Best Home Furnishings
- Mobile App
- Product Development
Today, Best Home Furnishings manufactures over 2,400 styles of furniture with over 800 different fabrics and leathers.
With over 4,000 retail distributors worldwide, Best needed a new way of managing the constantly updating catalog of styles, configurations, and fabric choices for their customers. Since the company mostly doesn’t sell direct-to-consumer, they needed to ensure that the salespeople at each retailer had the most up-to-date options.
Prior to our work, retailers relied on the existing paper catalog and a manually completed paper form that was error-prone and often out-of-date. We worked with Best to devise, design, and build a tablet app that retailers can use on the sales floor to customize and build Best furniture for order.
100+
Salespeople as part of the initial product deployment
99.9%
Reduction of incompatible order configurations
1M+
Configuration permutations supported for furniture options and fabric
The manufacturer wanted to streamline the process of placing orders on the sales floor to reduce total time-to-order while also cutting the number of potential errors.
Our team set out to first understand how salespeople at each retailer currently placed orders. We spent time with the Best team, their retailers, and our agency partner to understand where the biggest pain points lay. We wanted to be sure that the app we built didn’t just represent a mobile catalog but actively improved the order placement experience for both the customer and the salesperson.
Additionally, on the Best-side, we wanted to ensure that they had easy access to both placed orders and retailer analytics. This was something new for them—they never had real-time analytics data that they could breakdown by day available at their fingertips. This would open up the ability to better understand which stores were top performers, average daily sales of their products, and even the busiest days of the week.
Over the next several months, we used the experience and pain points we uncovered to design an app that brought the ordering experience to an entirely new level for this decades-old family-owned manufacturer.
- Built cross-platform Android and iOS tablet app that could be quickly deployed on commodity hardware
- Designed an administrative system that allows the updating of the entire furniture and configuration library from the existing company database
- Introduced a new suite of actionable analytics for the Best team to use with retailers
- Deployed the app to kiosk-scale screens for retail floor placement
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Retail App
The retail app presents the customer (or salesperson) with a catalog of furniture types, from sofas to armchairs to footrests. Once they select the core piece, they can continue with the customization of many options (such as arms/no arms) and fabrics. All prices are shown in real time.
Admin App
For the Best team, we created an admin dashboard that allowed them to manage their retailer’s lists of stores, individual sales accounts, and all of the products in the catalog. The team could review analytics by store, region, or salesperson, as well as deep-dive into individual products.