Client Challenge
Growth. It’s a good problem to have. However, with growth comes the challenge of scale, process, and systematization. This was exactly the challenge Caroline Z Hurley faced after she launched her eponymous homeware company.
As her business grew, it became apparent that the platform she’d chosen was not going to meet the need for process centralization of her wholesale business which was becoming more complex, and seeing increasing volumes as time passed as managing her wholesale customers was still a manual process.
- eCommerce
- UX & UI Design
- Front End Development
- Slack
- Google Drive
- Zeplin
- InVision
- Sketch
- Balsamiq
- JavaScript
- CSS & HTML
- browsersync
- Gulp
- Shopify Apps
TWG Approach
We knew we needed to do a deep dive into Caroline’s business to gain an understanding of how decisions were made and what processes she and her team used to manage the wholesale business. In spite of the fact that they had built an online store, many of their processes for managing orders were still manual and the platform was constraining and would remain so, even with customization. Through mapping workflows with a view to reducing friction and increasing digitization, we came up with a set of recommendations that centred on moving to Shopify and making things as user friendly as possible for Caroline and her team going forward.
Out of the box, Shopify would not solve Caroline’s business challenges, but by integrating the Wholesale (Supple), Quickbooks and MailChimp apps, we were able to automate all workflows and TWG created a seamless automation for her inventory flow which freed-up hours of work that was being managed by one of her key team members -- the very person who needed to be focused on managing growth in the D2C business.
Brand management and marketing were other critical elements of this engagement. We knew exceptional design was required to properly convey a tactile product in the two-dimensional world of online retail. This meant storytelling had to be at the forefront of the site’s design. We worked collaboratively to identify the kind of information she needed to share for the kinds of customers she sought to attract and customized Shopify modules to accommodate.
Most significantly from an ongoing site administration perspective, we connected the front-end experience to editable fields in the Shopify back-end admin portal so that Caroline and her team could make changes to the site quickly and easily.
The Outcome
When it comes to process flow and inventory management Caroline Z Hurley is a model of how to manage high-volume wholesale. Now, nearly 100% of the necessary processes can be executed without human intervention. While Caroline is delighted with the efficiencies the TWG team was able to create, she is first and foremost an artist and storyteller, and as such she was personally delighted by our ability to adapt existing Shopify themes to make the site image-rich.
I am obsessed with quality. For me quality is born from great collaboration, open dialogue and passion — I’m an artist after all. The TWG team is also focused on their craft, and quality is at the heart of what they deliver. For them it wasn’t just about picking the right platform and building a beautiful brand aesthetic for my online store, it was also about ensuring they really understood my business and what it would take for us to grow effectively and efficiently.