Overview About Above The Fray Design

L.H. Dottie is a 4th generation family-owned supplier of top quality parts for Electrical, Plumbing, Industrial, Low Voltage, Renewable Energy, and HVAC businesses. They were in the process of re-building their website and migrating from Drupal Commerce to Magento 2 when they realized their current agency was not a good fit for their needs. They came to Above The Fray looking for assistance to rescue the project and take it across the finish line. The Challenge Because this project required us to come in with the build already in progress, we had to abandon our typical discovery process and instead decipher the intricate scope of the site and understand the dynamic requirements of the client’s business through a more continuous discovery process. After diving into the code, our team discovered a substantial number of serious issues in the existing infrastructure built by the previous agency, demanding a comprehensive overhaul of much of the existing code. With the disappointments the L.H. Dottie team had already faced, it was critical that we earn their trust throughout each step of the project. Our transparency, robust processes, and professionalism were pivotal in building their confidence in our team and putting the project back on track.

Crabtree Kitchen + Bar, a Crabtree brand, is a farm to table restaurant located just across the bay from Seattle in Poulsbo, Washington. The Crabtree’s own and operate a family of restaurants and retail brands centered around food and drink including two restaurants, a chocolate shop, a liquor store, and a cattle farm. They initially reached out for help redesigning and architecting a new ecommerce website for High Spirits, their liquor brand, and once that site launched with success, they decided to proceed with an updated site for Crabtree Kitchen + Bar as well. The Challenge The Crabtree’s wanted to unify the digital presence of their brands and make it easier for their customers to navigate between and purchase from all of their stores. They wanted Crabtree Kitchen + Bar to be able to show product recommendations from their other stores  and use a shared cart for a seamless buying experience. For example, if a user was ordering an entree on the Crabtree Kitchen + Bar site, they might see a few bottles of wine from High Spirits recommended that pair well with that meal.

gearUP Sports, a leading sports league uniform company, teamed up with Above The Fray at a critical inflection point in the company’s nearly 15-year journey. After a period of significant growth, gearUP Sports was in dire need of a systems architecture and standard operational procedures overhaul. They needed long term solutions to address core issues preventing the company from scaling further. gearUP was also ready to revolutionize the way coordinators, players, parents, coaches, and fans shop for uniforms online—prompting the creation of a one-of-a-kind ecommerce tool outfitted with an array of sophisticated new features. The Challenge Virtually all of the business’s core operational processes were manual and scattered across various systems, with no consistent standard of protocols. This made it cumbersome to synchronize cross-team efforts, adding extra time to the ordering process both externally for customers and internally for the gearUP Sports team. The company also needed to migrate from OpenCart, their previous ecommerce system, to a platform that would allow them to easily establish hundreds of new web stores daily for their customers with custom logos and branding.  With a keen understanding of the task at hand, Above The Fray worked to develop a new operational framework, and build a new purchasing portal dedicated to delivering an unprecedented customer experience.

For more than 45 years, GloryBee has provided one of the largest assortments of raw honey in the world to wholesale and retail customers. The team at GloryBee came to Above The Fray with a new vision for their ecommerce sites focused on improving their customer experience and reducing the strain on their customer service team. They wanted to create several microsites to support the various customer groups they served, improve organic rankings, and uniquely highlight their products and offerings. GloryBee was determined to find the right proactive partner who could help them take their vision and mold it into a strategic plan. GloryBee recognized that their website was outdated and wasn’t serving their customers well. Their primary customer group, their wholesale customers, made up the majority of the company’s revenue source, but the main website was built for their retail customers and really focused on niche beekeeping and craft products rather than GloryBee’s core product offerings. The on-site experience was so bad that most of their wholesale customers weren’t using the site at all, leaving  the customer service team bogged down by calls, emails, and requests that should have easily been handled by a functional B2B ecommerce site. In addition to the poor functionality of the wholesale site, it was also difficult to get to. The wholesale subdomain was barely ranking in search and confusing to navigate to once on the retail site. GloyBee’s vision to create several microsites solved for the goal to create a tailored experience for specific customer groups but didn’t take into account the scope of work it would take to build dozens of unique sites or the fact that there would be no simple way to cross-sell to a customer that needed both honey and coconut products, for example,  if they existed on separate domains with separate carts.