Beautiful B2B customer experiences convert. Just ask Industry West.
From side tables shaped like boulders to modular sofas with crisp, clean lines, each piece of furniture that appears on the Industry West website is painstakingly curated in the manner of a high-end brand. And yet, you won’t encounter these unique pieces and creative angles solely in the glass- and steel-encapsulated corner offices of the executive suite. Whether you know it or not, it’s highly likely you’ve met an Industry West find out in the wild—on a long connection in an airport, typing away in a conference room or hotel room, or while visiting the headquarters of your favorite stadium.
After many years with Adobe Commerce (formerly Magento) as their platform of choice, the team sought greater efficiency in their technical operations. They needed to be able to curate high-end and highly custom customer experiences with less toil, and bring the bulk B2B ordering process up to modern standards—even though the industry itself lagged behind.
Since moving to Shopify and relaunching their website with the help of Shopify partner, Domaine, Industry West has seen:
- 90% lift in B2B web order revenue (trade accounts)
- 10% lift in new trade accounts
- 15% lift in average basket size (items added to cart)
- 20% lift in average order value (AOV)
How it started and how it’s going
The reach and influence of Industry West’s designs are a far cry from the company’s humble beginnings. The company was founded in 2012 by Jordan and Anne England. Jordan, who was in real estate at the time, went looking for some dining chairs online, then decided to cut out the middle person and go straight to the manufacturer to make his purchase. Soon, they’d filled the couple’s shed with his finds, which they sold on eBay and sent out via UPS—or, occasionally, by flying to a different state and driving a rented Penske truck through midtown Manhattan themselves, with a great deal of honking in their wake.
“There was definitely a gap in the market,” says Jordan, who is the very picture of the entrepreneurial spirit. “There wasn't designer furniture readily available. Nobody was doing pure play digital design online at the time.”
Soon, Industry West had become the go-to place for business owners and wholesalers to purchase high-end furniture online for their properties.
The challenge: Marrying bespoke experiences with greater operational efficiency
Curating beautiful customer experiences with a highly variable catalog
Each piece available for purchase through Industry West is truly unique. That’s at the core of the brand’s aesthetic—and it was also at the heart of the challenge in designing a website that truly felt like them. Their products range widely in aspect ratio. Some are long couches. Others are small, skinny stools. Putting those two next to each other on a website could potentially make the little stool seem small and the couch look gigantic.
“Roughly speaking, about 30% of our revenue comes from ecommerce, and 70% is our sales team,” says Ian Leslie, Chief Marketing Officer at Industry West. “But it’s all without cold calling—and we’ve only done one or two trade shows in all of our years.”
The website is our catalog. That means that even though ecommerce is only thirty percent of revenue, the website counts for everything in terms of every customer coming in the door.
Getting the design right was extremely difficult to do on Magento, where customization meant many extra hours of development time—and extra budget along with it, every time a new and unique SKU came through the door.
Navigating a convoluted back end with a difficult-to-manage B2B customer flow
It wasn’t just the storefront that added onto the operational hours—it was also everything about how the back end ran. In fairness, this was in part due to customers in a legacy industry, who expected to log into a trade account, register discounts, then speak to a sales representative directly to get a quote. This typically happens because the customer is in the quote stage with a designer or architect, who will ultimately be the one cutting the check, and they are just gathering estimates—but the manual nature of it all was frustrating.
“I can’t tell you the number of times we’ve had customers log in to their trade account to see their discount, add $10,000 worth of product into their cart, then send a screenshot to a sales rep to get a formal quote,” says Ian. “You’re like, okay, the quote is what you got in your cart with that discount. But they still have to have that formal process.”
Not only was this process manual, but it also required a separate experience for B2B buyers, who were directed through a separate subdomain for their trade login. Each of these buyers had to be handled individually, at the account level.
“If someone created an account they got discounts based on classifications on Magento,” says Ian. “But that’s where it began and ended in terms of personalization. There wasn’t time or the ability to do anything else.”
Struggling to create efficiencies
If you’re sensing a theme here, it’s that efficiency was both direly needed and nearly impossible to achieve on Magento.
“Jordan kept asking for more efficiency,” says Ian. “We were showing all of these hours spent on development without anything appearing to happen. I kept saying, ‘It’s not that nothing is happening, you’re not seeing anything better happening.’”
We were just spending time and money on urgent, backend things. For instance, we poured money into a sun-setting version of Magento, and then just had to spend even more when there was an upgrade. Plus every quarter there were patches. These things were what we were focusing our time and money on.
B2C or B2B, they just needed better
It was imperative that the website be not just a better experience, but also a great one. Understanding the distinct needs of the B2C versus the B2B experience was key to that—but they also weren’t radically different. The team had spent years investing in photography that was both beautiful and highlighted the specifications needed for both a premium B2C customer or a large B2B one to feel confident putting in an order.
Architects, designers, internal procurement people for Google, or someone decorating their house in the Hamptons are all generally going through the same buying process: they're all on Instagram or Pinterest. They're all Googling the same things. So I just need to show the pieces in a beautiful manner. If they like it, the difference is in whether they will buy one or one-hundred.
The solution: A new platform, a new partner, and a new approach
Though nervous about such a big change, the team ultimately pivoted the site to Shopify. Ian immediately noticed the platform itself was refreshed and improved—the strategic direction and overall site approach would be the next step.
I was a Magento guy. But that being said, everything was hard coded. Any app you wanted to add, it was difficult to do so.
