Finding furniture that reflects your personality and lifestyle can be both thrilling and challenging. It's common to enter a furniture store and wonder how many people have similar designs in their homes. And spending thousands on a table set only to see a duplicate at a friend's house can be disappointing. The Furniture Guild offers a solution by building custom furniture using state-of-the-art technology to create one of a kind pieces unavailable anywhere else.
But the space in a furniture showroom is obviously limited. So how does a company with over 3,000,000 custom configurations enable the customer to truly express themselves while providing an accurate pricing estimate in real time? That's where we came in.
In an effort to keep up with the times—and better reflect their offering—The Furniture Guild's president, Hib Johnson, reached out to Kalon. Hib's ask for Kalon? Build a marketing site and a furniture configurator with a seamless digital experience that's fast, easy to use, and reliable.
With our design team focused on the product's feel and functionality, our developers worked closely with Hib to write the business logic from scratch, diving in code-first to build a solid foundation paired with an intuitive UI. Given the large number of potential configurations, our primary goal was to create a user friendly site that allows customers to design, preview, and order a unique piece of furniture where they can express their full creative freedom. Our team's attention to user experience and ability to take an idea and bring it to reality allowed us to easily accommodate the client's needs in this evolving space.
With few solutions currently in the market, this project brought fresh challenges for our team to tackle. We needed to strike a balance between the requirements for operating a business with a highly customizable product inventory and the realities of modern-day user expectations. To do this, we used a combination of existing services and our own code to build an interface we knew would accommodate The Furniture Guild's needs, satisfy user needs, and adapt over time.
In order to create a performant and responsive configurator, Kalon built a single page application using Vue.js powered by an ASP.NET Core API and Azure SQL Database. Using cloud functions, we parallelized the processing of tens of thousands of images to power the configurator.The result was a configurator and marketing site that work in conjunction to provide customers and show room sales reps with an experience that is as easy to use as it is fun.
We feel that you shouldn't have to be a senior developer or a CMS expert to make updates to your website. That's why when building the admin backend for The Furniture Guild's Marketing site, our team focused primarily on making it easy to use while maintaining all of the functionality currently offered in the market. Our team has enabled Hib and The Furniture Guild to spend more time doing what they do best: producing furniture pieces that truly have a style all their own.
