There are certain challenges related to online sales of high-end furniture. Buyers can’t assess furniture tactilely, it’s difficult to present actual physical parameters, there may be too many product attributes, etc. A rather complex ecommerce market, we have to admit.
Not all ecommerce platforms are doing a good job displaying designer pieces of furniture. To put it simply, unique, extraordinary things require unique and extraordinary digital merchandise.
And one platform – due to its unlimited customization options – has gained popularity among designer furniture manufacturers and retailers. It’s Adobe Commerce.
Let’s take a deep dive into three cases to find out what attracts top furniture retailers to the Adobe (ex-Magento) ecosystem.
Contents:
Tom Dixon
Lovesac
Industry West
Wrap-up: Why all this is possible with Adobe Commerce
Tom Dixon
Tom Dixon has already become quite a well-known name in the industry. Once a flashy luxury label catering to an elite crowd familiar with the nuances of contemporary art, they have become a recognized global brand.
As an example of the project’s innovative spirit and potential, consider that Dixon set up a 62-ton press in a museum of modern technology so that custom designs could be made on the spot.
Such a reverent attitude to the uniqueness of the product produced and the interactivity of the production process itself runs through Tom Dixon’s entire body of work.
Challenge
Perhaps this is why, when the brand began its digital transformation, the uniqueness of the product – and the desire to convey it at all costs – once again became a pillar.
Another concern was interactivity. How to maximize efficient interaction with clients while receiving immediate direct feedback from them?
The content and media received special attention: how to maintain the same level of engagement that social networks like Instagram and Pinterest have established. Tom Dixon needed advanced tools in order to work with high-resolution luxury content.
Solution
To cope with such outstanding tasks, the brand decided to work with one of the most flexible platforms on the market – Adobe Commerce (ex-Magento). Much of the inspiration came from the fashion industry, which had already perfected the direct-to-consumer business model.
The flexibility of Adobe stores was also a huge plus. There are plenty of plugins to choose from, allowing even a modest team of developers to implement technically complex ideas.
Structurally, the site had three sections: Shop, Spaces, and Stories. The Shop section, according to the uniqueness of the products, had expanded product options for selection. The Spaces offered customers a better idea of designer furniture and how it looks in certain settings familiar to them (be it offices or restaurants, etc).
Finally, thanks to Stories, buyers received their insta-dopamine similar to the one they go to social networks for.
Tom Dixon website did a great job of recreating the feeling of total immersion in their collections and design world by combining such disparate elements.
The product pages are particularly important because they showcase the originality of the company’s aesthetic. Adobe Commerce allows owners to work with bulky branded professional photos comfortably which is essential for interior designers.
Thanks to the flexible functionality of the ecommerce platform, it was also possible to implement a furniture constructor. The tool engages customers to create unique interior elements by themselves, covering Tom Dixon’s need for more interactivity.
And not only customers – product CAD files are available on the site for wide use by designers and architects. The degree of interactivity has increased even more, engaging experts and professionals to contribute.
Adobe Commerce capacity allowed the brand to scale its online business to all global platforms, easily customizing prices and content for each region separately.
Impact
Tom Dixon received a unique platform to match its unique products. The website’s performance has improved significantly, encouraging visitors to spend more time on site (+7.5%), dramatically reducing the bounce rate (-18.8%). Since the start of the launch, the conversion rate has also increased by 31.5%.
Adobe Commerce admin capabilities are enormous: adding products (even as complex as Tom Dixon’s) is easy, as well as managing a huge amount of content by a small team.
Based on the available statistics, the label expects to receive 20% of the revenue from the site. On top of this, Tom Dixon’s extraordinary style has been successfully digitized thanks to Adobe ecommerce platform.
Lovesac
Lovesac has been recognized as one of the fastest growing furniture retailers in the US. They gained popularity in the furniture and comfort industry with their unique concept of The World’s Most Comfortable Seat – super-comfortable bean bags.
At some point in their story, Lovesac decided to shift from the luxury niche to the D2C sustainable sales model. Now, sustainability is at the core of their manufacturing and product design.
In the US, up to 10 million tons of furniture end up in a landfill every year. Lovesac designed The World’s Most Adaptable Couch “to last a lifetime”. The Sactionals line was built to be “forever changeable, continuously upgradeable, and future-proof.”
This innovative new line of modular sofas required a technical solution as flexible and one-of-a-kind as the product itself.
Challenge
Lovesac’s ambition to sell costly modular sofas that customers could endlessly update and rearrange instead of throwing them in a landfill was dicey.
For its successful implementation, they required a digital platform able to inspire trust and confidence among customers. A virtual environment where shoppers would feel as comfortable as if they were lounging in their desired modular sofa.
Furthermore, Lovesac wanted their customers to enjoy a frictionless shopping experience across all available channels, wherever they are: in showrooms, on mobile or browsing the web on their desktop.
Lovesac was looking for an ecommerce solution to match the luxury feel and premium nature of its sofas. Since this popular furniture brand was known for its white-glove service at the pre-digital stage of their becoming, they wanted to preserve the trust they gained.
The brand’s sustainable attitude to encourage shoppers to “buy less, but buy better” demanded building a new kind of virtual showroom for their online presence.
On top of this, their digital transformation took place during the beginning of the pandemic, so one of their other goals was to maintain close relationships with their customers via the capabilities of their online store.