To unlock the full potential of Shopify, Ian and his team went on the hunt for a development and design partner. Ultimately, they secured the help of a new partner in Tomorrow Agency (now Domaine, after merging with Half Helix), who got to work.
Designing a unique look for unique products
The Industry West team already had a deep library of gorgeous product photography from which to draw. Domaine got to work, focusing on wireframing, user interaction, and user experience that would highlight their imagery without competing with it. They put together a full token design system, and accounted for a variety of landing pages to highlight different needs.
For example, for a landing page highlighting an interior design project using hotel furnishings, they built a global section library the team can now easily use to build their landing pages going forward. And they completed analytics and user testing along the way.
The collaboration between Industry West and Domaine was key, with each side deeply listening to and collaborating with the other.
“Working with Industry West represents how great collaboration leads to innovation,” says Lenora Rigoni, Vice President of Creative at Domaine. “Our internal processes focused on redesigning the customer experience in a manner synonymous with Industry West furniture’s values: high quality, focus on craftsmanship, and ease of use.”
This becomes obvious when examining the new site’s product description pages, which function as an expanded gallery—one that does justice to the beautiful imagery the Industry West team was hoping to get more out of. There’s a two-level zoom, and a user can click on the modal to zoom in even further and discern the quality of the material at hand.
A typical challenge in the home furnishings category is that products have wildly different dimensions. Solved through a unique collaboration between Design and Development teams, Domaine created a combination of horizontal and vertical product cards that render dynamically based on the product size. Long couches take up the width of two product tiles, while more vertical items take up one. This ensures a more realistic view of the scale of each product.
“Inspired by their gorgeous photography, our team used code to crop into images, rather than creating thousands of extra images,” explains Lenora. “This code was also used to create unique aspect ratios across a variety of furniture dimensions. The outcome is a distinctive photographic style integrated throughout the website.”
When we challenge conventional ideas and think creatively with our clients, we uncover unique and beautiful solutions.
Leaning into the Shopify B2B suite
One key goal in this was to ensure they were maximizing Shopify’s capabilities, particularly when it came to their trade member programs—the companies and designers that are looking to buy in bulk. Now, these customers have a fully customized B2B experience, created using the Shopify B2B suite. This allows Industry West to sell to their B2B consumers in increments, and sell in quantity discount tiers.
One of the biggest improvements is the ability to group companies that have many email addresses associated with them into one catalog with set pricing for their company. Not only does this streamline the experience on the backend, but it also ensures efficiency and consistency for each B2B company buying within the system.
Making better use of features and partner apps to create deeply custom experiences
Another feature that the Industry West team now takes greater advantage of is Shopify Functions, through which they can offer fabric swatches. Originally available only for trade members, the team had long wanted to offer this feature to consumers as well, but they needed to be able to charge consumers a shipping fee. Now they can through Shopify Functions.
In moving to Shopify, the Industry West team wanted to be able to better personalize their email communications based on whether or not a given audience member was a trade customer. Klaviyo, an email marketing app available in the Shopify app ecosystem, allows the team to do just that.
“With Klaviyo, we’re able to separate it out so that our DTC customers are getting pretty emails with lots of images, while our B2B customers get a much more no-frills email,” says Ian. “There’s no image, just copy that gets right to the point: here’s our top 10 items in stock this week. It’s crazy how we’ve seen such a lift in click-through rates. Our CTR when emailing our entire list is around 10%, and it’s 35% when emailing our trade accounts.”
The results: A site and experience as unique as Industry West and their customers
A more beautiful, more aspirational experience
First of all, the new Industry West website is beautiful. Just take a look.
The look and flow are as seamless and elegant as the products are—as is the whole user experience.
We’ve had so much feedback on the website itself, just how great it looks, from manufacturers and customers. The aesthetic and qualitative feedback has been nonstop since immediately after we launched.
And it’s not just the cover that’s beautiful: it’s the backend, too. There’s less admin, particularly when it comes to B2B draft orders, PDF estimates, custom price catalogs, and discounts.
“It's much easier to see inventory reporting on Shopify than it was on Magento,” says Ian. “And we can easily make draft estimates and send them over chat to customers, which we could never really do in Magento. I was really nervous about the back-end management, but it’s been really good.”
Average order value up, refunds down
These aren’t just qualitative perceptions; there are hard numbers to back up the feeling that the site is more seamless, with a better flow.
Since launch, Industry West has experienced a whopping 90% lift in the share of web order revenue associated with trade accounts, and a 10% lift in new trade accounts. The average order value (AOV) has increased by 20%, and there’s been a 15% lift in the average number of items placed in a cart.
What would it have taken to achieve this same success on Magento?
“A lot more developer hours post-launch,” says Ian. “A lot more going into the code to make a change—literally everything in Magento means changing code.”
I've become a Shopify superuser. I feel so comfortable creating different product templates, page templates, and category templates. That’s something you never could do in Magento and it’s been a huge win for us. Now we do have different product templates based on collections or based on categories.
Dreaming big as they look into the future
The results are full of promising numbers. More than promising, they help the Industry West team dream big about what’s next—because they’ve got the tools now to make it happen. Soon, they’ll add Shopify Audiences to that feature list, to help them better target customized audiences.
On Shopify, the Industry West team can get as customized and bespoke as their customers expect them to be—and they can do it all with the elegance and grace of their beautiful furniture, which you can see currently taking over the world.
