transformation leader who has worked across some of the biggest names in CPG, including Coca-Cola and Nestlé, before moving most recently into the DIY and home improvement category.
Dean grew up in South Africa and has lived in Ireland for the past seven years, and he brings a global perspective to the wildly different challenges of selling tools and home improvement products online, where a single SKU might need to speak to a first-time weekend DIYer and a contractor standing on a job site in the same breath.
We talk about building content for split B2B and B2C audiences, the operational pain points brand teams face with SKU complexity, why sell sheets and spec sheets still matter, the state of content analytics, mobile legibility, his book, and where he’s actually seeing AI make a difference in e-commerce operations today.
Welcome back to Beyond the Shelf.
Dean McElwee: Thank you. Thank you for having me on.
Getting Into E-Commerce and Digital Transformation
David Feinleib: Great to see you. You have tons of amazing experience and knowledge to share on this episode. Before we get into it, let’s go back a little. You’ve worked across a wide range of global brands and categories. What originally pulled you into e-commerce and digital transformation?
Dean McElwee: I think it’s probably a combination of two main things. I like solving complex challenges, ideally when there isn’t a playbook you can just pull out and run the same play. I quite like work where you actually have to work out what’s going on, work out what the complex challenge is, and then work out what the solution is — and that solution may not be something that’s been done before. So it’s part curiosity, and really the challenge of working in different environments where complex problems need to be solved.
David Feinleib: So something where you could eventually build a playbook, but maybe there isn’t one going into the problem.
Dean McElwee: Absolutely. Often there’s no playbook when I start, and part of my job is to put one down and make it a repeatable thing that everybody can work toward. That’s normally where the fun comes in — how do you make something scalable by making it repeatable, and learning what drives it and what makes it tick.
David Feinleib: My ears might be deceiving me, but your accent sounds a little unique. Tell us about that.
Dean McElwee: There’s a bit of a backstory. I grew up in a country called South Africa, right on the tip of the African continent, and moved to Ireland about seven years ago. So that’s where the accent comes from — born and bred in South Africa, and I’ve been in Europe for about seven years now.
David Feinleib: Amazing — the good news is you sound naturally smart to us. You’ve got category experience across DIY and you’ve worked at brands like Coke and Nestlé, but DIY most recently. Tell us about the home improvement category. It’s a little different than some of the other CPG categories.
Dean McElwee: It is quite different. When I first moved into it, I thought I could just apply the same rules, which was probably a bit naive. Where it’s really different is there’s a lot more information in these categories. When you’re buying something like a tool, there are so many more variables to think through from an e-commerce point of view: does it have a battery or not, does it come with a warranty, and so on. There are far more decision points than you typically find in other categories, which makes it a really interesting category from an e-commerce standpoint.
The other interesting part is you have a split audience. Most e-commerce sites in this space, let’s say Lowe’s, Home Depot, or the ADEO Group in Europe, are catering to both a B2C audience like you and me, who might use a tool for a few hours a year, or every couple of years in my case, and a B2B audience who uses the same kind of product for hours every single day. In a typical CPG environment, you’re mostly catering to someone shopping for groceries. This is a very different set of categories and a very different set of dynamics.
Building a Content Strategy for Two Very Different Audiences
David Feinleib: So if I’m building out my content playbook and content strategy in DIY and home improvement, what does that mean given I have those two audiences to build for?
Dean McElwee: There are a couple of things to consider. Your two audiences have very different needs. A B2C shopper might be starting from a point of no knowledge at all, through to someone who’s fairly comfortable with DIY because their parents taught them. Your B2C audience runs the full range, from knowing exactly what they need to not knowing what to do at all, and the content has to cover both of those groups.
Then you have the B2B audience, which has totally different requirements and is often in a different location altogether. Picture somebody standing on a job site who needs a new drill — if he doesn’t have one, he’s not working, and he’s not making money. He needs it within the hour, and he’s almost certainly shopping mobile-first.
