West Elm brings luxury home with Adobe XD

West Elm is a global home decor and furniture retailer with outlets around the world, but we are also part of a larger global family. As one of the four sister companies of Williams-Sonoma Inc., along with Pottery Barn, Rejuvenation, Mark & Graham, we have a commitment to quality across the board. At the same time, each of our brands has a distinct voice and unique look and feel. Leading the design team at West Elm, my mission is to make sure these two goals are always accomplished. We want to ensure our customer’s experience is consistent, cohesive, and enjoyable while also feeling iconically “West Elm.”

Like many other ecommerce businesses, West Elm has seen massive growth since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Retail companies usually have their peak season during the holidays, but the entirety of 2020 was a peak for us — everyone was at home. Many people were in a frenzy to finish or redecorate their rooms or set up an office to work remotely. To meet that accelerated demand, while staying true to our mission, our design team needed to innovate quickly.

The main challenge we faced was that amidst this huge increase in demand, customers weren’t able to come into our showrooms due to the pandemic. For many of us, furniture is something that we need to touch, feel, and sit on before we decide to buy it. Visual assets are essential in order to create a complementary digital experience around selling luxury furniture, but during the height of the pandemic they became the only experience.

At West Elm, we have in-house photographers and videographers who shoot all of our own assets. They create videos to communicate the size of a bed, for example, that we then place on the product pages. We also have a fantastic Design Crew of interior designers that provides free consultations. With in-store appointments no longer possible, we had to get creative, coming up with various new innovative options to offer free remote design services: one-on-one online chats with our experts and virtual consultations by video, phone or email to help with room planning, furniture selection, and more. Additionally, an interactive desktop tool called Room Planner, helped simplify the process of furnishing and decorating a room.

A faster, more collaborative workflow with Adobe XD

In Adobe XD I can have an entire campaign all in one file. I no longer need to look for and open multiple files and applications when designing as all of the assets I need for a project or campaign are available within one canvas and within a single tool. Files previously created in Photoshop, for example, can be accessed directly from within XD via CC Libraries. Thanks to these features, we now do around 95 percent of our designs in XD, and we use the integrations with other Creative Cloud applications like Photoshop for image editing and Illustrator for vector work to make our process a seamless experience.

From a collaboration standpoint, my team works closely with the marketing teams and e-commerce merchants on seasonal campaigns, sale assets, and cross-brand promotions. XD enables us to easily share files with our site management teams, designers, and engineers in a much more agile way. Previously, we needed to upload assets to our server and then share them, but with XD’s Coediting feature we can now design and edit those designs collaboratively and in real-time. Coediting, along with the various share features in XD, has led to a much faster workflow. When I redesigned our Corporate Responsibility page, for example, I was able to share wireframes and development specs with an engineer in California. The ongoing, natural, and fluid collaboration was essential to the success of that page.

Responding to accelerated consumer demand and expectation

The demands on ecommerce environments in general, and designers in particular, just continue to grow. Customer expectations have greatly increased, and accordingly the list of design deliverables we need to produce is getting longer. It’s crucial to have a streamlined workflow to be able to quickly respond to this constant change while ensuring a branded and consistent customer experience. XD has created a centralized location not just for our assets, but also for knowledge sharing and collaboration. At West Elm, when necessary we can now go from design to developer hand-off to pushing changes live within an hour, this is a pace that was unimaginable prior to leveraging Adobe XD.

As XD has evolved, so has our team. We are consistently looking at ways to use the latest and greatest of the application. XD has helped us create a 360-degree customer experience with multiple touch points and has given us the ability to design better, smarter and, of course, together.