Work / Solo Rugs

Background

Venerable handmade rug dealer Solo Rugs, once a trade-only enterprise, launched its e-commerce site in 2014, making its extensive collection of one-of-a-kind rugs available to the general public. A long-time favorite of interior designers, now offering affordable, programmable designs to all with a sense of aesthetic and flair. It has since grown to be one of the largest area rug retailers online.

Objective

Our job was to grow Solo Rugs sales through their direct to consumer dropship business as well as their online wholesale, by generating on-brand advertisements, create A+ content for their Amazon storefront, grow their existing wholesale channels, and create an excel based master data sheet of all product SKUs and program variants. Because of their many retail channels, help was also required in managing their digital asset base and optimizing its compatibility with internal channels as well as with vendors. Their inventory holding over 10,000 unique item variants had to be organized properly in order to maintain accurate data feeds, inventory levels, correct SKU images, and proper copy and item specifics.

Brand Guidelines

The Brand Guidelines for creating promotional materials for Solo Rugs 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. Background images should always be taken with a professional DSLR camera and staged to create a sense of luxury and intimacy. The logo overlay should be displayed front and center on all supplemental materials alongside the bio, with a focus on building visual brand recognition and equity among both new and existing customers.

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.

We thus can create urgency on our product pages by communicating the brand’s message, delivering relevant key information on the product being purchased, and establishing the brand as an authority in the space, while also effectively while maintaining a consistent and cohesive visual identity throughout.

Brand Materials

Supplemental materials are essential for branding, but more than just looking pretty, they make a quantifiable impact that can directly be noted in revenue.

Brands that just don't take the time to create rich content get punished by customers. While some considerations of a brand are irrelevant in the early days, in order to grow to the next level, the little details are a distinguishing factor for the consumer. In this modern world we have access to the entirety of the internet to make informed buying decisions. Rugs are a purchase that takes a lot of consideration by the customer. Our research found for this customer, that it takes somewhere between 3 to 6 weeks from the initial interaction to a completed checkout. Someone who is willing to spend thousands of dollars on a handmade rug will properly do their research, and even test out many options before making a final decision. With a flat object like a rug, it is sometimes hard to justify or capture its essence in a mere photograph.

Solo Rugs was losing sales to their competitors; Safavieh, ABC Carpet & Home, Restoration Hardware and others. Customers in an effort to educate themselves on even what the correct size was to fit in their room, would often resort to other sources on the web. Ultimately, they would end up on a blog post, or a "how to fit your rug in your room" article or some other piece of informational content that was posted online by another brand.

Rug Size Guide

A rug sizing guide was created to showcase different options for sizing a rug in your room. Many customer service emails were taking up time for Solo's customer service representatives asking the same questions over and over again. In order to open up time and make things more efficient, displaying the sizing guide live on the product pages not only cut down the amount of labor hours required to answer these tickets, but increased the conversion across product pages by over 20 percent.

Organizing Collections

The Solo Rugs product catalog had over ten thousand unique SKUs and an ever-growing quantity of programmable designs. One of the challenges we faced was organizing the products into coherent collections that resonated with their shopper. Many brands tend to group things into arbitrary collections or base them off design aesthetic without regard to how it affects the customer experience. User experience (UX) in design is the process of creating systems that provide an appropriate and meaningful experience to users. It involves understanding the needs, likes, and dislikes of your customer and designing your web pages in a way that is visually appealing, easy to navigate, and intuitive to the user. The most important consideration to keep in mind when designing any page on your website is usability, aka, how easy it is for users to accomplish what they’re trying to. This includes things like navigation and product hierarchy, button layout, and overall ease of use. If your pages confuse the user or cause them to have to interact with more layers than necessary, you tend to see them drop off the page, resulting in a high “bounce rate”.

Collection Preview Pages

Lifestyle photographs of the size run, programmable product tiles for visual appeal to the customer

Classification of the product types, mid-century modern, art deco, flat weave, vegetal dye, etc

Rugs efficiently organized by style and PDP's were combined to increase on-page SEO

Collection Preview Pages

Lifestyle photographs of the size run, programmable product tiles for visual appeal to the customer

Classification of the product types, mid-century modern, art deco, flat weave, vegetal dye, etc

Rugs efficiently organized by style and PDP's were combined to increase on-page SEO

Results

After our efforts there were clear results in terms of engagement and conversion rate. The biggest proof was the added content which led to an increase in revenue from the Amazon dropshipping arm of the business over the subsequent 3 months with all other variables held the same.

The comprehensive organization of their digital assets (think 10,000 SKUs times 4-10 images per product) resulted in priceless improvements. It streamlined the process for addressing customer requests, and in some cases removed that need altogether. It also led to a notable increase in overall operational efficiency internally. It also allowed them to increase add-on sales by enabling cross selling between products of the same design that were available in different sizes.

While we are unable to share specific details about the other projects we worked on with Solo due to confidentiality agreements, we are able to talk with your team and discuss your options for working with us. Especially if your business model is similar to this client, we can find a solution for you! Overall the Solo Rugs team was very excited with the results we were able to achieve and we look forward to working with them again in the future.