Daniel Blatchford
Founder & CEO
Product engineer and operator. 17 years building software products, eight years running a wholesale distributor. Leads product and engineering.
Writing by Daniel Blatchford
The real cost of manual order entry in a wholesale business
Retyping orders from email into your ERP feels like a small, harmless task. Totted up across a year, it is one of the most expensive habits in wholesale. Here is where the cost actually hides, and how to work out your own number.
The UK late-payment problem, and an invoice-chasing playbook that keeps customers
Late payment is one of the most persistent drags on UK wholesalers. The awkward part is that the usual fix, chasing harder, risks the very relationships the business runs on. Here is a playbook that gets invoices paid without souring the account.
Brand-side vs distributor-side AI: how to tell which one a vendor actually is
The AI-for-supply-chain market has quietly split in two. One half is built for the brands that make product; the other for the distributors who move it. They look similar in a demo and behave very differently in your business. Here is how to tell them apart.
AI for wine and spirits wholesalers: what actually works
Drinks wholesale has its own language: allocations, duty, bonded stock, en primeur, trade pricing. Generic AI tools miss most of it. Here is where AI genuinely helps a wine and spirits distributor, and where it does not.
How to automate orders from email, PDF and WhatsApp without replacing your ERP
Trade orders rarely arrive in a tidy feed. They come as emails, PDF attachments, and photos on WhatsApp. Here is how to take the typing out of processing them, while keeping the systems and the control you already have.
How to choose AI for a wholesale distribution business: a buyer's checklist
AI demos all sound the same, then behave very differently once they meet your business. Here is a practical checklist for distributors: the questions to ask, the red flags to watch for, and the proof to insist on.
Answering trade customer questions with AI, without a bigger team
A large share of a distributor's inbox is the same handful of questions: is it in stock, when will it arrive, what is my price. Here is how AI can answer those from your real data, and where a human should always take over.
Demand forecasting for wholesale distributors: holding the right stock without guessing
Forecast too high and cash ages on the shelf; too low and you stock out when it matters most. For a distributor juggling thousands of other people's SKUs, here is how to hold the right stock without relying on a Friday guess.
What happened to our own P&L when we put AI inside our wholesaler
We do not just build Conducta; we run it inside our own wholesale business. Here are the numbers from our audited management accounts, the nine months after switch-on against the nine months before, and what actually moved them.
Why Conducta is a separate brand from Sip Champagnes
We run a wine and spirits wholesaler. We also build AI software for wholesale distributors. Here is why those have two distinct brands, and what the name Conducta actually means.
The case for human-in-the-loop AI in wholesale operations
Fully-autonomous AI makes a great demo. It does not win enterprise contracts. Here is how Conducta thinks about where the human belongs, and where they do not.
Why Conducta ships in Slack, not in a new dashboard
Every SaaS tool ships a dashboard. Almost nobody logs into it. We built Conducta as a Slack app because that is where the work already happens.
Why we built Conducta for distributors, not brands
The AI-for-supply-chain category has quietly split into two. Here is why Conducta sits on the distributor side of that line, and why it matters to our customers.
Curious about Conducta?
Thirty minutes with a founder. Bring your three worst manual processes.