Sonder Living
Bespoke Furnishing
Shopify Plus
Leading a brand to use Shopify's full capabailities - on a Black Friday deadline.
When a new team started to lead the Sonder Living online properties, they found their current set up inadequate and inflexible for their multi-region ambitions, despite it having been implemented recently. They approached Pixelcabin with a set of hard requirements including a launch before Black Friday 2020 - one of the most anticipated eCommerce sales days of the decade.
Pixelcabin worked closely with the Hong Kong-based team to reimagine the entire user journey and experience, whilst also providing future-proofing with multi region expandability, and a better integration with their existing data management back-end, Salsify.
Catering to B2B and B2C customers from one theme
With a large business-to-business customer base, the ability to print a 'tearsheet' was highly important. Interior designers can print beautiful tear sheets straight from any Product in the specific variant of their choosing.
Multi-region from (re)launch, with unlimited global possibilities
A key enhancement after launch was the ability for Sonder Living to run a true multi-region set up, including region detect / select and specific product mix and pricing per region.
Project Challenges
A previous attempt at revamping the site with another agency had not played out as expected, and the UX and UI was nowhere near 2020 standards, even though the project had been completed that year. Pixelcabin looked across all of the challenges needing solved and knew that a bespoke theme build was not the right fit here both on time and budget limits.
The solution
Pixelcabin's in-house design delivered our highly-popular 'design within a theme' service where we choose a reputable theme from the official Shopify store, and propose specific UI changes and additions. That way, the coding time can be put on unique functionality and not rebuilding UI elements that are normally ready to go out of the box with a third-party theme.
As part of a larger organisation, Sonder Living is part of a family of companies that use Salsify to manage data cross-organisation and sync it to Shopify. However, the data being synced was not helpful for the front-end and various features did not work properly for the admin or the customer.
The solution
Pixelcabin's in-house project manager worked closely with the Sonder Living data team to resolve various naming and metafield-related issues, whilst also working with the in-house design and engineering teams at Pixelcabin to ensure by the launch that different Product variants could be easily shopped from the same Product page, with specific images and metadata available on each Product page.
Sonder Living was looking to expand beyond their dominant US customer base and be ready to ship directly to countries in Asia and beyond. However, each region would need a specific product and content mix, not just its own currency.
The solution
Pixelcabin set up a multi-deploy flow that enabled one change to the codebase to be pushed to all regions, whilst enabling each region to have its own product mix (synced from Salsify), pricing, and content. Features can be toggled on and off according to each region as they require them, with the added benefit of each region having access to any feature created for the platform.
With a large customer base of independent interior-designers, Sonder Living had to effectively run a B2C and B2B platform from the same store. However the current platform did not display real-time discounts and was cumbersome to use by some of the largest-spending customers.
The solution
Utilising Shopify scripts (a Shopify Plus-only feature) and implementing an integration with the front end, a Customer could now see their discounts being applied in real time, whilst also making it easy for a Sonder Living admin to tag Customers and provide them with site-wide discounts as they shopped, without the need for discount codes to ever be used.