More Than Just Craft Commerce: Replatforming to Build a Sacred Space

A Modern Update for Traditional Crafts

Annie’s was founded in Big Sandy, Texas in 1975, sharing the magic of the stitching world through magazines and catalogs. They were acquired in 1996, and their parent company would eventually consolidate all the craft and nostalgia businesses they owned under the Annie’s banner in 2012. By that time, Annie’s had expanded into the world of ecommerce, but over time found themselves with multiple websites that couldn’t connect with each other. Customers needed separate login credentials for each site, causing frustration for users and missed cross-sell opportunities for the company.
 
Worse still, the mounting technical debt from their homegrown ecommerce platforms was directly impacting revenue. The time it took to process a payment was so long that an increasing number of customers would abandon the site without completing their transactions. Annie’s knew things needed to change, and had a hard deadline for it (thanks to the upcoming end of a server hosting contract). They began what would be a game-changing, company-wide digital transformation process, and at the center of it all, asked Guidance to lead the ecommerce replatforming.
 
With Adobe Commerce as the solution of choice, Guidance had the flexibility and scalability they needed to get Annie’s on the right path for continued growth and community building. Additionally, the project’s timing aligned with the release of Adobe Developer App Builder, a serverless extensibility platform that offers a more unified middleware creation process. Guidance put the new platform to the test, integrating an array of new-to-Annie’s services – ERP, WMS, payment processing, subscription management, and more.

Branding for a Sacred Feminine Space

Annie’s aspires to be the leading retailer in women’s lifestyle and entertainment products, content, and services. But above and beyond that goal, they want their online presence to offer more than just ecommerce. They shared a vision of their new site as a community for learning, softer and more welcoming where, in the past, it had been stark and lacked warmth. Their recently updated style guide brought their brand in the right direction, but it needed further elaboration to extend the brand’s presentation into the digital space and do so in an ADA-compliant way.
 
Guidance used Annie’s brand purple – recently modified in their style guide update, and which needed to be carried through for brand recognition – as a jumping off point for a subtly tweaked ADA-compliant digital color guide. Guidance’s empathic design incorporated shades that still told the supportive story Annie’s had in mind, while employing a necessary contrast range for text pairings with buttons, banners, and backgrounds.

Crochet One, Then Four More in the Next Stitch

Annie’s ultimate desire is to merge five disparate websites into one, but as Guidance’s UX, UI, and content strategy teams dove into the discovery phase with Annie’s internal teams, they quickly realized two things. First, with a digital transformation also underway (more about that in the next section), replatforming resources were going to be limited in the short term. Second, existing issues with the B2C website needed urgent attention. The homegrown platform had become so difficult to manage that customers were experiencing delays of 30 seconds or more from the moment of clicking a “Pay” button at checkout to the order being processed. It had become a customer service nightmare, in addition to losing Annie’s thousands of dollars in sales every month, as customers navigated away from the checkout process in frustration.
 
As a result, Guidance worked to develop a future-proof approach, solving the B2C website challenges in the short term and offering Annie’s customers the kind of frictionless shopping experience they wanted, while laying the groundwork for migrating Annie’s other websites as soon as time and resources would allow. This required the development of a new and coherent site information architecture, which prioritizes wayfinding, user intent, and logical content relationships.
 
On the product detail pages (PDPs), Guidance developed new controls for Annie’s highly configurable products. For example, with book club bundles, customers can choose between digital, audio, or print formats, and set delivery frequencies. These PDPs also account for different purchasing scenarios, including one-time buyers, subscribers, and logged-in members, ensuring clear messaging at every step. For patterns and other instructional products, Guidance created a badging system to provide at-a-glance details about the craft type, skill level, and supplemental resources available for each.

The Focal Point of an Even Bigger Picture

Annie’s didn’t just task Guidance with fulfilling an ecommerce project in isolation. 
It was part of a company-wide digital transformation—a merging of business processes to integrate the different websites and product lines, as well as an overhaul involving their enterprise resource planning (ERP), warehouse management system (WMS), payment gateway, subscription service, and customer relationship management. As such, the Adobe Commerce replatforming also needed to deliver layers of connection between Annie’s newly implemented backend systems and the frontend customer experience.
 
Guidance worked in concert with multiple external partners to establish stable, scalable data flows between Adobe Commerce and platforms like Microsoft Business Central (the new ERP), Logiwa (the new WMS), and other platforms. 
The custom middleware development began with a new opportunity – access to Adobe Developer App Builder, a solution intended to replace the practice of PHP development. App Builder enables the creation of serverless apps and offers plug-and-play integrations and API clients, while also allowing for development of webhooks and custom menus, for example.
 
Guidance also took Adobe's Commerce Integration Starter Kit, building off of it and greatly expanding its base capabilities to support Annie’s unique use cases. 
In addition to enabling the usual kind of data synchronizations between an ecommerce platform and an ERP, Guidance also refined the middleware solution to offer robust error handling. A custom logging system provides granular visibility into the integrations’ workflows, directly within the Adobe Commerce admin panel. This greatly enhances Annie’s internal ability to support and troubleshoot the new system.

Taking a Liking to Subscribing

On top of the array of physical and digital products offered by Annie’s, they also offer a range of standalone subscription products, including children’s crafting kit memberships, book clubs, and magazine subscriptions. Each of these has its own unique fulfillment schedule and content format options, and suffered from the challenge of being spread across multiple legacy websites, requiring multiple customer records and logins. But perhaps the most complex offering is Annie’s Creative Studio, which grants customers access to thousands of exclusive videos, patterns, tutorials, and other digital items.
 
To manage recurring payments and subscription logic, Guidance chose Ordergroove as the Adobe Commerce extension that could best handle Annie’s complex set of use cases. Taking advantage of the flexibility this solution offered, Guidance made significant customizations to deliver an integration that supports customers from product discovery to subscription management. On every PDP, customers can see whether a given product is available to them through their Creative Studio membership, preventing duplicate purchases. Inside a member’s Digital Bookshelf, they’re able to easily scan, sort, and filter all the assets to which their membership grants them access.

Creating a Sense of Digital Entitlement

Among the most technically nuanced aspects of the project was the overhaul of Annie’s digital product management capabilities. Previously, digital content—as diverse as patterns, ebooks, audiobooks, instructional videos, and machine-readable sewing files—was fragmented across their multiple websites, and subject to each site’s access rules. This was a pain point for both customers and Annie’s development and customer service teams.
 
To transform their digital product management into a scalable, centralized, and intelligent system, Guidance designed a custom digital entitlements framework within Adobe Commerce. Each digital asset is typed and tagged at the system level and associated with specific file paths associated with hosting on Amazon S3, or asset IDs for video streaming with Brightcove. Adobe Commerce communicates dynamically with S3 and Brightcove to deliver content securely and reliably. The system also accounts for password protection, watermarking, and digital rights management (DRM) necessities.
 
With a framework in place, Guidance turned to the challenge of migration. Thousands of customers, and years of data scattered across multiple legacy websites, meant that Annie’s needed a system for importing digital assets to the new system as seamlessly as possible, minimizing any disruption to access. Guidance created the automation to achieve this, as well as the tools that allow Annie’s customer service reps to easily make manual adjustments when needed.
 
From the customer perspective, the newly designed Digital Bookshelf delivers a unified and intuitive experience. They can easily browse, sort, and filter previous purchases by file type; export files to external devices like Kindles and sewing machines; see file update and revision histories; and redownload purchases or retrieve accidentally deleted or misplaced files. All of this, and more, can be done without customer service intervention. And as with membership programs, information on the PDPs helps prevent customers from making duplicate purchases.