Work / Lillian August

Background

For over 20 years, Lillian August Designs has been a one-stop resource with extraordinary merchandise, thoughtful service and enduring quality for home furnishings and interior design. They are a one-of-a-kind combination of furniture showroom, gift store, antique emporium and full-service design studio.

Objective

Lillian August faced several challenges when trying to expand their product catalog and improve their online sales. Their existing website navigation was cluttered, overwhelming and provided no way of filtering results effectively. This led to a poor customer experience, with users struggling to find what they were looking for and frequently abandoning their searches. This problem on a SKU level, extended to the warehouse, with many orders taking too long to ship causing customer cancelations or even shipping the wrong product out entirely. The customers would thus regularly stop by the showroom, adding labor costs to their stores, and further detracting from organization, inventory upkeep and order fulfillment. Additionally, their existing process for product uploads was time consuming and inefficient, with each item uploaded manually, leading to frequent errors and inconsistencies.

To address these issues, our team was tasked with developing and implementing unique streamlined solutions for their business with the end goal of increasing revenue and profit margins across their organization.

Results

Our team spearheaded the building and development of new furniture categories; refined the website’s navigation; made coding updates where necessary; fixed bugs and tagging errors; created a customer-friendly system for filtering items; interpreted and cleaned up existing item data; simplified product specifications for better internal usability; implemented a brand-new process for new merchandise uploads via Shopify; overhauled inventory management and warehouse operational efficiency; set up a lifestyle studio; built email campaigns around new photography, and thoroughly trained their employees, management, and staff on the many new backend processes we delivered.

The Brand Guidelines for creating promotional materials contain a quick brand blurb and simple image paired with their logo overlaid on top. The intention is to convey the brand in a refined and elevated manner, even when used for promotions or ad material such as the Amazon A+ content. The brand blurb should be brief and direct, highlighting the key elements of the brand.

The Lillian August Showroom, in turn, resorted to sending customers to browse through their extensive item catalog online, instead of physically navigating through the crowded showroom. This cut down on warehouse usage time for labor required to move around product, reducing the amount of touches required for a customer to make a purchase.

Storefront Filtering

Previously, upon entering the website, customers would select a furniture category from the navigation, and were overwhelmed with a grid of thousands of products under a single page. No separation by type, color, price or use of a filtering mechanism; all Lillian August interior decor categories suffered by this design. Naturally, there was a need to make the website more user-friendly with features familiar to customers to promote seamless navigation and exploration. It was our task to integrate subcategories and filtering components to promote efficient shopping, and the results spearheaded a universal change across all Lillian August category pages.

Product Organization

In the past, Lillian August conducted manual uploads and updates for each individual item via Shopify. However, an influx of inventory called for an easier more efficient system of organizing, updating, and uploading products en masse to the website. We created multiple master excel files, each containing product title, SKUs, images, details, stock, and their corresponding categories. Once completed the files would be loaded to their Shopify storefront and checked for site-breaking errors (which would happen more often than not with their old system integration); meta fields were also created which would now automatically populate following a pre-made template we agreed on, thus, cutting down how much time it took to manage the website.

Warehouse Improvements

We assisted in one of their warehouses location transition. They went from in-house shipping, to already packaged and pre sorted products on racks that were ready to ship out of Stamford, CT. We made it so all that was required to send an order out was affix a shipping label to the outside of the package. The products that Lillian August deals with are heavy and take up a lot of space, so while streamlining this may not sound as impressive for a company with smaller products, reducing the warehouse labor for them, for 20-50 orders a day, gave them hundreds of hours in saved payroll costs weekly.

Photo Studio and Direction

Oversaw the creative and art direction to create a permanent photo studio inside their Norwalk, CT, gallery. Working closely with the photographer, we conveyed the brand's narrative into the shoot. We set up three cameras in the studio in an assembly-line-styled shoot where the product rotated in and out of the specified shoot areas marked by tape and stoppers. We ensured precise positioning and placement of the furniture, as well as the angles and permanent camera setup.

By tethering multiple cameras to Capture One, a remote photo capture application on three separate computers, we were able to cut down on how long it took to set up and individually photograph every product. Keep in mind that we would need to shoot many different photos for every SKU, from different angles, while preserving the same angles for each product while moving them around. Upon finalizing, we created an instruction manual for future reference on the process. By working closely with the photographer and the team, we achieved successful and effective shoots that showcased Lillian August's products and brand, as well as providing an invaluable permanent asset to their company.

Labels and Order Flow

An upgraded labeling system we implemented improved inventory management for our client by providing consistent cataloging and accurate matching of all products to their corresponding SKUs and images. This made it easier for warehouse employees to locate products, resulting in a streamlined warehouse order flow and fewer errors in product selection, ultimately enhancing the overall customer experience during the purchasing process.

Email Marketing

Lastly, we assisted in the creation of weekly promotions around the new products that were photographed in the studio setup. We incorporated them tastefully into email campaigns, collaborating closely with the VP of Marketing and the owners of Lillian August.

While adhering to the Lillian August brand guidelines, this new wave of emails featured refinements to the overall look and feel, designed to elevate the brand. The emails showcased select products that were added to the showroom, and later transitioned to informing their customers of new website features, holiday sales, or provided information about upcoming designer events, etc.