Since 2008, this week’s Store Spotlight, Oliver+S has been an online resource for unique sewing patterns for children. Over the past four years, the company has experienced steady growth, developing related product lines under the Oliver +S brand, as well as two additional related craft brands.
“We chose Miva Merchant because of its ability to be customized to integrate seamlessly with the rest of the site. Back then we were primarily a brand-awareness site with light add-on ecommerce functionality for consumers who couldn’t find our products in their local independent fabric stores,” says Oliver +S Managing Partner, Todd Gibson. “The ecommerce engine we chose had to be easy to use and fully customizable to integrate into the rest of the site. Since then, ecommerce has become a much more important part of our business, and Miva Merchant has been able to expand with us.”
Oliver+S currently carries 50 products, many of which have inventory attributes, resulting in approximately 100 unique store SKUs. Shoppers can choose from Oliver+S patterns, Lisette patterns, Straight Stitch Society patterns, as well as books and videos.
The store’s recently redesigned site, which launched on March 14th, 2012, features a completely updated look and feel.
“We re-thought from the ground up what we wanted the site to do and completely re-architected it using our analytics data. We cleaned up the site’s navigation and placed the site’s focus on the sections of the site that were most popular with our users,” says Todd. “We chose to highlight four main sections of the site in our redesign: our store, our discussion forum, our blog, and a new “play” section of the site that we had decided to develop as a brand building tool to highlight the paper doll illustrations we use on our product’s packaging. These are the signature element of our brand."
