Dan Murphy’s: alcohol sales strong, despite cost of living struggles

After a $12 billion spin out from Woolworths in 2021, Dan Murphy’s and its sibling brand BWS form the retail arm of Endeavour Group, which also owns the ALH pubs business. In the first half of 2023, Endeavour’s drinks retail sales hit $5.4 billion – a slight decline on the previous year when COVID restrictions drove demand. Still, it remains 14 per cent higher than three years ago.

The scale and ownership of Dan’s may have changed over the decades, but Pfeiffer-Smith remains focused on building the basic pillars of the stores: price, service, and a wide range of products.

“It’s that breadth of range, the breadth of discovery of something new, something exciting. It’s been compared to like, either a library you wander through, or like a lolly shop for adults,” she said.

As she discusses the brand’s future, it’s clear she sees the company as more thank just a drinks operator. It’s a data cruncher, an events operator and a content maker that wants insights and conversations with its customers.

Many of those consumer insights are garnered from the company’s loyalty program, My Dan’s, which has notched up 5 million members over the past few years. The draw card for these members is price.

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Each day, a group of staff log on to track the cost of hundreds of popular beverages and beat the market.

As its millions of consumers interact with the business, Dan Murphy’s learns more and more about what they like. The anonymised pool of data helps the business see the interests and shopping behaviours across a range of demographics. “We can see what premium customers are doing, and younger versus older, and how that plays out across different customers,” Pfeiffer-Smith said.

It helps shape the group’s content business, including its digital platform Dan’s Daily, where lists of the top Margaret River cellar doors sit alongside tutorials on how to start drinking mezcal.