Solving Digital Discovery in a Regulated Industry
October 8, 2026
When wine ecommerce, digital distribution and the three-tier system collide, you get one of retail’s hardest transformation challenges. In this episode of Borders & Bourbon, PourNow cofounders Paul Mabray and Andrew Levy explain what it takes to simplify it.
Joining Vanesia Adkins and Gordon Thomason, Paul and Andrew discuss messy product data, local retail, regulatory complexity, AI, distribution strategy and why growing businesses need to “nail it before they scale it.”
Wine ecommerce, beverage alcohol distribution, digital retail and three-tier compliance create a uniquely complicated path between a shopper and a bottle.
In this episode of Borders & Bourbon, hosts Vanesia Adkins and Gordon Thomason sit down with PourNow cofounders Paul Mabray and Andrew Levy to explore what growing businesses can learn from an industry still working through its digital transformation. They discuss why the best customer experience often depends on complexity being solved behind the scenes, how regulation can become part of the product rather than an obstacle to it and what happens when messy data or unclear terminology gets scaled through technology and AI.
What You’ll Learn:
- Why brands should meet customers in the moment they are ready to buy
- How PourNow approaches the challenge of matching millions of wines and spirits across thousands of retailers with different systems and naming conventions
- Why digital commerce does not have to replace brick-and-mortar retail
- How deep knowledge of the three-tier system helps Paul and Andrew design technology around regulation
- Why teams need shared definitions before automation or AI starts accelerating misunderstandings at scale
- How a product can be physically available in a store but effectively invisible if it does not appear correctly on the digital shelf
- Why founders should “nail it before they scale it” and build a real distribution model