Cathy's Concepts

Project Description

Website Design & Development Featuring eCommerce Personalization for Cathy's Concepts 

Cathy’s Concepts began designing and creating personalized gifts and goods in 1988. Since then they have grown immensely and sell in retailers throughout the country like Nordstrom, Target, and Bed, Bath & Beyond. They offer personalization on all of their products, adding a unique touch to their contemporary yet classic designs.

Project Objectives

Since they began, Cathy’s has sold primarily as a B2B distributor. Wanting more control over their relationships with their consumers, they reached out to us with the desire to build a brand new direct to consumer website featuring their CLV brand.

Strategy & Design Process

We began the process with a Kick-Off meeting with their entire team so that we could learn more about the team behind their amazing products. We quickly learned of their passion for their products and true desire for a website that allows them to connect with their consumers. We created the homepage based off a design intent and mood board, and built it in a way that we were able to turn different aspects of the page on and off with a toggle switch. This gives their team control over different facets of the site to pull in.

We also created target market personas for the team so that we could best understand how their buyers will be using their site. We created five personas and discussed their goals for the site, background, and social media use. This guided our sitemap creation, as well as our recommendations for ongoing marketing, which we are looking forward to partnering with the Cathy’s team to pursue.

Development Process

The website is powered by a combination of FusionCMS and BigCommerce, giving strong engines to both the content and the commerce. FusionCMS allows for the customization on their homepage and robust

We used BigCommerce because it allowed for Cathy’s Concepts to be on a platform that could scale with the large growth they are planning on experiencing. This also allowed us to integrate with a few systems and Apps that were necessary for the team. We integrated with CLORAS to track their distribution as well and are going to grow their wholesale side as a phase two of their products.

eCommerce Personalization

What really sets Cathy’s Concepts apart is their personalization of all of their products. From monograms to full names, all of their products can feature personalization. We wanted to be able to display that on each of the products and allow for different color swatches, letters, and fonts to be shown based on Cathy’s capabilities. We used the App Customily to create the affect and give users and idea of what their bag could look like. This truly gave their site a unique experience that consumers won’t get on any of their distributors’ sites.