RAFT: Handmade For Life

Heinz Frye and Mick Quinn founded Raft in 1999, It is the biggest flagship store and largest British manufacturer and retailer in any Westfield Shopping Centre.

RAFT: Handmade For Life

Client

Mick Quinn

Location

London, UK

Platform

Magento

Website

https://www.raftfurniture.co.uk/

Project Highlights

New UX/UI Development
Conversion Optimisation
Rebranding
Custom Integrations

Project Overview

About Raft Furniture Objective Challenges

About Raft Furniture

Heinz Frye and Mick Quinn founded Raft Furniture in 1999. They specialise in producing handmade sofas and reclaimed teak furniture. Today, sustainability sits at the core of its operations, which include five sofa factories in Wembley, a reclaimed teak factory in Indonesia, and four showrooms across the country. In 2022, they launched their largest flagship store at Westfield London, making Raft actually the largest British manufacturer and retailer in any Westfield Shopping Centre.

Objective

Raft Furniture’s initial request was a simple upgrade from Magento 1 to Magento 2, and an entirely new website was built thereafter. The achievement is one both the Raft team and we are well proud of. Finally, post-migration, ensuring that their legacy system in store was perfectly in sync with the current technology stack. Moving ahead, features like a sofa configurator were built from scratch, with additional custom features developed for better user experience.

Challenges

The integration of Raft’s legacy systems with the latest technology stack posed major problems for us. The integration of legacy systems is a real challenge due to differences in technology, data formats, and communication protocols. Transferring the data across these systems in an easy way proposed a significant challenge.
Next, we focused on data centralisation. Bringing together data from different sources, namely an EPOS system in physical stores and various online channels into a single platform, rendered that data into easy access and reporting.
Once we have formatted the data, it will be in the process of migrating from one platform to another, which involved tasks such as data migration, feature replication, and minimisation of downtime.
At the same time, we worked on developing custom features. Building customised tools like the sofa configurator and custom API connectors required a deep understanding of Raft’s business needs, along with the technical expertise to deliver these features effectively.
User interface redesign and user experience enhancement was a challenge, as it required us to create a balance between aesthetics and functionality. It had to remain true to the identity of the company while fully living up to user expectations.

Historic data handling posed quite an uphill task.
The old stack was creating a lot of bumps within the organisation.
The business wants brick-and-mortar customers to find expectations met on the website.
The look and feel of the online experience to match the offline.

Core Solution

Over the last two years, we have built a strong partnership with Raft Furniture, admiring their commitment to exceptional customer experience and their distinctive, aesthetically pleasing products. This partnership has enabled us to deliver remarkable solutions for their brand.

#1

Focus on customer experience: Being a direct-to-consumer brand, Raft Furniture has always placed very high value on creating a unique customer journey. We have brought the same quality of customer experience to the digital front, producing results that went beyond expectation.

#2

Migration strategy: The task of migrating from Magento 1 to Magento 2 is planned in such a way as to create minimal disruption. For this, we moved data, created features, ran both sites together for troubleshooting, and finally made the cut to the new site in a downtime period when traffic was scaled down.

#3

Legacy system integration: We successfully integrated Raft Furniture’s legacy system with the new ecommerce platform, overcoming data format challenges and ensuring efficient communication between systems.

#4

Custom solutions: We created a suite of custom features: The user-oriented Sofa Configurator, a store appointment scheduling system, and a complicated quotation system. These solutions streamlined the customer journey and enhanced user satisfaction.

What is the Outcome?

Our team worked hard to ensure that all the implementations affect the business in a positive way and after tracking the progress for 6 months and got the following improvements.