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East Fork
East Fork
Year
2021-2023
Team
Strategy, Content, Design, Engineering
Program
Factory
Service
Information Architecture
Content Strategy
Art Direction
Ecommerce Design
Ecommerce Development
Headless Replatform
3rd Party Integrations
Brief
Bondfire partnered with East Fork in 2021 to holistically redesign and re-platform their e-commerce experience.
The East Fork leadership team approached BF with a handful of issues. Their brand was strong, but it was closely tied to one of the founders, Connie. The product had found a cult following, but they needed to attract new customers. The website was fun and quirky, but lacked the backend sophistication to effectively manage their inventory, business logic, and content management.
In true BF fashion, we went about solving all of these problems utilizing a holistic brand, UX, and technology forward approach. The end result was a successful relaunch and foundation for subsequent growth for the business.
Introduction
Helping translate the voice and personality of the founder to the brand.
By 2021, East Fork has amassed a cult following, led largely by the personality and communications of their founder, Connie. We knew that in order for the brand to grow, we needed to develop a scalable system for visual communications, merchandising, and content strategy.
Results
Average Order Value
+11%
Conversion Rate
+6%
YoY Revenue
+40%
Solutions
We constructed a digital design system that put the product at the center.
The beauty of East Fork’s pots lies in its unique approach to the glaze. Leveraging highly collectible color drops, each piece is instantly recognizable as a piece of East Fork. We made the decision to strip all color from the digital design system, allowing the impact of the photography and product to take the forefront.
We designed a navigation system that effectively speaks to new and returning customers.
Prior to the redesign, the navigation menu lead with the standard “Shop” link. It was clear that East Fork needed to present it’s hero product line, Pottery, so we architected a navigation system that quickly allowed customers to find these products. Returning customers can quickly jump to specific glazes and forms, while new customers can understand a high level overview of the product merchandising.
We developed a robust yet elegant solution that linked back of house inventory management with frontend UX.
East Fork’s inventory logic is coupled closely to the glaze, and these glazes contain a variety of characteristics such as inventory level, salability, customer notifications, and business logic. We developed a backend organization that allowed East Fork to define these characteristics at the glaze level, which would then cascade down to the corresponding child products. This system unlocked greater flexibility and increased administrative productivity for their merchandising team.
We built a performant and scalable headless architecture on Shopify Plus.
Given East Fork’s complex inventory, glaze, and business logic requirements, Shopify’s native ERP capabilities were posing a serious hurdle for scalability. Our team architected a modular headless stack that utilized the best of what Shopify Plus offered, along with best-in-class content management with Sanity CMS, and API-based microservices for connecting 3rd party platforms.
Art Direction
We collaborated with the creative team to develop a scalable system for art direction.
One of East Fork’s super powers is their ability to create beautiful and captivating imagery. We partnered with the in house creative team to develop a system for presenting imagery on the site in the most effective way. This included pack photography on the PDP, campaign imagery on the homepage, and brand assets throughout the user experience.
Case Studies