The manufacturer's entire revenue ran through third-party retailers. Every piece it made was sold under someone else's roof, with a commission paid on each sale. The brand had no direct-to-consumer presence at all: no channel it controlled, no first-hand view of who was buying its furniture, and no way to shape the buying experience around its own products.

Product complexity was the reason the direct route had never been taken. Customers do not buy this furniture off a shelf; they choose fabric, finish, leg style and custom dimensions for each piece. A template web shop built for fixed SKUs cannot express that, and getting it wrong risked a stream of mis-specified orders arriving at the factory.

The operational side was just as unforgiving. A one-off configured piece has no standard shipping rate, so delivery costs could not be quoted at the point of sale, and every order ultimately had to reach the ERP that runs manufacturing. Without solving configuration, freight and order flow together, a direct channel would have created more problems than it captured.

We built a custom ecommerce platform designed around the way this furniture is actually bought. Its centrepiece is a visual product configurator: customers select fabric, finish, leg style and custom dimensions, and a live preview updates with every choice, so what arrives is what they saw. The configurator does the work a showroom assistant would, walking the buyer through each decision in order.

Around it we solved the two problems that had made a direct channel impractical. A logistics API returns real-time freight costs for the configured piece, so customers see the true delivered price at checkout rather than a surprise afterwards. And a custom order management system carries every order, with its full specification, straight into the company's ERP, so the factory builds from the same data the customer entered.