I was approached by Marshall Home in July of 2020 because several of their projects had fallen a bit off of the rails and they needed guidance as well as additional hands to find themselves some better footing. They were several months behind on catalog development and their small workforce was struggling to keep up with their work volume as they continued further into what was becoming their most profitable year as a company. In addition to normal growing pains, we're also just a few short months into the Covid-19 pandemic and the world is still adjusting to the "new normal" and everything else that came along with it.

The tl;dr:

    • Company has a small admin staff of just 6, making maintaining 6 websites worth of product updates, orders, invoices, and customer management difficult.

    • Current website offering doesn't easily support orders and customers often call in because they're confused and can't find what they're looking for.

    • Internal processes contain a lot of printing out paper and shuffling it around the office.

    • Current web solution requires an offsite developer to perform simple tasks like changing photos/copy, adding products, etc.

    • Performed several database transfers to migrate them into a single system for managing orders and website front end.

    • Redesigned the website from the ground up utilizing modern best practices and tailoring to their unique customers needs.

    • Introduced new service systems within the company to streamline work efforts and simplify processes, resulting in fewer errors and missed deadlines.

    • Put self service tools in the hands of the admin staff for easier and more affordable website management.

For starters, Marshall Home Corporation is a $10m+ company that consists of 6 brands and has an incredibly small admin team of 6 people. 6 brands meant 6 individual web stores and administration portals to manage, on top of 3rd party services like amazon and Wayfair. Each of their employees were managing several email inboxes with no clear reason to each inboxes existence, confusing both customers and internal staff alike. 

Their internal systems being so disconnected was cause for a lot of shuffling papers around the building. Orders would get printed, dragged between multiple desks, shuffled to the warehouse for packing, brought back to the office with inventory updates, and would often result in additional phone calls being made for adjustments and/or generally unhappy customers receiving partially filled orders. 

Customers from each brand struggled to browse current product offerings and couldn't make simple orders online. They could fill out forms and requests, but quotes, invoices, order tracking, and updates had to be done manually by a Marshall employee once received. This made for a large amount of unnecessary phone calls, emails, and time spent trying to track things down.

Lastly, Marshall had thousands of backorders in the system from lack of inventory - including discontinued items. Customers could only find out current inventory availability by placing their order and waiting to see what showed up, or calling and speaking with someone on the phone. 

The first step is figuring out "what" we're going to do. I spent a lot of time diving through other businesses websites that had imprint/child brands to see how they handled their public facing presence. This was a uniquely challenging process as Marshall operates differently from any other company I've ever worked with in almost every single way. Ultimately, we decided that housing the different brands "under one roof" wasn't going to hurt anything, and may even incentivize their customers to try out other Marshall imprint brands. This ended up being a huge win for the remainder of the work to be done. 

Due to the small team and need for simple management, I identified Shopify as the backend software to host the new website. It's incredibly easy to create and assign user logins so each employee has their own login to the admin panel along with custom permissions so they can't change or access anything that they're not supposed to. Each employee's actions are also tracked for quality control. Because of Shopify's login system, this also means that all of the employees need only log in to one place to be able to manage orders from all of their stores in one place. Also, because it has a rather successful front-end editor, this would make small changes to marketing material incredibly easy for the team after some training so that they wouldn't need to rely on me or another professional for everything.

Next, the company was already utilizing an ERP system to track their orders, invoices, and accounting needs. This meant that unless we wanted to manually move orders from Shopify to the ERP, we needed software to translate data from one system to the other. After some research and phone calls I was able to identify a 3rd party partner that would be able to provide a mostly-pre packaged solution. This saved a ton of time, but also presented some challenges as the way in which Marshall has been able to keep up with such a lean team comes from improperly utilizing rather large pieces of the ERP's functionality. After working closely with the development team partner, we were able to workshop together a data flow that kept both systems happy and allowed orders to pass through.

​​​​​​​Make It All Make Sense to the Customer

After some conversation with the owner - he made the decision to "sell" all of the imprint companies to his most successful company, Marshall Home Corporation (an umbrella that already hosted Marshall Home & Garden and Banyan Designs). With this move, we can start branding the companies together, and we can move forward with new plans for the new website. We decided to go with something simple & elegant that matched but not copied the existing Marshall Branding. 

We're going to utilize the navigation bar to do something pretty cool that I picked up in my research for the project - a company selector. Each company will have it's own place in the navbar, accompanied by a Mega Menu to guide the user between collections. Honestly, this was my favorite part of the redesign. It was a bit difficult to tackle, but we were all incredibly happy with it in the end. 

Going this route also allows each brand to maintain it's own identify with a unique landing page and forwarding domain. Customers unfamiliar with the new site will still land exactly where they would expect to regardless of which company they came searching for. 

Customers now have one account to shop all of Marshall's brands and can view their own order history, tracking information, download invoices, and pretty much everything you'd expect them to be able to do in a modern eCommerce solution. 

    • A large, bold header pushes the primary collection for each Company to romance the customer on landing.

    • The "New Arrivals" Section automatically updates itself with the newest products that are added to the website.

    • The promotional tabs are updated when new events come around.

    • As the target customer skews older, a focus on contrast, good spacing, and large buttons/interaction points came to fruition for accessibility

    • All in all, a much brighter, modern, and unique feeling landing page from anything they were working with before.

A simple collection page shows a cleaner, more organized selection of items. Items have consistently styled imagery and metadata that makes it incredibly easy to browse. Items are now searchable and every available SKU now has a home on the site. 

In this screenshot, we are logged out - so pricing is hidden dynamically. Being as Marshall is a wholesale-first company, public pricing could run us into trouble. 

How do we solve this? We setup a super simple application form. When you arrive at the login screen for the first time, you can click "register" and fill out some basic information. When submit, an employee is notified via email and they're able to login to Shopify and approve or deny the customer. Once approved, live pricing shows up so long as they customer remains logged in. 

Along with a store this size (almost 3,000 SKU's) product management can become an issue. We spent time painstakingly going through each SKU and categorizing them by size, color, type, season, you know it. We tagged every thinkable search term under the sun. This makes it incredibly easy for customers to find what they are looking for.

In addition, because inventory has been such an issue in the past, I designed a custom Inventory module that shows real time inventory data pulled directly from their ERP. This would not only show the customer whether or not the item was in stock, but also whether or not the item was on order to come in soon. 

This single feature had a larger impact on the staff than any other implementation. Customers no longer have to call in to see if something is in stock - they just know. 

It was a LOT of work over the course of a rather long time - but the team is much more capable of keeping up and have been able to shift many of their responsibilities and focuses on new tasks that ultimately help the company move forward at a much faster pace. They can run with fewer sets of hands, fewer phone calls, and can now focus more on taking care of their customers rather than keeping up with the day-to-day. 

Further work was done utilizing the ERP integration to supply data to 3rd party partners like Wayfair, Overstock, amazon, etc. A fair amount of service design effort went into new processes and procedures to accompany the new software. There were several days of training provided and a few huge weekend projects for installing and managing new tech. 

All in all this project was a great success for all parties and I look forward to continue finding new projects to work on together.