A huge product catalog can make a website difficult to navigate, which leads to customers bouncing and, ultimately, a loss of revenue or even a bad reputation. But for a company like PurposeBuilt Brands, with nine huge product catalogs, customer confusion can become an even bigger problem.
THE CLEANING REVOLUTION
Since 1941, the Weiman family has been pioneering a new revolution they like to call, “So much more than clean,” when they started developing their expansive line of cleaning products starting with Weiman Wood Polish. This product was a first-to-the-market of its kind, formulated specially to preserve and protect fine wood furniture.
Since then, Weiman has continued to develop more first-of-a-kind cleaning products, including pioneering glass cooktop cleaner in the 1980s. The Weiman Family’s dedication to creating products that go beyond simply cleaning and instead beautify and fortify people’s belongings led them to develop a diverse portfolio of cleaning product brands.
What started as Weiman in 1941 is now known as PurposeBuilt Brands, a company passionate about building premium brands that offer safer, gentler, and more sustainable cleaning products: “Our desire is to be better for you, your family, your business, and the environment.”
PurposeBuilt believes in operating with a purpose and passion for creating products that are prized by their users and ultimately better their lives.
eCOMMERCE STRESS AND STRUGGLES
Because PurposeBuilt Brands is dedicated to continually improving their customer’s lives by adding to their portfolio of exceptional brands, they came to a point as a company where they realized they needed cohesion and improvement in their eCommerce presentation.
Their previous Magento 2 websites were extremely buggy and overloaded with third-party plugins that made daily site maintenance so difficult and time consuming the upkeep was virtually impossible for the PurposeBuilt team. Because none of their sites were connected, their team had to play a game of debugging whack-a-mole each time Magento went through an update, fixing issues on one site and then checking through code on the other 8 until they could fix each site’s issues.
Not only that, PurposeBuilt offers a robust library of helpful content available on most of their websites that drives traffic to their eCommerce stores, but their WordPress blog was constantly in danger of going down. Pat Lee, the eCommerce Director for Weiman, and the rest of his team were frequently stressed and worried about the possibility that their number one source of inbound website traffic would be suddenly and unexpectedly non-functional.
Finally, each PurposeBuilt Brand had its own website and they weren’t connected to each other, causing their customer base to be unaware of the full catalog of quality products available to them. Their eCommerce team wanted to find a technical team with the chops to create a single shopping cart for their current brand portfolio that can scale as they add more brands.
With their brand’s websites in such a precarious state and the anxiety of potentially losing traffic (and potentially revenue) looming over them each day, the PurposeBuilt team decided it was time to find a solution.
CONNECTING A VAST BRAND PORTFOLIO
First thing’s first, PurposeBuilt’s team knew they needed a website with a much lower total cost of ownership.
They began to seek a Solutions Integration partner that could debug their Adobe Commerce Magento 2 sites, reduce custom code, and centralize their website features. Pat at Weiman had worked at a company previously that partnered with Classy Llama and felt that our team was a perfect fit to solve their pain points.
After an initial discovery period, the Classy Llama team determined making all the necessary improvements to Weiman’s current site would be time- and cost-prohibitive. We determined that, it would actually take less time, money, and effort to rebuild their Adobe Commerce M2 site from scratch. Not only that, a new build would create a website that was much more maintainable for the PurposeBuilt team providing them with the lower total cost of ownership they wanted — and with a lot less stress.
During the new build, Classy Llama was able to help PurposeBuilt think more holistically about being a multi-brand company.
A frustration the PurposeBuilt team and their customers alike had was the inability to shop all of the company’s brands at once. Because each brand had its own website, they also had their own shopping cart. But since one company owns all of the brands, wouldn’t it be easer if they somehow had a shared shopping cart between all of the PurposeBuilt brands?
The Classy Llama team said yes, it would, and created a brand switcher that would allow customers to add any product from any PurposeBuilt site and add it to one shopping cart. Not only that, we created a header functionality to make it easy for customers to switch from brand to brand seamlessly while shopping.
Now PurposeBuilt has the benefit of each of their brands having their own website, while also offering their customers the convenience to shop all in one place.
In addition to creating a stable, connected websites site with a single cart, our UX team created themes designed to help centralize branding fonts and colors without creating a cookie-cutter brand expression, given that each of PurposeBuilt’s brands are all distinct. Now their team has the ability to make one change to their pattern library and have it apply across all nine of their websites, or just as easily make a singular change to one of their brands.
To solve PurposeBuilt’s problems with their WordPress instability, Classy Llama determined that the third-party extension Weiman was using to connect to their blog would not be stable on the Adobe Commerce platform. Instead, our team recommended implementing an Adobe Commerce (Magento) specific extension from MageFan, a hybrid WordPress and Adobe Commerce (Magento) blog solution. As part of this effort, the team was able to migrate a considerable amount of blog data from WordPress to Magento where it could be more easily stabilized and maintained, as well as customizing the blog styling on the blog landing pages to match the rest of their branding themes.
Now the team at Weiman has stability for their current blog content and what they need to continue to develop an even more robust content library for their customers.
Classy Llama also bolstered PurposeBuilt’s shipping solutions by making sure their preferred shipping partner ShipStation was still the best tool for their new sites. PurposeBuilt uses ShipStation to let customers track their order shipments through their Magento website.
After a quick audit to validate their choice, the solutions team began to integrate the shipping tool on Magento. During this integration, some unexpected bugs and challenges were discovered, but our technical experts were able to rally together, solve the issues, and get the ShipStation integration up and running.
FROM CONFUSION TO COHESION
Thanks to the solutions built by Classy Llama, PurposeBuilt Brands now has a stable Adobe Commerce M2 site that’s able to maintain brand differentiation for each product in their portfolio. Not only that, the shopping cart integration allows their shoppers to browse each distinct brand while all of their sites are powered by one shopping cart.
The ease of use for customers to shop all of PurposeBuilt Brands brought cohesion to their portfolio, allowing the company to better connect with their audience and bring them the high-quality products that they’re passionate about developing.
PurposeBuilt’s team has been so happy with Classy Llama’s solution, they decided to sign on to an ongoing engagement with us before the build was even complete. Now that the website has launched, our ongoing services team is in place to provide site maintenance, further relieving the team’s stress.
As PurposeBuilt continues to build their brands, they now have a reassurance that they not only have a website that can expand along with their portfolio but also a partner who can help them with that expansion. Recently, Classy Llama developed a new project that kicks off shortly to add three additional product lines to PurposeBuilt’s website suite.
Since working with Classy Llama, PurposeBuilt now has a stable Adobe Commerce M2 build that features multiple sites in one, cohesive yet distinct branding, and an ongoing maintenance partner in Classy Llama. Now that their team enjoys a better experience for their customers and less daily stress, they’re free to focus on what they love: Developing more sustainable cleaning brands that can bring value to their customers’ everyday lives.