Organized Living Case Study
After making major headway on updating their brand, the Organized Living team came to Sparkbox ready to bring their digital presence up to the standards of their high-end organization products.
The Challenge
The web team cares for their main consumer-facing site, their ecommerce site, a site for professionals, two different Intranets (for dealers and sales teams), and a web app that allows users to customize a storage solution for their needs. It's a lot of work to create, modify, and maintain all those properties with just a small web team. We knew right away that in addition to driving sales and leads, we needed to reduce the time it took for the technical team to build and update all the platforms they support.
We worked with Organized Living to establish goals and prioritize the top sites and templates to tackle in our engagements. Our initial effort focused on the main site. We later had the opportunity to contribute to Organized Living's ecommerce exploration.
Reimagining the Core Site
We worked very closely with the Organized Living team by bringing them into the why and how behind our decisions.
Organized Living storage solutions are most commonly installed in bedrooms, which are very personal spaces. Homeowners and homebuyers have to feel comfortable inviting Organized Living into their most intimate rooms. To accomplish that, we suggested a careful shift away from focusing on their products and toward the people who use them. The redesigned site would highlight products through a focus on customers, their rooms, and what those storage solutions could mean in their lives.
The site should feel like sunshine through an open window or a perfectly cozy blanket on a cold day—warm, homey, and "just what you need." The Sparkbox team worked with photos that contained heavy doses of natural light washing over the people and products, reinforcing the idea that an organized life makes life better. The Organized Living team did a great job taking our lead and finding successful imagery and content to support that vision.
We embraced a streamlined approach with a focus on customers in the new information architecture, which drastically reduced the number of product pages—from 74 down to 8. And we further reduced complexity by repeating a single "Get Started" call to action at key points throughout the site.
Content and design worked together to hone in on the emotional side of storage solutions—how an organized space means so much more than just a nice closet. It means peace of mind.
Sparkbox developed a design system and worked closely with Organized Living to ensure they could integrate and own the system long term. We had a strong partner in Organized Living, and they were excited to make the most of the design system. Micheal Hickerson, Organized Living's Director of Software Development, said, "We were able to significantly increase scope mid project to include a second site and still meet a tight timeline based on the design system and CMS framework."
We also discovered that the design system made our development process more efficient. The design system has become a standard part of our development process. Since launching our redesigned website, we've expanded the design system to include our Intranets and email templates. I'm looking forward to the day when we have design system components for all our web assets.
You can hear more about the design system and its integration strategy on the Responsive Web Design Podcast.
Ecommerce
Sparkbox also supported Organized Living in an ecommerce exploration. The Organized Living team wanted to iteratively experiment with ecommerce to support direct specialty orders. It was important to the Organized Living team to approach ecommerce as a trial effort and to test its long-term potential for the company. With this understanding, Sparkbox evaluated a range of options and recommended BigCommerce. BigCommerce gave Organized Living the option to start small and work from an existing template. We were able to make minimal changes to the template to ensure alignment with the Organized Living brand, without going too far into the investment. Our approach gave them just what they needed to experiment in an important new space.
Results
- More professionals contacted Organized Living in the first 72 hours after relaunch than contacted them in the entire previous year.
- The average online order amount increased 71%.
- The Organized Living team added an additional professionals site to their initial launch plan mid-project and still launched on time and within budget.
- Ongoing development has been smoother and more effective.
