Industry: Alcoholic Beverage Distribution | Headquarters: New Jersey
Challenge: Kramer needed to rebuild a 1,250-SKU beverage price list every month. Although 90% of prices remained unchanged, new products, discontinued SKUs and complex promotions forced a complete manual re-layout.
Solution: Pagination database publishing software generating the monthly price list from Kramer’s Excel data, applying predefined rules for pricing tiers, mix-and-match offers, beverage formats and brand layouts.
The Complexity Behind a Monthly Beverage Price List
A monthly wholesale price book is not just a catalogue. It is a sales tool where pricing logic, promotions and product structures need to stay accurate every cycle. Kramer, a New Jersey wholesale distributor of alcoholic beverages, publishes exactly this kind of document.
The catalogue carries the mechanics that a beverage buyer navigates by:
- Cases, bottles and kegs as distinct formats, with cases at the front of the book and kegs at the back.
- Single serves as its own section at the front, in alphabetical order, laid out differently from the main book.
- Multi-level (break point) pricing, where the same product prices differently at 5+, 10+, 15+, 40+, 52+ and 104+ units, showing the promotional price alongside the discount.
- Mix-and-match groups, where products in the same group combine towards a shared quantity threshold, so a buyer hitting the break point on one flavour also unlocks the price tier on the others.
- Dated promotions, where about 95% of deals run for the standard monthly period and 5% are scoped narrower (a Monday-and-Tuesday only offer, a mid-month price change) and have to sit inside the main brand block with a compact validity note.
- Brand-forward layout, with the brand logo above the SKU rows rather than a product photo per line.
- A new cover file for every monthly issue.
See how beverage price list automation works.
Kramer Before Pagination: The Excel-To-Acrobat Monthly Cycle
Before automation, Kramer’s monthly cycle ran in Excel with an export to Acrobat. About 90% of the prices held steady from one month to the next, so the real pain was not price maintenance. It was product add-ins and drop-outs: a supplier adds three SKUs, another discontinues one, and the layout has to be re-flowed by hand across the whole book. Every month, several days of work.
Kramer’s team can use InDesign, but a fully manual InDesign process was days of layout time per cycle, on top of the data work. That was the shape of the workflow they wanted to leave behind.
What Pagination Automated For Kramer’s Monthly Price List
Kramer’s monthly Excel export now feeds Pagination, which produces the full monthly issue against the rules defined once. The requirement Kramer set at kickoff was clear: the layout has to be a cookie-cutter rule that applies automatically to every item, without manual adjustment per brand or product family. The same rules have to hold for a simple two-SKU brand and for a complex one, with dozens of flavours across multiple packs and mix-and-match combinations. The transformation covers the whole book, not just the product pages.
| Area | Previous workflow | Automated Workflow |
|---|---|---|
| Data source and output | Monthly Excel export, reformatted for layout, sent to Acrobat, several days per cycle | The same Excel export ingested directly, print-ready PDF (and packaged InDesign) generated on demand |
| Book structure | Case/bottle/keg split, single serve section, brand-by-brand grouping and same-price consolidation all held together by hand | Case beer at the front, kegs at the back, single serve as its own alphabetical section, brand logos placed above each product table, and same-price products in the same category and brand collapsed into one row set to save pages |
| Break-point pricing and mix-and-match | Break-point tables and mix-and-match combinations built by hand, with visible spaces or gaps where a product had more than one level | Break points read from the data and rendered in the price block; products in the same mix-and-match group render together with the shared threshold visible |
| Dated promotions | Special promo windows (Monday-Tuesday deals, mid-month price changes) inserted manually into the right brand block | Deals sorted by their from-date, with the validity dates printed inline for anything narrower than the full month |
| Static pages and monthly cover | Covers and table of contents rebuilt or refreshed every issue | Table of contents generated automatically; Kramer supplies the cover file for the month and the workflow picks it up |
How Pagination Handles Mix-And-Match, Dated Promotions And Beverage Formats
Two mechanics are worth calling out separately, because they are what a generic catalog automation tool tends to miss.
Mix-and-match is not a display convention. It is a commercial rule: products in the same group count towards each other’s quantity break, so a buyer who takes a pallet of one flavour also lifts the price tier on the other flavours in the group. The workflow reads a mix-and-match flag on each SKU, groups them together at render time, and shows the shared threshold on the block. New products join the group by getting the flag, not by anyone editing a layout.
Dated promotions run inside the same monthly book. Most deals are valid for the whole month, but a portion are scoped narrower: a Monday-and-Tuesday only offer, a first-half-of-month price that changes on the 15th, a special date around a holiday. The workflow sorts these blocks by their from-date, prints the validity line only when it is not the full month, and keeps them inside the brand block they belong to instead of parking them in a separate section.
Automate Your Monthly Beverage Price List
A monthly wholesale beverage price list involves far more than updating product information. Share a sample of your current book and a portion of your product and pricing data, and the Pagination team will map the path from your existing workflow to an automated monthly edition ready for print.
