American Hotel Register
American Hotel Register is a 150-year-old B2B hospitality supply company. When I stepped in to lead digital, the business was still running on print-first muscle memory, a legacy catalog, fragmented analytics, and a digital channel that served as a supplement to sales reps rather than a growth engine. Over a decade, I led the cross-functional digital team (design, development, marketing) and rebuilt the digital organization from the platform up. We replatformed onto SAP Commerce Cloud (Hybris), stood up a modern analytics and experimentation stack (Adobe Analytics, Adobe Target, Qualtrics), modernized marketing operations (Acoustic), rebuilt customer support (Zendesk), and layered a content ecosystem (WordPress) on top. The most strategic piece of the transformation wasn't the platform migration; it was the custom vendor advertising program, rules engine, and CMS we built in-house. That system turned catalog placement into a monetizable inventory and delivered $3.5M in incremental profit while giving vendors a measurable performance channel for the first time. The results compounded: marketing campaign output scaled 5×, production efficiency improved 40% through purpose-built builder tools, and digital sales mix grew from 51% in 2010 to 90% in 2021, a generational shift for a company that predates the telephone.
Quick Facts
Technology Stack
A 150-Year-Old B2B Company in a Digital-First Decade
American Hotel Register had been the institutional supplier to the hospitality industry for a century and a half, and most of that history was built on print catalogs, field sales, and long-standing purchasing relationships. The digital channel existed, but it was a supplement, not a spine.
Legacy Commerce Stack: The e-commerce platform couldn't keep up with the SKU depth (tens of thousands of products across housekeeping, guest room, food service, and facilities), couldn't personalize for institutional buyers, and required engineering for every merchandising change. Digital sales had plateaued around 51% of revenue and were trending sideways.
Fragmented Analytics & Marketing: Campaign performance lived in spreadsheets. Experimentation was essentially impossible; there was no infrastructure to run a controlled A/B test, measure the result, and decide what to ship. Marketing ran on print production cycles, not digital feedback loops.
Untapped Vendor Monetization: American Hotel's catalog placement was, economically, a high-value surface: dozens of vendors wanted premium positioning, but there was no system to sell, target, or measure that placement. Real money was sitting on the table every day.
Organizational Risk: The hardest constraint wasn't technology; it was that a 150-year-old B2B organization had to change how it operated without breaking the institutional customer relationships that had carried the company for a century. Digital transformation meant cross-functional rewiring across design, development, marketing, and CX, not a website redesign.
From Print-First to Digital-Native: In Six Threads
The transformation ran on six parallel threads over ten years. None of them worked in isolation; each one unlocked the next.
Build the digital organization
Led hiring and cross-functional team design across design, engineering, and marketing. Established shared rituals (roadmapping, design reviews, release cadence) so the three disciplines could ship on the same clock instead of handing work over walls.
Replatform onto SAP Commerce Cloud (Hybris)
Led the platform selection, vendor negotiation, and implementation that moved American Hotel onto SAP Commerce Cloud. Rebuilt catalog, taxonomy, pricing, account management, and B2B-specific flows (approval chains, cost centers, reorder patterns) on the new stack.
Stand up the analytics & experimentation stack
Implemented Adobe Analytics for behavioral data, Adobe Target for on-site experimentation, and Qualtrics for voice-of-customer. Made measurement and testing a normal part of every release, not a special project.
Build the vendor advertising program
Designed and shipped a custom vendor advertising program with a rules engine and a custom CMS for placement management. Sales, operations, targeting, reporting, and billing were all built in-house because nothing off-the-shelf fit a B2B catalog of this shape.
Modernize marketing & CX operations
Rolled out Acoustic for marketing automation and lifecycle messaging, and Zendesk for unified customer support. Built custom marketing builder tools that collapsed campaign production time and raised campaign throughput dramatically.
Content ecosystem on WordPress
Layered a WordPress content ecosystem on top of Commerce Cloud to power SEO, editorial, and long-form content that drove top-of-funnel and fed the commerce engine.
The Platform, the Tooling, and the Program
The visible artifact was a modernized commerce experience on SAP Commerce Cloud. The invisible artifact, where most of the value actually came from, was the in-house tooling and programs we built on top of it.
The vendor advertising program. A custom rules engine and CMS let the merchandising team monetize catalog placement at scale. Vendors got targeted, measurable placement; American Hotel got a new recurring revenue line. The program delivered $3.5M in incremental profit on its own.
Custom builder tools. Marketing campaign production was one of the biggest hidden costs in the organization. We built purpose-built builder tools that let the marketing team ship campaigns 5× faster and cut production overhead by 40%. That throughput made the analytics and experimentation investments pay off; there was actually enough campaign volume to test into.
Unified analytics + experimentation. Adobe Analytics + Adobe Target + Qualtrics created a feedback loop the organization had never had before. Decisions on pricing, layout, merchandising, and campaigns became empirical instead of political.
WordPress content ecosystem. The content side of the funnel got its own platform, its own editorial rhythm, and its own measurement, and it fed Commerce Cloud with qualified traffic instead of being a disconnected marketing site.
Digital sales mix, compounded. The combined effect (platform + program + tooling + analytics) moved digital sales mix from 51% in 2010 to 90% in 2021. That number is the one that matters: a 150-year-old B2B company ended the decade as a digital-first business.
A Generational Shift, Measured
Over the arc of this work, American Hotel transformed from a print-first B2B supplier into a digital-native commerce business, without losing the institutional customer relationships that had carried the company for 150 years.
The numbers tell the compounding story: a new revenue program, a step-change in marketing throughput, a collapse in production overhead, and a wholesale shift in where the business actually came from.