Catbird strikes eCommerce gold with Magento

Image source: catbirdnyc.com.

Described by The New York Times as “the cool-girl jewelry go-to,” Catbird creates captivating, custom jewelry on demand. Their stunning necklaces, rings, and bracelets are all manufactured at the brand’s iconic offices in Brooklyn, New York, and are often seen on celebrities.

Initially, Catbird’s web store (built on Magento 1) worked like a charm on desktop; It did a great job of showcasing their jewelry and providing a stellar online shopping experience. But Catbird’s new, young and digitally savvy-shoppers are often glued to their phones, and they needed to create an updated commerce experience for both channels that is elegant and engaging—and like their brand, highly functional.

“When we started reimagining Catbird’s webstore, we wanted our customers to experience the brand with a sense of discovery and curiosity,” said Anna Wessel, eCommerce director at Catbird. “It was important for us to tell our brand story through high-quality content and product detail pages, while offering a more intuitive navigation to help cultivate our loyal customer base.”

As digital natives, Catbird’s customers demanded an outstanding commerce experience with features like same-day shipping and the ability to create wish lists. On the back end, the company needed an ability to completely change up their homepage during the holidays or sale periods, and keep the site looking fresh. In late 2018, they decided to upgrade to Magento Commerce 2.

“Our new, responsive Magento Commerce 2 site has increased our conversions and elevated the brand to new levels. No one else in our industry sees the conversion rate or has the flexibility of content that we do,” said Anna.

Image of Catbird Jewelry.

Image source: catbirdnyc.com.

A dazzling web store, across all devices

Together with their Solution Partner, Imagination Media, Catbird embarked on a journey to relaunch their web store. They relied on Magento Commerce 2 to build custom functionalities such as in-stock, out-of-stock, and lead-time messaging, to ensure that customers have full inventory visibility. They also added custom gift messaging, wish list functionality, and same-day shipping for customers who can’t wait to get their hands on new product.

In addition, they built a custom mobile commerce theme that was independent of the desktop store, enabling a seamless omnichannel experience. They simply followed the default Magento Commerce 2 stack, using jQuery, KnockoutJs, and pure JavaScript code with responsive web design, to make the website look and feel amazing on all mobile devices.

Catbird’s mobile commerce experience today is a completely different theme and layout from the desktop experience — and optimized for customer conversion. With a completely mobile-driven website, the navigation is simple, clean, and straightforward — while maximizing media such as beautiful imagery of their jewelry.

Image source: catbirdnyc.com.

It’s all easily customizable on the back end, empowering Catbird to change overall site themes, update the look and feel to promote a holiday or special sale, while easily adjusting core functionalities. And with Zendesk integration for customer service, the result is an eCommerce experience that is smooth and enjoyable.

For their static content, Catbird also migrated from using Bluefoot previously to Page Builder on Magento 2.3. “We were beyond excited when Page Builder came out, and it’s something we adopted right away,” said Anna. “Almost everyone at Catbird is empowered to create content with the jewelry, and Page Builder has really made updating existing content or creating new ones a nimbler process that allows us to match our web experience with our seasonal campaigns.”

Delivering more relevant experiences to their shoppers

Another way that Catbird is delivering a differentiated shopping experience today is by leveraging an AI-powered Product Recommendations feature that is exclusive to Magento Commerce. Catbird previously experimented with product recommendations software from another vendor but removed the feature once it started affecting site performance and creating lag anywhere where the code was living. Plus, implementing it was a very manual process that involved a lot of guesswork around building the most attractive product recommendations.

“Based on my previous experience, I had my ear out for something that could work better for us. Learning that the Product Recommendations feature was AI-powered and native to Magento gave us a sense of security that it’d work well and not have any negative impact on the site. And because I knew it was an Adobe product, I felt like it was coming from a large, trustworthy brand that has a ton of data and investment behind it,” said Anna.

Selection of Catbird pendants.

Image source: catbirdnyc.com.

Anna added that adding Magento’s product recommendations feature to the site was a seamless process that required less than three hours of developmental work with Imagination Media. Currently, Catbird has deployed product recommendations on their home page and product detail pages, leveraging popularity-based and shopper-based recommendation types. And because the capability is powered by Adobe Sensei, it continuously uncovers meaningful product affinities based on shopper behavior.

Sparkly results

The new Catbird storefront captures everything the brand had planned. Today, the Catbird team is more agile and able to evolve and match its on-site experience with their popular campaigns. Their art department is better equipped to adapt content across channels, and the Catbird buyer has access to new tools like instant purchase, PayPal Express Checkout, and other options for product discovery and making checkout a breeze.

After deploying Magento 2, Catbird has seen: