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increase in customers
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Performance metrics compare YoY 2021 over 2019.
In 1991, Jennifer Taylor Home began manufacturing and selling attractive and affordable designer furniture to shoppers with a discerning eye for quality. The company originally operated from a single office in Southern California, but today it is a globally recognized brand with business holdings in Japan, Russia, Middle East, Europe, Western Asia and Australia.
Although Jennifer Taylor Home started from humble beginnings, its success was built on a pure and simple dedication to the craft of furniture and decor to outfit just about every room in the home. From living room, bedroom and dining room furniture to complementary decor, lighting and art, Jennifer Taylor Home products are designed to make a house a home with comfortable, luxurious furnishings at affordable prices.
Confidence in the brand and its craftsmanship and unique product designs were the catalysts for Jennifer Taylor Home to enter the world of ecommerce by first selling on various marketplaces like Amazon, Wayfair, Home Depot and Overstock. But in 2015, things changed and the company launched its first direct-to-consumer website.
“We launched our first ecommerce website on an open-source platform called NopCommerce. With very little marketing budget and next to zero consumer brand awareness, we just made having a cart available to sell direct to consumers our focus at the time. We grew and became more complex and sophisticated as a business, but the platform did not,” said Vu Tong, sales and marketing manager at Jennifer Taylor Home.
“I heavily pushed for BigCommerce over Shopify and Magento. I had experience with BigCommerce so I was a proponent of switching to the platform.”
vu tong sales and marketing manager, jennifer taylor home
When asked why Jennifer Taylor Home made the switch to BigCommerce, Vu matter-of-factly stated, “The reason was me. Top management brought me in to turn things around and get the online business growing. When I saw what we were working with, I began pushing for us to migrate to a different platform.”
If Jennifer Taylor Home was going to grow and expand its business, Vu knew the company needed an enterprise-grade ecommerce platform with a lot of capacity to scale to make it happen.
“I heavily pushed for BigCommerce over Shopify and Magento. I had experience with BigCommerce so I was a proponent of switching to the platform,” Vu said. “With BigCommerce we are getting as many of the ecommerce features and experiences that are already widely desired from many of the popular ecommerce websites, but we are getting them out of the box. To me, it was the best choice between a turnkey mom-and-pop solution and ultimate enterprise scalability.”
The flexibility of BigCommerce was another contributing factor in Jennifer Taylor Home’s ability to scale by making it easy for the company to adopt new payment methods like Apple Pay and PayPal. “There seems to always be some kind of new wallet or digital payment out there. BigCommerce has been very easy going in terms of adopting them, so that’s been very useful for us. It makes the checkout process easier, even down to the connectivity to our ERP,” Vu said.
Jennifer Taylor Home uses NetSuite for its enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. In addition to serving as the company’s order management system, it is used to sync orders purchased on Facebook and Instagram shops directly into BigCommerce.
“Everything is basically connected and this simplifies our business,” Vu said.
Notable Applications:
Comments by: Vu Tong, sales and marketing manager at Jennifer Taylor Home
Ads and Listing on Google by BigCommerce – “There are other solutions, but we’ve found the one created by BigCommerce has been the most streamlined. I’ve provided feedback directly to that team in the past, and I’m thankful BigCommerce created this solution.”
Signifyd – “We didn’t start using this until the halfway point when our revenue was getting much larger. [Our growth] unfortunately attracted a lot of fraudulent parties, so we turned to Signifyd’s guaranteed fraud protection as a type of insurance to cover this.”
Clyde – “This app has provided us with supplemental revenue by offering product protection to our customers who feel they would need this assurance.”
Technical Features:
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
Netsuite
“With BigCommerce we are getting as many of the ecommerce features and experiences that are already widely desired from many of the popular ecommerce websites, but we are getting them out of the box. To me, it was the best choice between a turnkey mom-and-pop solution and ultimate enterprise scalability.”
vu tongsales and marketing manager, jennifer taylor home
Growing and expanding its business on an ecommerce platform, Jennifer Taylor Home’s growth trajectory continues to increase. From 2019 to 2021, the business experienced a 228% increase in customers, a 229% increase in orders and a 373% increase in revenue.
“As we grew, there were a lot of challenges such as adopting new payment methods, making the checkout process easier, having connectivity to our ERP system, as well as the ability to market through product ads on Google,” said Vu. “BigCommerce made things easier by having a built-in marketplace for apps, allowing us to test the different connections and supplemental features that allow us to increase our conversions. The availability of the API allowed us to create solutions to connect BigCommerce to our existing ERP.”
In 2021, BigCommerce recognized Jennifer Taylor Home’s innovation and achievement on its ecommerce platform by naming the company its 2021 winner of the Make it Big Emerging Brand Award.
"Jennifer Taylor is an exceptional furniture manufacturer selling directly to the consumer. It has seen amazing growth since launching on BigCommerce in 2018, growing to a multimillion dollar business through a great product offering and an excellent site to match," one MIB judge commented.
While Jennifer Taylor Home is always developing new products, the company is looking to increase its made-to-order capabilities in the coming months and years. “Long-term, we would also like to go global with BigCommerce, shipping directly to consumers in other countries,” Vu said.
Published: September 2022
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