In this case study, Iconography's Wayne Robbins describes how his company's unified commerce system made all the difference at high-end retailer And So To Bed …
In the dreary days of late January 2019, we connected with the new head of ecommerce and marketing at luxury bed and bedroom furniture retailer, And So To Bed, and began a dialogue.
This initial connection would lead to a pitch meeting and our eventual appointment to help support this well-known high street retailer re-platform from their old Magento ecommerce site – as part of a broader re-energising of the And So To Bed brand, its proposition and the customer experience online and in their retail stores.
Adam, the head of ecommerce, had a clear idea of the sort of agency he wanted to work with and the sort of platform he was after. As a seasoned, knowledgeable ecommerce professional who has worked with open-source platforms and knew about their limitations, Adam was now looking for an innovative and technically adept ecommerce agency – a specialist who could take on and handle the complexity of selling high-end, made-to-order furniture items.
Fortunately for us, we have a great track record in the furniture sector – working with many leading independent furniture retailers – and this meant we were ‘in the mix’ as a potential new agency partner.
Furthermore, our approach was timely – it coincided with the extension of our core ecommerce platform. It was this new innovation – an enterprise-level ecommerce platform with an integral EPoS and retail management functionality, a single coherent unified commerce system for online and face-to-face retailing, not reliant on an integration – which really caught Adam’s attention.
As part of the ‘bigger picture’, And So To Bed wanted to radically improve the in-store customer experience and empower shopfloor staff with the tools to interact with potential customers in-store, anywhere in the store, and have product information, EPoS and quoting facilities to hand.
Store staff had been working with a clunky, limited and unintuitive desktop-based, in-store order-taking screen. This approach was restrictive and didn’t enable store staff to interact with customers in context - next to the items (high-end luxury beds and mattresses) they were considering purchasing.
This outmoded form of transactional retail didn’t sit well with the high-end and specialist retail experience And So To Bed sought to provide.
When we said we had something that would deliver a fluid in-store retail experience, using the website platform, the meeting and the train tickets were quickly booked, and the rest, as they say, was history.
As a technical ecommerce agency, we are excited about the many benefits OMNIS, our unified commerce system, will bring to retailers. In the future, furniture retailers can avoid integration issues like these and get on with building successful, agile and engaging businesses which serve customers online and in-store.
If you want to work with a professional ecommerce agency, we should talk!
Wayne Robbins is a director at Iconography, which blends high-quality website design with some of the best web programming experience in the market, and has been building profitable, high-performing ecommerce and omnichannel businesses for its clients since 1997. Iconography's integration-free solution, OMNIS, is a unified commerce platform which blends ecommerce, RMS, CRM and EPoS to free retailers of the constraints of their existing platforms. Contact Wayne at [email protected].
