The Swiss Colony, Inc. is one of the largest direct marketers in the world. The company, along with multiple catalog subsidiaries, provides customers with furniture and home decor, apparel, entertainment products, gifts and collectibles, and much more. Other catalogs operated by Swiss Colony include Montgomery Ward, Country Door, Ginny’s, and Seventh Avenue.

CHALLENGE

Swiss Colony faced the challenge of organizing and managing multiple Web sites that catered to different audiences, but still had the same fundamental needs in terms of e-commerce and user experience. They sought to have one common platform in which they could manage all sites with one Site Manager.

Swiss Colony engaged Fry to redesign swisscolony.com and develop a multi-site platform for the following 12 Web sites:

• Swiss Colony
  
• Montgomery Ward
  
• Ashro
  
• Race TeamGear
  
• Seventh Avenue
  
• Midnight Velvet
  
• Through the Country Door
  
• Ginny’s
  
• Monroe and Main
  
• Home Visions
  
• Tender Filet
  
• Grandpointe
  

SOLUTION

Fry leveraged our Open Commerce Platform (OCP) as a multi-site solution. OCP employs a multi-layered class-type architecture that allows for greater code re-use, extendibility, and scalability that optimizes the ability to use OCP to support multiple sites with distinct user interfaces. Fry developed a model in which one product database is shared and a common site manager is used to manage content across all sites. The functionality of the platform meets the needs of all of the Swiss Colony sites, but only the functionality needed for each particular site is used. This model, and the inherent scalability and extensibility of the OCP framework, supports Swiss Colony’s goal to leverage a single e-commerce platform for all of their sites. The variation in the look and feel of all 12 sites is also a testament to the multi-site capabilities of OCP.

As part of the OCP implementation, Swiss Colony also had new merchandising and promotional capabilities. Not only can they tailor promotions specific to customers for each site, all experiences are managed with one site manager tool.

In addition to building the platform that these sites sit on, Fry performed all of the production/CSS work for Tender Filet and Monroe and Main. Fry also provided launch support in the form of both managed services and technical operations and creative design for www.swisscolony.com.