With end-of-life looming ahead, Marlow White knew they needed to make the move from Magento 1 to Magento 2. The sunsetting of your current platform isn’t generally a cause for celebration, but Dan from Marlow White was strategic about using the jump as an opportunity to make improvements to their customer experience.
Marlow White sells dress uniforms for military and first responders, as well as ceremonial swords and service awards and decorations. That being said, professionalism and precision are the name of the game.
Classy Llama helped carry this commitment to excellence in marlowwhite.com’s upgrade to Magento 2. Magento 2’s improved theming helped set the stage, and our design team helped reimagine their most popular pages for an improved custom experience.
Moving to Open Source
Marlow White’s previous site was built on Magento 1 Enterprise edition. They wanted to reduce the overhead of license fees by moving to Magento 2’s Open Source edition. We helped Marlow White evaluate this choice and helped find extensions for M2 that would help bridge the feature gap to meet their needs.
Uniform Centers
A key area of Marlow White’s customer experience is their “Uniform Centers.” Each Uniform Center serves as a hub for a certain uniform type, where any compatible uniform component can be purchased individually, or a complete uniform can be bought as a package. Uniform Centers also serve an educational purpose, as they demonstrate requirements for various uniforms, filtered by military branch, gender, rank, and occasion.
Classy Llama helped to re-architect this feature on the backend and design a new UX that would help customers find what they were looking for more quickly.
Though Uniform Centers were part of Marlow White’s Magento 1 site, they were heavily customized and required a lot of effort to maintain. On the backend, the upgrade to Uniform Centers made it easier for the Marlow White time to manage and update packages and components.
On the frontend, a new user interface streamlined the way customers selected complete packages or individual components. Our design team crafted a tabbed interface that allows customers to view either Packages or Components without loading separate pages. Previously, customers looking for individual components had to scroll down the listing to find components below the package.
Awards Builder
One of the more complex aspects of a military uniform is the awards rack. Marlow White’s “Awards Builder” feature is the best rack builder on the market for arranging the right awards and devices according to military regulations. We helped migrate this pre-existing feature from their Magento 1 site to Magento 2 with a complete overhaul of the frontend architecture and a significantly improved design and user interface.
Outcomes
A key success for Marlow White’s move to Magento 2 was their mobile experience. Nearly 60% of their site traffic was coming from mobile, but visitors in this segment were rarely completing purchases. Since the upgrade, they saw revenue from visitors on mobile devices increase by 200%.
Long-term, Marlow White will reap the benefits of a site that uses Magento 2’s native functionality better and has improved architecture. Its design improvements will continue to please shoppers for years to come.
The site was completed just in time for the Army’s major uniform overhaul coming in early 2020. As these members of the service update their look, they’ll enjoy Marlow White’s library of helpful industry information, as well as their new site’s attractive design and improved user experience.
“The Classy Llama team is highly skilled, yet down to earth. They were able to tackle and complete some extraordinarily complex jobs without stressing us out in the process. Our new Magento 2 site runs twice as fast as our old site and is already showing an increase in mobile conversions. We are very pleased with the Llamas’ work on this project.”