Baker Furniture is a premier manufacturer and designer of fine home furnishings based in Hickory, NC. After moving apart from their parent company, they were on the hunt for a website development partner to help with the transition of their digital services to their own properties. After working with a different local web development partner and finishing 70 percent of their migration, their partner could no longer finish the project and based on a recommendation, the Baker Furniture team began working with Emergent Software.
Emergent Software not only finished the large-scale migration project, but has since become Baker’s exclusive website development partner, working on site maintenance, and adding new features to enhance the site’s functionality.
Migrating the Umbraco websites to new web properties
To support the transition away from their parent company, Baker Furniture needed assistance migrating their existing set of Umbraco websites to a new Microsoft Azure environment. To do this, Emergent Software had to port over multiple existing websites to new hosting environments. In addition to migrating the websites to a new environment, the Baker team needed help integrating a new Product Information Management System (PIM) and sunsetting a few online services that the team would no longer be using.
Emergent Software was able to complete this major migration on a shortened timeline due to the previous website development partner having to back out of the project. The migration was completed and launched without any major hiccups! After the migration was completed, Emergent Software and Baker Furniture moved into a continuous development and maintenance phase, which is still in place today. In this phase, the Emergent Software team focuses on maintaining the existing website and adding new features to increase the overall user experience for both employees and customers.
Building new website features to enhance the customer experience
Emergent Software has helped the Baker Furniture team execute on building quality-of-life updates and improvements to their site over the years. One notable feature that has been added is an “in-stock” toggle within the global website header. This feature allows customers to see which products are in stock while they shop in a showroom, allowing them to make same-day purchases of furniture. Website users can also easily toggle between in/out of stock products when browsing products.
The stock availability button displays stock information pulled from a data spreadsheet API, which is uploaded to the site daily. This feature idea was brought to the Emergent Software team from Baker’s sales team and will ultimately help to boost product sales – as customers will be able to instantly purchase products in stock.
Baker has future updates for the site planned which include improving their site wishlist functionality and also working with the Emergent Software team to transition away from internal digital services that they no longer use.
Sustaining a long-term relationship and increasing the site’s overall stability
Since beginning work together in 2019, Emergent Software and Baker Furniture have built a strong relationship on trust, responsiveness, and collaboration. Since improving the website, Baker Furniture employees and customers have taken notice of the site’s faster load times and overall stability. Emergent Software has helped Baker to extend the life of their aging website rather than completely rebuilding it – saving the team both time and money. We look forward to our continued partnership with Baker Furniture and cannot wait to see what the future holds!
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