Case Study - Project 06
A nationwide brand and retailer of fireworks was looking to re-platform its website to provide a connected commerce experience to its customers. Fireworks cannot be sold online, however leadership was looking to maximize the impact of its digital experience on improving its in-store sales, both during high seasons such as July 4th and New year’s and by raising interest during the rest of the year.
Challenge
A nationwide brand and retailer of fireworks was looking to re-platform its website to provide a connected commerce experience to its customers. Fireworks cannot be sold online, however leadership was looking to maximize the impact of its digital experience on improving its in-store sales, both during high seasons such as July 4th and New year’s and by raising interest during the rest of the year.
Client’s existing website, e-commerce store front and the stores were disconnected. Their content creation and management processes and systems did not allow for agility in delivering content to their users and engaging them beyond their website or e-commerce store. Even though their product is highly specialized and their brand highly recognized, they were not able to deliver a highly differentiated digital experience. Their IT and content team was very lean, and they were finding it hard to recruit and retain talent due to the challenges posed by their existing tech stack and related processes.
Beyond providing an inspiring, engaging and personalized experience to its customers, the client wanted the new platform to integrate seamlessly with their ERP, in-store systems, and BI to deliver a connected experience, and to gain abilities to continually experiment with, learn and evolve their products, offerings and commerce strategies.
Solution / Approach
GSynergy paired client’s IT leadership with a senior digital transformation consultant, who started with studying their current systems, people (org structure, skills and culture), and processes for creating, managing and delivering their digital content in the context of their past and their near-term and long-term goals from their digital transformation. The consultant also gauged their future ability to recruit and retain talent in the functions of content creation and delivery.
With that foundation, GSynergy first helped them layout the needs for the MVP and then a roadmap for their long-term needs. GSynergy researched solution alternatives and presented multiple alternatives that would deliver for their functional and technical needs, but in the context of TCO to acquire and maintain those solutions, the future org structure and skill needs, and the kinds of work and effort their future teams would have to perform to grow and maintain the solutions.
GSynergy interfaced with technology vendors, designed and conducted POCs to demonstrate solution and vendor fit, and then finally helped leadership make an informed decision.
GSynergy then put together a dedicated team of front-end and back-end engineers under the leadership of a senior transformation consultant to build, performance test and rollout the MVP. GSynergy also worked closely with the UX, IT and content teams of the client throughout the project to ensure they were enabled from the inception to maintain and grow the new CMS, content delivery and connected commerce system.
Results
The fireworks brand gained desired agility in managing and delivering its content to inspire and engage its customers. The project was delivered in a very aggressive timeframe of just four months, complete with performance testing to handle over a million visits per month.
The client was able to evolve the priorities of its IT team on creation of presentation templates, and fixing issues with the overall platform rather than updating content. The ownership of content creation and publication was easily passed on to then non-technical content creation and marketing teams who could now predictably create, manage and learn from their campaigns.
The overall impact on business remains to be seen as that goes beyond platform capabilities and relies heavily on their ability to engage their users through the much more capable connected commerce platform.