Providing an Edge for Polysleep on Shopify Plus
Jeremiah Curvers is the Co-Founder and CEO of Polysleep, a Canadian mattress retailer based in Montreal, Canada, and also a client of Diff Agency.
Jeremiah launched Polysleep just 3-years ago as a mattress-in-a-box company. The company started with just one product, the classic Polysleep mattress, and has since expanded to add pillows, two new mattresses and a bed foundation, and soon to be announced a baby mattress.
Jeremiah Curvers, CEO, and Deborah Nasica-Labouze, COO, Polysleep
To celebrate Polysleep’s rebranding as an innovative technology company with Diff, I thought it would be a good idea to introduce diff blog readers to Polysleep’s team. I jumped on a call with Deborah Nasica-Labouze, COO, and Jeremiah, CEO, to talk about the latest enhancements for Polysleep’s desktop and mobile website for selling online: context, user experience, 3d modeling and much more. Here’s what they had to say:
Q - Why did you decide to work with Diff Agency as your Shopify Plus partner?
A - First off is Diff’s expertise in building multilingual (English and French) sites which enabled us to stop using the Langify app for our multilingual needs. The second reason is the fact that we were able to develop a fully customized front-end template on Shopify Plus based on our own unique design concepts. Diff had that capacity to do something different than what other mattress companies do.
Q - What were some of the challenges you faced by selling online in the competitive mattress marketplace?
A - There's a lot of small players in the mattress industry selling online, and even in ecommerce retail when there’s such a specific niche market. Shopify is a very popular platform because it allows you to scale a website with a very limited budget. The problem, however, is that it’s very hard for a brand to showcase a message differently without knowing how to customize a Shopify store. We decided to work with Diff because they are Shopify experts and their in-house developers could provide us a range of collaborative ecommerce design services.
The first step in the process was sitting down with Ben and his team to really study and understand the difference of what the consumer might feel when going to our website versus a brand that has a lot more authority. Matt’s user experience team conducted a usability session to help us realize how hard it was for real consumers to clearly understand our value proposition and secure our brand value. At that point, we started iterating different concepts until we just literally said with our team, let’s build everything from scratch rather than doing an update.
Q - What are your greatest achievements from working with diff on the Shopify Plus store redesign?
A - One thing we did differently is our photo treatment. The model interacts with the call to action (CTA) button, so instead of putting a picture and then having an element where you can click around it, we made sure the picture is part of the element itself. That’s why on the homepage the lady is pointing up to the CTA. That’s what we are trying to do more and more, having a synergy between the online selling platform, the content, transitions and animation concepts.
The second thing we did is the gradient background for the wow factor on the homepage. To keep the flow interesting without having to put too much information, the background changes colors as you scroll down to different products. It goes from a light purple to a dark blue and goes back to a grey afterwards. People are used to seeing one flat colour, so subtly changing colours is playful and eye-catching, keeping the user engaged and focused on the product information.
Then on the product itself, we’ve used 3D animation as a way to speak with people who are more like me, who are technical thinkers and want to know what really makes this mattress unique. We need to speak to different people, so at the moment we are working on a new mockup on the product page to repeat the same information, just in a different language. In addition to the technical, we’ll have a pictogram for example, that says no motion transfer in a way that is very friendly and easy to understand. That’s really the core of the content - to be able within the same page to narrate the same elements differently so that we capture more attention and therefore hopefully have a better conversion rate.
Also, the store locator is a big thing for us, the fact that you can interact with the map directly to see our local stores, and that we can update that easily in a fashionable way. Even for SEO purposes, if you go to the footer of the page, you’re going to have a store by product feature, a duplication of our store locator that is aimed towards helping search engines categorize these pages better.
Q - How do you think Diff’s enhancements on your Shopify Plus store are giving Polysleep an edge in the competitive mattress online market?
A - The main edge we would say is user experience, which is integral to selling online. The second would definitely be leveraging the UX knowledge over the past couple months. The fact that we can develop a custom front-end template based on our unique design is what sets us apart. We are not bound by the ‘Oh, the template cannot do that’ mindset, so that’s a big plus.
We are going to be on par with multi-million dollar websites with elements that our competitors don’t even have yet. Our features will bring the user experience to a level where people don’t necessarily expect that from a small local brand, especially not on Shopify Plus.
Q - So what’s coming up next for the Polysleep Shopify Plus store?
A - What we’re most excited about working with Diff is really to push the boundaries that make people think ‘Oh my goodness, that’s not doable with Shopify.’
What’s coming up next is that we will grow our online traffic as much as possible which is why we are investing massively in content creation. After that, we’re discussing integrating new features that we didn’t have before - like products that show up on the side of the site, the integration of a chatbot that is AI driven, the capacity to have guest blogger accounts on our website and link to their social profiles, and possibly even integrating personalization elements with Diff’s partner Dynamic Yield.
Now that the core of the website rebrand project is done, we will continue to work on small feature releases on a monthly agile schedule with Diff - and that is really cool and often the biggest roadblock when you do a website. Working in smaller chunks of development at a time allows us to navigate more freely and efficiently to make sure we adapt all our content and elements based on the market reaction.
Who else would you like to see a conversation with? Business Owners? Marketers? UX Designers? Tweet or message us @DiffAgency on Twitter to let us know your thoughts.
