Woods Furniture - Case Study

Woods Furniture are a nationwide school furniture supplier who needed help with their online stock management. They believe that education is of utmost importance to our children’s future and have studied how they learn from a behavioural, ergonomic and cognitive perspective to develop furniture that is flexible, adaptable and stimulating. It’s this philosophy that inspires their intelligently designed range of furniture. Furnishing schools with the highest quality products requires hosting a large and constantly changing catalogue of stock in order to offer enough of a variety of products to keep up with the demand and needs of schools. Since Woods Furniture were using an outside organisation to manage their website, they just weren’t able to maintain their online presence as they would have liked to. In order to accurately reflect their rapidly changing stock, like when new products arrived, they needed to be added, removed or edited on the website. This meant contacting the firm controlling their website, submitting a request - which took a week of their time - and also paying a fee, so money was leaving their pocket every time a change was needed. But now with Shopify, it is so easy to use that everything can be done in-house, meaning any changes and updates to the website can be carried out regularly and as soon as they’re needed, allowing Woods Furniture to stay up to date online and significantly reduce their costs. Woods Furniture can now add, remove and change products whenever they wish, while also applying the appropriate options for customers to specify exactly what it is they want, something that Shopify has made easy and effortless. It really has been a huge leap forward in how Woods Furniture are able to manage their products. Getting onto Shopify has changed Woods Furniture’s business for the better. Aside from their products, they’ve been able to add customer case studies and share research and insights. They can connect to their team member's social media feeds which has challenged everyone at Woods Furniture to get involved and has made creating content a lot more organic. Shopify has various dashboards that allow you to view and customise various data and insights on your products. Woods Furniture says that Shopify’s dashboards are great as the analytics are very useful to steer things such as keywords and product rankings. Key benefits that Woods Furniture have experienced since getting on to Shopify are: An increase in website traffic A large increase in enquiries and quote requests Reduction in the website management costs Without The Instillery, Woods Furniture say that none of this would have been possible. Woods Furniture felt stuck on what was the best next step to solve their website woes, especially since they were under the impression that changing their website would cost a bomb. But after approaching The Instillery, Woods Furniture were excited about the changes to come and felt refreshed to hear that transitioning their website was going to be very simple. The brand on the website now looks cleaner and more modern on Shopify. The layout is much better to use as customers can easily navigate to where they want to go. Woods Furniture also love that when a customer provides feedback on their site, they can immediately make any changes that may be required. What made the Shopify experience so smooth for Woods Furniture was The Instillery’s help and guidance through the setup process. Woods Furniture say that the transition to Shopify was made easy by The Instillery, as we spoke their language and really understood what Woods Furniture was trying to achieve. We provided Woods Furniture with mock ups of their Shopify store layout and carried out a demonstration of the functionality so when it came time for Woods Furniture to manage Shopify themselves, they felt comfortable they were going to get exactly what they wanted. Following the site going live, we took Woods Furniture through a training session and away they went! Richard Jenkins, New Zealand General Manager of Woods Furniture has this advice for fellow business; “If you are thinking about Shopify, just go ahead and do it! Once you are setup you are in control of your online business and The Instillery make it an easy, smooth and painless transition. So why not?”