Manhattan Wardrobe Supply

Selling over 10,000 products in more than 70 categories from their Spree Commerce site and brick-and-mortar store.

Manhattan Wardrobe Supply (MWS) is a purveyor of hair, makeup, and wardrobe care products for film, theater, and TV professionals. To better serve their New York City customers, they were expanding their store in Chelsea – but online, things weren’t so rosy.

When MWS first came to us, their website was in serious trouble. Their previous developers would “solve one bug and three more would appear.” They’d spent 900 hours “stabilizing” the code base without adding a single new feature.

MWS asked us to assume ongoing maintenance of their site (running on Spree 1.3) and upgrade to a Spree 2.1. After diving in, we discovered (among other things):

• Server errors
• Slow page load times
• No automated tests
• Unnecessary customizations
• Deployment restrictions
• Hosting issues

How We Helped

We agreed on a monthly retainer and began the process of fixing these issues so we could eventually focus on improving customer experience and raising conversion rates.

Our work with MWS has included a wide range of tasks to stabilize and update the existing code base and add new features that improve the customer experience and administrative functions. These tasks include:

• Shifting hosting to Heroku
• Creating a staging site
• Adding a test suite to cover key site functions
• Deleting unused code:
  • If it's redundant (core Spree provides the same functionality)
  • If it's much more complicated than it needs to be
  • If it's not compatible with current Spree
• Updating to Spree 2.1
• Creating landing pages for top level taxons like “makeup”
• Adding batch product uploads
• Improving site speed
• Adding Algolia search to provide faster and more user-friendly search results

The Result

We launched MWS's new responsive site in time for New York Fashion Week to offer their busy customers an easier and faster way to buy on their mobile devices.

In the first three weeks we’ve seen the mobile conversion rate jump by 51%. Overall conversions are up 26%.

While it may not have the glamour of a Broadway musical, our work has resulted in significant improvements to the structure and function of the MWS site, and sets the stage for future growth.