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, it’s 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, he had a realistic view of their relative strengths a weakness. 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 online.
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, in the sense that it coincided with the extension of our core eCommerce platform and it was this new innovation – an enterprise-level eCommerce platform with an integral EPoS – a single coherent 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 shop floor staff with the tools to interact with a potential customer in-store, anywhere in the store, and have product information and EPoS facilities to hand.
Store staff had been working with a clunky, limited and unintuitive desktop based in-store order taking screens. 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 have something that would deliver a fluid in-store retail experience, using the website and tablet, the meeting and the train tickets were quickly booked…and the rest as they say is….
The first phase of the project is now ‘bedding in’. The eCommerce platform is generating online sales and driving store visits. It serves as an ‘endless aisle’ in smaller branches, where, due to space constraints, And So To Bed are unable to show as many beds as in their flagship stores.
As a technical eCommerce agency, we are looking forward to linking our solution with And So To Bed’s parent company’s SAP system in the coming months and working closely with this exciting and ambitious new client in the years to come.
Contributor: Wayne Robbins, Director – Iconography Ltd
[email protected]
www.iconography.co.uk/iconography-instore
