Crafting a Best In Class Online Experience For a Luxury Furniture Brand

McKinnon and Harris handcrafts high-performance, luxury outdoor furniture for estate, garden, and yacht. Founded in 1991 in Richmond, Virginia by a brother and sister, the company exudes tradition and creates quality heirlooms made to last for generations.

Tell us a little bit about this project.

When we started working with McKinnon and Harris, their website was a poor reflection of their brand; it lacked the grandeur and attention to detail that was expressed through every other facet of the business. We set out to design a digital experience that would be as dignified and lasting as their furniture, bringing the brand’s digital presence up-to-speed and heralding McKinnon and Harris into a new era.

We embarked upon an extensive research and discovery process to understand the needs and desires of McKinnon and Harris and their customers. As we uncovered what differentiated McKinnon and Harris from competitors, it was important for the website to serve as an avenue for telling their story. It also needed to feature their extraordinary furniture in a way that appealed to designers and customers while also serving as a useful tool for their sales team.

Why was Craft a good fit for this project?

Craft provided the perfect foundation for us to be able to deliver an experience on the new McKinnon and Harris website that was both awe-inspiring and practical. The overall design was immersive and beautifully expressed the nature of the brand, featuring large scale imagery and videos across the site. With Craft, we were also able to accommodate the many levels of categorization and options with each piece of furniture, from collection and furniture types to color, cushions and other custom options.

Another reason we chose Craft is because it provides a secure and flexible platform that we can build off of with additional features and other best-in-class software that extends Craft’s capabilities to rival enterprise-grade CMS options. In addition to building a customer portal where users can save and share furniture favorites, we delivered a robust search and discovery experience powered by Algolia. It delivers instantaneous, as-you-type results, and we included comprehensive filtering options that align with the furniture categories and options.

While the current website serves as an online catalog and sales are not conducted through the website, we were mindful during design and development to leave a path for enabling ecommerce capabilities in case McKinnon and Harris wanted to pivot their operational strategy at some point down the road. Therefore, Craft was also a great choice because of the possibility of utilizing Craft Commerce in the future.

Did you use any integrations or plugins on your project?

We utilized a number of standard Craft plugins to accommodate required website functionality, and we built two custom plugins to assist with member management. Legacy Members was a custom plugin we built for transferring members from the old website to the new website, and we also built a custom Salesforce plugin that passes specific user registration data over into Salesforce, which helps inform and empower the McKinnon and Harris sales team.

What is your team most proud of when it comes to this project?

McKinnon and Harris has been extremely pleased with their new website and how the experience mirrors the beauty and quality of McKinnon and Harris furniture and immerses the visitor into their story of fine hand-craftsmanship and family.

From a content management perspective, Craft has empowered their marketing team with a publishing experience that is much more intuitive, flexible and pleasant. And from a build perspective, we can’t help but think of the parallels between the enduring qualities of McKinnon and Harris furniture and the new website. While the website won’t last for generations like their furniture will, Craft enabled us to design and build the site to be as timeless as possible, serving the company and their customers for many years to come.