Interviews
Lodger Footwear is a startup designer of luxury ready to wear and bespoke mens shoes located in London's fashionable West End. Recognizing the importance of online marketing to their overall growth strategy, Lodger needed a feature rich ecommerce platform that would scale as their business grows. Magento not only runs Lodger's online sales, it also serves as their primary inventory management system and CRM tool. It provides Lodger with a secure gateway into their product catalog and customer activity sitewide, enabling quick access to key reporting features, invoices, shipping status, and more.
Magento interviewed Gorilla, an ecommerce services firm located in Chicago. Gorilla works with multi-channel retailers and brand manufacturers helping them with creative, strategy, marketing, and platform implementation.
- What technologies are currently implemented / integrated in the frontend and behind-the-scenes?
For the front end of Lodgerfootwear.com, we integrated custom promotional features, slide shows, "mega" dropdown menus, and rich product viewing tools using custom jquery and ajax. All work done on the back end is based on Magento with custom php development to add functionality not found off the shelf. Custom features include a "My Wardrobe" section of the Account area showing all products purchased by a customer as well as items in their wish list; a rich promotional banner series on the home page tied directly into the Magento CMS system; a "Shoe of the Month" configurable product category in which products are available for a month at a time, then "expired" to a gallery of past shoes of the month; and more.
- Why did you choose Magento for the project?
After an initial bad experience with offshore resources, Lodger had a very short time frame, a compressed budget, and needed to have a powerful, but elegant "luxury oriented" solution up quickly. Magento met all their needs including inventory and order management saving the client from having to procure an ERP tool. The open source platform, robust and growing community support, flexible architecture, and many 3rd party plug-ins made Magento an easy choice over OSCommerce and other platforms that were more common at the time.
- Would you recommend enterprise companies use Magento?
Yes, depending upon the specific requirements.
- What are your future plans with Magento and the site?
Gorilla has developed a practice area around Magento and will continue to grow our relationship with Varien. We are excited about the advances Magento has made over the last year and look forward to continued maturation of the platform. We continue to add to the site around the business and marketing requirements of Lodger.
- Any recommendations for people evaluating Magento?
When choosing a platform, take strong consideration into the road map and life cycle of that platform over the next 2-4 years. You need to be in it not only for the features and functions the tool offers now, but the long term viability and growth of the tool in the years to come. Choose something with the momentum to grow along with your organization.
The open source platform, robust and growing community support, flexible architecture, and many 3rd party plug-ins made Magento an easy choice ...."
- Brian Grady, Gorilla
Lodger Footwear is currently running on Magento at http://www.lodgerfootwear.com/.