Solution
As one of Lovesac’s executives put it, they chose Adobe Commerce as their ecommerce environment since it has the same nature as their flagship product, Sactionals — it is super customizable to fit any needs.
A pair of jeans can have several colors, maybe a couple of different styles, but few things have as many options as the Sactionals, which have endless variations to assemble.
With Adobe Commerce’s admin-friendly panel, it was easy to set up a robust D2C functionality with a convenient virtual showroom. And furthermore, to design a unique shopping journey for their hedonist lie-abeds and loungers.
To make it even more engaging for amateurs of premium comfort, Lovesac employed a flexible Magento platform to enhance their online store with educational and instructional content, including tutorials, how-to videos, recommendations from experts and happy customers.
With a bit of customization, they also created pages with inspiration materials, technically allowing customers to share their assembling tips and experience with one another.
However, the most important feature, the centerpiece, is an interactive Sactionals product configurator. Here, Magento’s potential really shines. Online customers can assemble their cream-dream deluxe sofas step by step, as easily as kids play with their Lego bricks. Configurator allows customers to tweak every little detail: the number of seats, fill materials, colors, covers, accessories, etc.
Impact
The launch of the new website on Magento 2, along with the original configurator, allowed Lovesac to unify the user experience and blur the line between online and offline stores.
Thanks to these solutions, online sales have increased by 100% during the pandemic. And in less than a year, conversion rates and AOV saw double-digit growth compared to pre-Adobe periods.
Cherry on top: in 2019, Lovesac topped the list of 100 fastest growing furniture retailers in the states.
Industry West
The story of the Industry West began out of curiosity or even as a dare.
Imagine a couple: one evening, they are browsing the Internet searching for the design furniture for their nest. They are browsing and trying to decide; however, nothing can drag their attention. And then one of them says – “listen, why don’t we just start the production of something we’d love to have?”
The future founders were looking for designer interior items, and since absolutely nothing fit their tastes (moreover, it was unjustifiably expensive), they decided to launch their own furniture line. Isn’t this a reasonable reaction to the frustrating circumstance of not being able to find the stuff you need?
Their daring turned out to be so successful that, in a fairly short time, they were able to attract numerous top customers.
Challenge
“Every single Industry West piece & project comes with a tale or two – separating us from the standard boxed-in D2C narrative.” This is how Industry West positions themselves.
This otherness and uniqueness also required an extraordinary approach to digital transformation. Each piece of Industry West furniture has its own story, or even two.. How to bring it to digital life?
Industry West was caught in a bind at a crucial period of digital transformation: how to avoid alienating customers without compromising on the quality of the unique shopping experience they might provide in the long run.
Moreover, they aimed to create a convenient digital environment for customers, where they could plan, design, and think about design freely.
Among other things, they wanted their ecommerce site to become a new milestone in developing their business. And an easy-to-use platform for collaboration with their trade partners that would generate additional growth.
Solution
To create an intuitive B2B user experience for their store, Industry West chose Adobe Commerce.
They developed an original tool – the wishlist. A primary goal of the wishlist was to provide a user-friendly setting, a hub from which customers could access everything they need to carry out home renovation projects.
There are a variety of filters and color palettes to choose from, as well as the option to make a timetable for a project, import a user’s Pinterest boards as sources of inspiration, and even modify and share their creations with others.
Impact
Thanks to their digital transformation with Magento software, it was possible to engage numerous new customers. Thus, the number of phone calls increased by 30%.
The wishlist is very popular, and hundreds of individual projects are in progress. Hundreds of SKUs of new products are being added to these projects. This made it possible to increase AOV by 35%.
On top of this, the annual Industry West’s online revenue has grown by 40%.
Wrap-up: Why all this is possible with Adobe Commerce
We see some patterns and common trends.
- In all three cases (somewhat similar, somewhat different), the brands resort to ex-Magento not by chance – this is a data-driven decision due to the many well-known advantages of Adobe Commerce over other platforms.
- In all three cases, we are dealing with unique products, and in order to emphasize this uniqueness, we need a large set of tools for customizing the e-commerce environment.
- In all three cases, we want more interactivity: for one site, this is a configurator for assembling a unique sofa; for another, it is a wishlist – a tool for virtual planning for a desired set of products.
- In all three cases, we also need some kind of simulation or seamless integration of image-based social networks like Pinterest or Instagram. Brands need tools that allow their customers to create and edit their projects easily, and share their experience.
- Also, in all three cases, brands wanted their customers to enjoy the convenience of an omnichannel shopping experience. The brands that produce furniture often have a large number of physical locations that they want to promote online.
- And brands also wanted to scale their businesses globally with no hassle.
Adobe Commerce does an excellent job with all these tasks. The flexibility of the platform allows you to work with extraordinary products; the customizability of the platform allows you to create technically complex constructors for assembly and planning (virtual placement in space) – thus having an idea of how this or that object furniture may look in a particular interior.
Adobe Commerce also works great with social media integrations and in general can be easily configured as an interactive platform convenient for all participants in the process, whether we are talking about B2B or D2C.
Imagine what prospects will open up as the platform masters new AI or augmented reality.
Source from Grinteq
Disclaimer: The information set forth above is provided by velocityppc.com independently of Grinteq. Alibaba.com makes no representation and warranties as to the quality and reliability of the seller and products.
