Suite NY

We began our journey with Suite NY to extend their 8,000 ft² showroom to a broader audience, expanding its appeal to a national architect & designer (A&D) community; to strengthen their omnichannel touch points with their core NYC A&D residential and commercial project base, while introducing their showroom to an end-user/retail audience who may be buying similar ‘high design’ pieces from more mainstream online outlets such as DWR and Room & Board.

Bringing a designer physical showroom to an omnichannel distribution.

We took the opportunity of expanding Suite NY’s distribution in both online and offline channels to also evaluate the optimal brand positioning through an omnichannel strategy. For ease of URL entry, we shortened the full Suite New York to Suite NY, placing at the masthead of an eCommerce-enabled quickship program that shipped direct from vendor warehouses, as well as, SNY’s own warehouse that was supported by a custom LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) platform where we devised both business and technical requirements in our CMS implementation. As eCommerce was a new channel at Suite NY, neta created an eCommerce strategy and subsequently shepherded the strategy as an integrated team member with Suite NY’s showroom sales people and vendors. We also structured vendor partner and fulfillment agreements for 1^st time eCommerce European vendors who were reticent to explore the possibility of selling ‘showroom’ product online in fear of losing cachet.

The design and custom development of suiteny.com took 12 months from 1^st comp through to order fulfillment and end-to-end UAT. For design, neta provided detailed wireframes and created all content, including photo shoot orchestration, website art direction, and project management. Given breadth of assortment and as a budget control, we also advocated for and devised a vendor-generated asset program that would adhere to suiteny.com’s new high quality image requirements for enhanced zoom and image enlarge capabilities.

Once we were in development, we supported programming through rigorous front-end functional specification in highly customized user experience areas such as a featured commercial projects section, a new WordPress Blog (Suite News), and all operational and promotional Mailchimp email templates. We also played a key role in defining the job specification for a new full-time operational resource to join the Suite NY team full-time, who would oversee the new eCommerce and digital operation.

Our Results

While the primary purpose of suiteny.com is as a sales tool for showroom reps with architects and interior designers, the way the neta pricing model works for build-outs is a profitability exercise that we call the ‘Ad-Cost’ equation, so that build budgets are kept minimal while client’s upside is kept high. Our results for suiteny.com reflect the client’s upside at play, when performance exceeds expectations yet budgets for build-outs are maintained…which means a faster acceleration towards recouping platform build-out investment.

• Cost of Suiteny.com = 17% of incremental sales driven directly through the eCommerce (does not include offline or showroom attributed sales)
• 8 months post launch revenues trended +18% vs. our projections
• Conversion = +40% vs. projection