Coming back to the B2C audience from a content point of view, they may need instruction on what to use a product for, in what circumstance, in what context. You can’t use a drill for every single application, so you need to provide more context for that shopper.
Operational Pain Points on the Digital Shelf
David Feinleib: So I’ve got my two audiences and I’m building my strategy. What are some of the operational pain points brand managers and e-comm teams are facing today when it comes to the digital shelf?
Dean McElwee: There are a couple of big ones. The first is pure scale. Take something like drill bits — you might effectively have ten different SKUs, each with different dimensions, different lengths, different applications. That’s a huge amount of assortment complexity in DIY and home improvement, because each product can fall into a whole range of applications and categories. A large tool manufacturer like TTI, who makes Milwaukee, or Stanley Black & Decker, might sell into as many as sixty different categories, each with its own workflow.
So a lot of this comes down to understanding workflows. The big pain points tend to be SKU complexity, the sheer volume of content that complexity demands, and then, third, explaining what a SKU is and how it works in bullet points a shopper can absorb in about twenty seconds on the site before they hit purchase, whether that’s at Lowe’s, Home Depot, or anywhere else.
Content Accuracy and Consistency in a Complex Category
David Feinleib: Great list of to-dos, and I know exactly who they should talk to about it. Let’s talk about content accuracy and consistency, given all the variations and spec data that go into these products.
Dean McElwee: Content accuracy and consistency is such a big issue in this category because the products are extraordinarily complex — they simply have more attributes than I’ve seen in most CPG categories: applications, dimensions, and a much wider retail base to provide content for. The retailers in this space aren’t as concentrated, so you need variations for each of them.
On top of that, a lot of these manufacturers are constantly launching new products but are still built primarily for selling to individuals rather than online. At Lowe’s or Home Depot, you’re probably looking at somewhere around ten to fifteen percent of their business coming through e-commerce, so they’re nowhere near as mature online as, say, Amazon, or some of the other retailers we’re more familiar with.
Sell Sheets and Spec Sheets: Still Essential for Sales Enablement
David Feinleib: I want to switch gears and talk about different content types and getting in front of customers. Let’s start with sales enablement — sell sheets and spec sheets. Are those still a big part of the workflow today?
Dean McElwee: Absolutely, and it may surprise people how big a part they still play. These categories are highly complex, with lots of attributes — this isn’t a case of a product coming in five sizes and two flavors. You need content that explains what something is, how to use it, its dimensions, and so on. That’s especially true with B2B audiences, Dave. Think of someone building a large building: they’re pre-specifying exactly what they need, twenty drills, two hundred bits, and they’re very specific about it.
So sell sheets and spec sheets are extremely useful for sales teams. A lot of the sales structure in this market is territory-based, so a rep will walk around with his sell sheet and be able to talk to a retailer, explain the product, and cover every attribute without having to remember it all in his head.
David Feinleib: Makes total sense — a lot of volume, and you need the data at the ready. You made another interesting point too, that these need to travel with the sales rep out in the field much more than you might expect. Tell us about the workflow. Say you’re at a large brand that makes drills — how does that work today in practice?
Dean McElwee: Compared to a CPG business, you have a few more stakeholders in the mix, which makes things quite a bit more manual and time-consuming. First, there’s a product team responsible for developing the product, defining the attributes they think a plumber will need. It then goes through a brand team that checks tone of voice and brand identity consistency, then back into sales. It’s quite manual.
The other key part is that the bills of materials and everything upstream of that content have historically lived in ERPs. It’s really only been in the last three to four years, maybe five, that a lot of larger manufacturers have started getting seriously involved in syndication and PIM systems, which puts them roughly ten to fifteen years behind where CPG was in that world, as you’d remember from your Syndigo days, Dave. That relative immaturity on the data side makes the process quite complicated, with numerous checks and validations as material works its way through.
David Feinleib: You’ve had a look at our sell sheets solution. What do you think?
