Building a modern eCommerce store for a legendary gift retailer.
To bring its in-store shopping experience online and extend its reach internationally, Garrett Popcorn needed a modern online storefront. Codal was honored to partner with such a legendary Chicago brand to launch a truly transformative eCommerce solution.
Founded in 1949, Garrett Popcorn sells gourmet, Chicago-style popcorn to help people all over the world celebrate life’s cherished moments.
Prior to partnering with Codal, Garrett Popcorn had an outdated eCommerce website, operating on the legacy InsiteCommerce platform. This platform presented efficiency and scalability issues, with its inflexible admin portal, and a general inability to manage site content in a timely manner. Significant time and effort was required from the in-house development team whenever a front-end update was needed.
Garrett needed to migrate to a more robust eCommerce platform that would allow front-end developers to make essential changes, without being stopped or slowed down by technical limitations. The specialty retailer also wanted to ensure its new online store had a superior UX and UI design—one that would establish a real emotional connection with customers, and ultimately promote higher engagement, conversions, and sales.
Garrett needed a true design partner to craft an intelligent, user-friendly, and aesthetically pleasing online storefront that mirrors the unique in-person shopping experience. Codal’s task was multifaceted: Deliver an engaging, immersive eCommerce journey that caters to the unique needs of Garrett’s customers, while also incorporating extensive admin functionality to ensure that the internal team can efficiently manage and update the site as needed.
With the lofty goal of bringing a cherished Chicago brand into the next generation of eCommerce, our team got to work.
We kicked things off by conducting an on-site Discovery session with Garrett Popcorn’s stakeholders in Chicago. Over the course of a week, Codal worked in close collaboration with the Garrett team to define project goals and requirements. Through numerous activities and discussions, our team came to understand the current state of Garrett’s eCommerce business, including its product catalog, fulfillment strategy, branding guidelines, content strategy, and technology stack.
The data, research, and insights gleaned from Discovery guided our team’s roadmap to success. After assembling the user journeys, ecosystem map, and current site map, Codal and Garrett shared a comprehensive understanding of all the work that was required to launch this new eCommerce site. We delivered a proposed system architecture, as well as an extensive project plan encompassing all design and development work. Now, it was time to start building.
Codal’s UX design team had three goals in mind when creating Garrett Popcorn’s new eCommerce experience:
These goals were top of mind during the entire design process. The site’s UX needed to accommodate user navigation and browsing patterns, helping visitors to quickly and easily understand Garrett’s product offerings and variants—including different popcorn recipes, tin sizes, and tin designs.
It was also imperative that the site gave users insight into the diversity of Garrett’s product catalog, with its wide range of flavors and combinations. Lastly, the site needed to convey Garrett’s most important brand attributes: A freshly-made, high-quality product; a customer-centric, Chicago-focused persona; and a unique, indulgent shopping experience.
To ensure these goals were met in the final product, Codal conducted extensive user research, which provided valuable context and perspective, allowing our team to implement useful, simplified, and productive design solutions.
Through two rounds of moderated user testing, the Codal UX design team gleaned valuable insights. From understanding how users best interpret Garrett’s “always fresh” brand story, to seeing how they interact with the ‘Build Your Own Tin’ feature, to determining the best approach for organizing the product catalog, our team collected insights that would form the backbone of Garrett’s improved online shopping experience.
Some features of the site—like the ‘Build Your Own Tin’ feature—presented significant business limitations that had to inform UX design. With tin combinations limited by Garrett’s cooking process and expenses, our design team had to come up with an intuitive and friendly way for communicating to customers why certain popcorn combinations cannot be purchased.
To accommodate all of Garrett Popcorn’s new and existing functional requirements, Codal determined that migrating its eCommerce store to the BigCommerce platform was the best step forward. BigCommerce’s extensive native functionality and flexibility provided the perfect foundation to build Garrett’s new eCommerce site.
To effectively scale its content efforts and allow for easy and timely updates, our team successfully migrated Garrett to the Contentful content management system (CMS) and integrated it with the BigCommerce back end.
Next, we created an intelligent admin portal that allows the Garrett site to be managed internally. This custom portal went above and beyond BigCommerce’s native functionality to accommodate Garrett’s unique functional requirements. It provides accurate and up-to-date monitoring of all middleware and ERP integrations, ensuring they are successfully and consistently syncing. Additionally, the admin portal allows the Garrett team to manage inventory in real time, including all build-a-tin combinations.
Because Garrett is a gift retailer, it required special functionality to provide for things like multiple product variants, order customization, and shipping. Working in tandem with the UX design team, Codal’s agile developers created a custom ‘Build Your Own Tin’ feature, with intelligent logic that allows customers to create their own unique popcorn recipe combinations in multiple sizes and with optional add-ons.
Our team also built a custom inventory application with real-time inventory checks across the site to avoid overselling, and took advantage of native BigCommerce functionality that allows customers to ship to multiple locations under a single order—and to select future ship dates.
Finally, we implemented key functionality to accept payments from digital wallets, allowing customers to purchase Garrett products using Amazon Pay, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and more.
A historic brand with unique and delicious products, Garrett Popcorn is one of the most sought after gifting retailers. Codal was proud to partner with such a legendary brand to deliver a cutting-edge, intelligent eCommerce solution that’s built to scale.
Garrett continues to grow its brand globally. With an intuitive, customer-focused user experience and first-rate functionality, Garrett’s new eCommerce site brings the brand into the 21st century. Taking advantage of the flexible and reliable BigCommerce platform, as well as Codal’s custom development capabilities, Garrett launched an eCommerce solution that really pops.
