Drinks in the News

DRINKS Appoints Tech Finance Leader Matt Wolf as CFO

Written by DRINKS | Jan 4, 2024 4:39:42 PM

Wolf brings over a decade of financial leadership experience and a track record of success in SaaS and emerging tech.

 

LOS ANGELES, January 4, 2024 – DRINKS, the pioneering and leading operating system for alcohol e-commerce, today announced the appointment of Matt Wolf as Chief Financial Officer (CFO). Wolf’s experience in SaaS-centric enterprises, highly regulated industries and M&A fits ideally with DRINKS’ rapid evolution and transformation-minded approach to the $250 billion alcohol industry.

 

Wolf joins DRINKS after the recent sale of its DTC unit, Wine Insiders, giving DRINKS sole focus on its core growth opportunity: the alcohol e-commerce enablement technology it has built and scaled over the last ten years. Via its WaaS (“Wine as a Service”)-platform, DRINKS enables businesses to add alcoholic beverages in a fully complaint manner directly to their online storefronts. For the nation’s tens of thousands of alcohol producers and retailers, DRINKS provides regulatory and compliance technology through its Shopify app that makes it easier and dramatically more efficient for anyone who sells alcohol online to operate.

Wolf was previously CFO of Roadster, a SaaS-based, omnichannel digital retail platform that provides the complex and regulated automotive retail industry with digital storefronts to optimize the sales experience for customers, dealerships and OEMs. Wolf oversaw dramatic revenue growth and efficiency improvements, leading to Roadster’s $360 million acquisition by CDK Global. Wolf most recently served as CFO of ChartHop, a leading people operations platform, where he led finance and operations to help scale a rapidly growing enterprise SaaS platform.

Wolf has held other financial leadership positions in the consumer goods and tech industries, including with AB-InBev, after starting his career in investment banking with Morgan Stanley, where he covered consumer goods, including beverage alcohol.

“Matt’s success in highly regulated industries and his growth mindset are ideally suited to our focus on scaling our core technology to rapidly accelerate alcohol e-commerce,” said Zac Brandenberg, DRINKS Co-Founder and CEO. “His finance background and operational discipline will further enhance the value we provide our partners as we continue aggressively deploying our infrastructure solutions.”

“There are very few companies that are working to transform entire industries the way that DRINKS is,” said Wolf. “The opportunity to work with Zac and the team to accelerate platform adoption and growth is exciting. We are building on an ever-expanding base of enterprise-level retailers, brands and marketplaces, which DRINKS is connecting to the alcohol industry for the first time, along with an already-broad base of online alcohol merchants that knows how DRINKS’ regtech makes their lives easier and helps accelerate their own growth.”

Wolf earned an MBA from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth and a BA in Economics from the University of Rochester.

To learn more about DRINKS, visit www.DRINKS.com.

About DRINKS
DRINKS (drinks.com) powers digital commerce for the $250 billion US alcohol market. The company enables alcohol e-commerce for leading retailers, online marketplaces, and alcohol companies, eliminating a century of red tape with simple-to-use enterprise-grade technology. Via the DRINKS App for Shopify, DRINKS exclusively provides Shopify merchants of all sizes with an embedded, real-time alcohol tax and regulatory solution. The patented DRINKS PAIR platform leverages AI, Machine Learning, and Computer Vision to provide personalized shopping experiences and data-driven insights. Electriq, DRINKS’ Shopify Plus Certified professional services team, extends the company’s unparalleled beverage alcohol and e-commerce experience to create best-in-class customer journeys. DRINKS was named a Top Place to Work by Built In LA for five years, one of America’s Best Startup Employers by Forbes for two consecutive years, and earned the 2023 Brand Experience Award for Marketplace Strategies & Technologies by Retail TouchPoints. 

Media Contact:  

Liz Aquilino 

laquilino@threecheerspr.com 

914-980-2827