Ignacio Giri

Crate&Barrel

The Challenge

Crate & Barrel is all about creating connections and bonding with their customers.

However, they struggled to truly maximize the company’s growth and profitability through creativity and merchandising techniques.

Crate&Barrel

The Concept

We wanted to engage Crate & Barrel’s audience by creating an emotional connection between their home, the furniture in it and the moments being shared.

This concept would give off the traditional, warm feeling Crate & Barrel is known for while bringing value to their merchandise and, in turn, increasing growth and profitability for the company.

Crate&Barrel

The Solution

In order to bring storytelling and emotion into Crate & Barrel’s marketing, I played a key role in brainstorming, guiding, and creating multiple initiatives that worked together to meet the company’s goals in their own important way.

The “&” Holds Everything

Home is first and foremost a place where families live, grow, share and love. The & Holds Everything campaign focuses on the idea that home is more than the furniture in it. By humanizing the products with photography and interaction, I truly brought this campaign to life and connected consumers with the merchandise they were purchasing.

While this initiative is simple in design, it is complex in technology. I created several online marketing techniques that helped bring personal value to Crate & Barrel’s merchandise while ideating groundbreaking interaction methods that would feature the latest product catalog in a homey, familiar way.

I got started by redesigning, refreshing and rethinking Crate & Barrel’s website, specifically focusing on the e-commerce customer experience.

This redesign included designing, coding, building prototypes and testing new technologies leveraging HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript. Through the website, I translated the strategies I helped create to the digital world, connecting with the audience across all platforms.

The design and imagery used in the e-commerce customer experience focused on bringing the products in the Crate & Barrel store into a customer’s actual home. For instance, you wouldn’t find just a pan in the online store, but the pan that you will use to cook Christmas roast in, or your first Thanksgiving turkey. This imagery was crafted to help customers put themselves in the marketing campaigns, feeling the emotion behind the product.

As an added effort to upsell customers with strategic merchandise recommendations, I designed and coded an innovative scrolling pyramid feature. This scrolling pyramid helped customers make additional product choices in a relevant and straightforward way based on the buying patterns of similar customers.

We also created a viral initiative that tied in Instagram, encouraging customers to actually share their Crate & Barrel products in their own homes. They could win gift cards to use in the store by tagging their photos with the “#cbliving” hashtag.