Greenhouse Fabrics

Streamlined fabric finder and eCommerce website

As a leading distributor of interior fabrics to the design and upholstery trades, Greenhouse Fabrics turned to Rapid Development Group to design a modern eCommerce experience to help customers find the perfect fabric from an ever-growing inventory of over 10,000 patterns and colorways. Greenhouse Fabrics connects customers with their caring team of fabric specialists to ensure that each order is specified properly for the customer’s project. 

Services:
Site Architecture
Integration
Front-end Development
Technologies:
Drupal 10
Cloudinary
Project Link:
swaths of brightly colored floral and geometric patterned fabrics

Project Expertise

eCommerce

This website features a catalog of thousands of unique SKUs that authenticated members can add to their shopping carts and purchase. To help members find what they're looking for, members can search by keyword and filter by color, category, brand, and more. Members can purchase one or more yards of fabric, or they can request free memos of products they're interested in. Payment information and addresses can be saved to the user's account for faster checkout.

Project Contributors

Jonathan Chaffer head and shoulders image, wearing glasses and a plaid shirt

Jonathan Chaffer

Lead developer

Joe Maag head and shoulders, with glasses, stubble, and light blue dress shirt

Joe Maag

Theme architect

Haley head and shoulders, with glasses, brown hair, black shirt with light denim overshirt

Haley Troyer

UX designer

Project Brief

Greenhouse Fabrics takes pride in a very human-oriented sales and customer service strategy. Each customer is advised with care in selecting the right fabrics for their applications, and guided by a highly-specialized staff through the whole process. Modernizing by introducing e-commerce capabilities was inevitable, but this needed to happen without compromising their key differentiator.

The goals of this project were to:

  1. Allow customers to browse a huge catalog of fabrics online
  2. Bring an established human-driven sales strategy into alignment with an automated web-based model
  3. Provide marketing opportunities through personal, but expert, design advice

The site was explicitly not designed to be a casual fabric shopping experience, since Greenhouse Fabrics is a wholesaler focused on the needs of upholsterers and interior decorators.

Greenhouse fabric experts
Greenhouse ebony fabric collection

What We Did

The new Greenhouse Fabrics site emphasizes whitespace, to bring attention to the fabrics themselves which are the showpiece of the site. A modern design blog keeps content fresh, while products themselves are automatically sorted and presented in beautiful detail.

Behind the scenes, integrations with Apache Solr, Cloudinary, and FACTS keep this fast and efficient both for fabric customers browsing for solutions and for Greenhouse staff who need to maintain all of the detailed product and order information.

Fabric search

Challenge

Customers need to navigate among 10,000+ SKUs

Solution

An intuitive faceted search engine

Searching for a fabric needed to be easy and fast. The site's fabric search tool uses Apache Solr with a custom Javascript front-end to provide many ways to segment the product results, with nearly instantaneous feedback.

Challenge

Large fabric images place great strain on site bandwidth

Solution

Integration with an external content delivery network

Greenhouse Fabrics curates high-resolution photography for each of their thousands of fabrics. To display these to customers and facilitate their purchasing decisions, the Cloudinary content delivery network prepares and delivers these images quickly through a custom Javascript layer.

Challenge

An established ERP system holds all product and customer information

Solution

Automated product and customer data import

A loosely-coupled integration with the existing FACTS system provides system stability while still providing data integrity. Nightly imports reconcile product, customer, and order information stored in FACTS with the information maintained in Drupal. No data automatically flows in the opposite direction, allowing valued customer support staff to retain the final authority for all customer interactions.
Fabric details
“We have worked with Rapid Development Group for seven years now and we can always count on them to understand our ideas, provide great solutions, and ultimately turn our visions to reality. We needed to help our customers discover the perfect fabric options from our constantly growing inventory of over 10,000 patterns. RDG came up with a solution that felt both modern for internet shoppers and familiar for long-time customers who love the tactile experience of our fabric sample books. And best of all, it connected seamlessly with our existing business system for inventory and order fulfillment. RDG’s expertise, along with their in-depth knowledge of our business and brand, makes all the difference!”
Victoria Brooks VP of Marketing , Greenhouse Fabrics
Blue fabrics
Greenhouse textured fabrics
Home decor