Dean McElwee: I think it’s fantastic. A couple of things stand out. One is consistency. Another is pulling from original source data. And I think one of the most important things is that it doesn’t require publishing an actual book. There are still a lot of manufacturers around the world publishing large paper catalogs. I know of a business in Europe that, until two years ago, was publishing a large catalog at a cost of around a million dollars every four years. The biggest problem is that the moment you publish the catalog, you launch three new products and it’s already out of date. Being able to turn content around quickly, accurately, and on brand without a huge setup is a real advantage.
The State of Content Analytics and Auditing
David Feinleib: We’ve talked about automation and workflows and stakeholders. I want to look at another part of the content ecosystem: analytics. How is content audited today, and how should it be looked at?
Dean McElwee: Honestly, it’s probably very immature right now. It’s not audited that often. If you think about a maturity curve, “I’ve collected the data, am I auditing and refreshing it” is still a relatively new question for most organizations. That’s partly resourcing and partly because the cost of doing it has historically been very high for clients who wanted to. I think it’s one of the huge opportunities in this space, especially because the B2B customer base in particular is quite demanding about the information it needs.
David Feinleib: We’ve been working together a bit on our Optix offering. How does that apply when you think about DIY, especially given how important spec data and other data elements are in this category?
Dean McElwee: What it does well, not just for this category but for a lot of categories, is tell you what needs to be fixed and why. Often, when I see people doing image analytics or data analytics, it’s just “here’s your issue,” and it doesn’t connect back to how shoppers actually make decisions. I’ve always seen PDP image carousels as a tool to tell the shopper what to do and why they need to use a product, moving them through that decision process much faster so they can convert sooner. That’s where I think this kind of analysis has been really useful — even something as simple as telling a shopper the application for a drill: can I use it on concrete, on steel, on both? Those kinds of answers are great, and it also makes the case internally for brand teams to focus on telling the story from the shopper’s point of view rather than the product manager’s.
Mobile Legibility and the B2B Shopper
David Feinleib: Another area you’ve had a lot of insight into is mobile — both text and imagery. What are you seeing in terms of how shoppers are shopping, and how are teams thinking about mobile legibility?
Dean McElwee: Especially in this category, it’s absolutely vital to be mobile legible and brand legible — I need to clearly see which brand I’m buying. On a mobile screen, you’re working with a very small space. Now picture a weed whacker or string trimmer, a device that might be four or five feet long. How do I know which brand it is when the image is that small? How do I know where and how to use it? That’s where mobile optimization really comes into its own, because there’s a big difference between optimizing a cereal box and optimizing something as large as a weed whacker, especially once you add accessories into the mix: does it have a battery, how many, is it corded or cordless. There are a lot more dynamics to optimize for.
And going back to the B2B audience: picture someone on a job site, with a lot of noise and a lot going on, trying to check what he needs on his mobile device, make a call, and get to Lowe’s, Home Depot, or Screwfix to grab it. He has to be able to do that quickly. If it takes too long on mobile, he’s losing money, because he needs to get to the next job. He has to be able to see that the store has what he needs, get there, pick it up, and move on.
Writing “E-Commerce for CEOs”
David Feinleib: There’s so much I could ask you about. I mentioned in your bio that you’re the author of E-Commerce for CEOs. Tell our listeners about the book.
Dean McElwee: It started as a bit of a passion project during COVID. What we experienced during COVID was that, up until that point, a lot of organizations had treated e-commerce as something you put a team behind and moved on. Then COVID hit, and suddenly it became everybody’s concern — presidents of organizations who’d seen e-commerce at seven or eight percent of sales were watching it jump to twenty, twenty-five percent. It became the window, while we were all locked away, when I realized a lot of us hadn’t necessarily grown up with e-commerce and hadn’t made that leap yet. So the book is framed around how to take what people already know about the bricks-and-mortar world and translate it into the digital world — working out the analogies, and how they map over. That was the first book. I’m busy with the second one now, which should be out in the next three to four months, hopefully.
