Elevated Third Boosts Purple’s Metrics, Cuts Launch Time

Listen to article

Mattress innovators Purple wanted to improve the user experience and simplify content authoring, but the company’s disparate tools and tedious content updating process proved challenging

Working with Elevated Third to transition to Drupal on Acquia Cloud, Purple realized an 89% decrease in the time it took to launch promotions and a 15% boost in performance metrics.

Client: Purple

Challenge: Purple wanted to boost online sales while simplifying the content update process, but disparate tools slowed the company from reaching its goals.

Results: Performance metrics improved by 15%, and Purple decreased its promotion launch time by 89%, from nearly four weeks to just three days.

Meta description: Purple wanted to improve the user experience and the experience for content authors, and Elevated Third — along with Acquia — helped them make it happen.

The Client

A digitally-native brand, Purple’s mission is to help people feel and live better through innovative comfort solutions. The company designs and manufactures a variety of innovative, premium, branded comfort products, including mattresses, pillows, cushions, frames, sheets, and more. Its products are the result of over 25 years of innovation and investment in proprietary and patented comfort technologies and the development of its own manufacturing processes.

The Challenge

Purple wanted to create a compelling user experience to help generate online sales while simultaneously simplifying content authoring and updates. But with multiple tools powering its digital experience— including WordPress, Craft, and Shopify — the company’s content teams found it challenging to streamline content authoring while maintaining a centralized location for product information. And even minor content edits, like updates to promotions and pricing, required developer involvement.

With a broad array of mattress and accessory offerings, it can be difficult for customers to distinguish product differences. The company’s existing design system — a complex toolset that synced comercetools’ pricing data and included conditional pricing, promotions, and custom display options — used callouts and comparison tools to help customers make informed decisions. But when the company decided to transition to Drupal, its in-house team quickly realized they needed professional assistance.

The Solution

Purple tapped enterprise Drupal web development agency Elevated Third to provide guidance on the best way to “Drupalize” each component. Elevated Third took the lead on developing components in an easily configurable way that didn’t add unnecessary technical debt or bloat. For example, Elevated Third created product cards that marry custom images, on-the-fly dynamic pricing information, third-party rating metrics, and contextual conditional indicators like “on-sale” tags — combining a complex collection of information in a way that appears effortless and straightforward to potential customers.

Purple’s product and marketing pages relied heavily on product imagery, so appropriately handling media was a priority for admins and end users. Elevated Third deployed a digital asset manager into Drupal’s media library, simplifying the media management process. Additionally, Elevated Third designed a system that leverages Drupal’s Layout Builder for menus, empowering Purple’s marketers and content authors to easily move and edit the site’s mega menus without developer involvement.

Elevated Third integrated commercetools under the Drupal theme layer to facilitate Purple’s pricing and checkout process — the site’s product pages pull product data via JSON, interacting with the API driving product pricing. When a user starts to engage with product options, DMI’s React application handles that part of the page experience, delivering the user to the checkout once they add a product to their cart. This integration ensures consistency in the pricing displayed across the site, including in areas outside the React app.

The Results

Following the launch of the new site, Purple realized a 15% increase in overall performance metrics. The company has achieved significant improvement in the promotions process; with Elevated Third’s integration of Drupal and ecommerce tools, Purple can more frequently and quickly run promotions. This streamlined system has allowed Purple tremendous flexibility in the number and types of promotions it launches.

Another improved metric is the time it takes Purple to launch promotions. Purple’s marketing and sales teams often deploy back-to-back promotions with highly precise “go live” times. And while the company’s previous workflow was too sluggish and arduous to manage at scale, thanks to Elevated Third and Acquia, Purple now can easily create, stage, and deploy timed content releases across the site.

Prior to shifting to Drupal, promotions took an average of four weeks from development to launch; since adopting Drupal, Purple can develop and launch promotions in just three days. As a result, the company’s overall brand perception has improved, and Purple’s in-house development team can focus on making improvements that create a positive user experience.