David Feinleib: Fantastic, we’ll have you back on to talk about the new one.
Where AI Is Actually Making a Difference
David Feinleib: No conversation is complete without talking about AI right now. What are the real-world applications you’re seeing? How is it changing e-commerce operations today, and what do you see on the horizon?
Dean McElwee: I think I’m seeing it do a couple of things really well. The automation around content production and creative automation is a massive game changer for e-commerce operations. Consider the need to refresh content multiple times a year — we’ve all talked about that as an industry benchmark and aspiration for a while, but for the first time, we can actually do it without huge teams or heavy outsourcing.
Part of that is the time savings, but a big part is cost. I remember, not too long ago, four or five years back, sitting in two-hour budget meetings deciding whether to spend a hundred thousand dollars updating PDP photography, having to justify it to CFOs, running simulations to estimate exactly how much uplift we’d get to make the case. AI’s ability to standardize and automate tasks like that has been one of the huge changes we’ve seen over the last couple of years.
Rapid-Fire Questions
David Feinleib: So many great topics, we’ve covered a lot of ground. I’ve got a few rapid rundown questions for you, fast paced, just your quick thoughts. First: what’s one e-commerce trend you’re most excited about?
Dean McElwee: I’d love to say agentic commerce and jump on that trend, but I’m not going to. The biggest trend I’m actually most excited about is that everybody’s using AI to focus on doing the basics brilliantly. I think that’s one of the best things that can happen, because we’ve sort of ignored the basics while chasing shinier trends.
David Feinleib: Really well said. What’s one thing brands are getting better at in digital commerce?
Dean McElwee: I think brands are getting a lot better at being choiceful about where and how they play and what they actually need to win. In the early days it was, “we need to be everywhere, and we’re going to put out the same stuff.” Now brands are getting a lot better at asking which channels they actually need to be on, why, what the right content is for each one, and importantly, whether that content should differ by location. A Ferrero chocolate sitting at Walmart needs very different content than the same product at a retailer with a more upscale audience, because you’re speaking to a different occasion. Brands are getting smarter and more choiceful about that.
David Feinleib: Great points, and Ferrero chocolates are one of my personal favorites, we love working with them. One AI use case you think will have the biggest impact on e-comm teams?
Dean McElwee: Creative automation will be the single biggest impact for teams, not just because I’ve seen it work, but because I’ve seen how long it takes to get right manually. If you can free up teams to spend more time on merchandising and strategic thinking, rather than redoing text bullets, that’s a huge impact.
David Feinleib: One skill great e-commerce leaders tend to have in common?
Dean McElwee: Juggling. E-commerce is one of those fascinating areas where you’ve got to be part marketing, part sales, part tech, and the ability to juggle and prioritize is something I’ve seen across every really good leader.
David Feinleib: At the end of a busy week, how do you like to unwind?
Dean McElwee: Sometimes with a whiskey — I’m an avid collector of Irish whiskey, and living in Ireland, I’ve got to support my local distilleries. And a lot of the time, watching sports. I follow rugby from my native South Africa through to motorsports, I love watching Formula One. Usually it’s a combination of sport and whiskey.
David Feinleib: What’s the best way for our listeners to connect with you or learn more about your next book?
Dean McElwee: There are two good places. One is LinkedIn. From there, you’ll also find that I write longer-form articles on Substack, where I can spend a bit more time unpacking things. Those two are the best spots, and by all means, reach out and drop a DM. I’m always happy to get on a call and chat — that’s one of the great things about this industry, you can learn so much from so many different people.
David Feinleib: Dean, thanks so much for doing this. Tons of expertise, lots of great topics. I hope you’ll come back once your second book is out; writing one is a big feat, two is going to be incredible. Dean McElwee, thanks for joining me today on Beyond the Shelf.
Dean McElwee: Thank you. Thanks for having me.