Case study 4:
Website Redesign for Luxury Purchasing
Physical-to-digital retail evolution. Turning a showroom-driven business into a scalable digital commerce engine.
50k
UX
investment
398%
increase in
online upholstery
revenue
32%
increase in
web traffic
THE TENSION:
?
After building the storytelling platform for KnollTextiles, I could see the next opportunity clearly. The shopping experience didn't match the brand experience we'd just created. Someone would land on a beautiful editorial lookbook page and then click through to a product discovery experience that felt like a database.
The business model still relied heavily on face-to-face sales relationships. eCommerce was generating revenue, but nowhere near what it could, because the website wasn't helping customers move confidently from inspiration to purchase.
Search was limited. Navigation between KnollTextiles and the parent Knoll furniture brand was confusing. The two related brands needed a clear path between them.
THE MOVE:
I saw the gap, built the business case, and convinced the President and Creative Director to allocate $50,000 for a full site redesign. Then I enrolled in General Assembly's UX Design program to build the skills to lead this myself.
I put everything I learned in my UX Design certification course into practice. User interviews, usability tests, prototypes, user flows, nested navigation design, advanced search architecture, and a year-long rollout with engineers and freelancers. I also worked directly with the digital color team to calibrate product imagery, adjusting brightness and saturation by small percentages until the textile on screen perfectly matched the physical swatch.
THE EXPERIENCE CHALLENGE:
The advanced search feature was the centerpiece and the most challenging to solve. KnollTextiles had hundreds of SKUs across color families, material types, performance specifications, and designer collections. The existing search returned too many results with too little refinement. Designers needed to filter by color family, substrate, performance rating, and designer origin all at once.
Then the parent/subsidiary navigation between Knoll and KnollTextiles needed a new logic with clear wayfinding between brands and no dead ends.
THE RESULT:
1: Advanced search and nested navigation shipped across the full site.
2: A seamless cross-brand navigation between KnollTextiles and Knoll furniture established for the first time.
Navigation redesign + search improvements + discoverability.
I designed a filtering and discovery architecture that made the inventory navigable for the first time. Then I tied it to the storytelling platform so a designer could move from an editorial piece about a collection straight into filtered search results for that collection's products.
The same navigation problem between parent and subsidiary appears at every scale. how do you create a seamless experience between platforms that feel like separate companies but belong to the same ecosystem? I solved it at KnollTextiles between a parent brand and a subsidiary. I solved it again at Wayfair between corporate, careers, and investor relations. The answer is always the same: design the connective tissue first, then build the content that moves through it.
This was the same cross-platform navigation challenge I'd later solve at Wayfair. how do you create a seamless experience between a parent brand and a subsidiary when they live in the same ecosystem but feel like separate companies? At Knoll, that meant designing the navigation architecture to move fluidly between the furniture parent and the textiles division, so a designer researching a full office specification could move between product families without losing the thread.
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398% increase in upholstery ecommerce revenue year-over-year
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150% increase in sitewide ecommerce revenue
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32% increase in web traffic
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$50,000 investment secured, led, and delivered end-to-end
THE LESSON:
Design the connective layers first (search and navigation), then build the content that moves through it.
Leading the Omnichannel Charge:
At KnollTextiles, the business model relied heavily on face-to-face direct sales. Recognizing the need to bridge the gap between online and offline experiences, I advocated for a $50,000 investment to overhaul the website end-to-end. As the leader of this large-scale UX design project from concept to completion, I conducted user interviews and usability tests, created prototypes and user flows, pitched to directors, and engaged with freelancers, product managers, and engineers to to bring the designs to fruition. Over the course of one year, we rolled out incremental updates, resulting in a 150% increase in eCommerce revenue across all product categories, with upholstery revenue soaring 398%.
This highly successful endeavor inspired me to be a part of revolutionizing the future of eCommerce at Wayfair as the first UX Writer for the company's first-ever brick-and-mortar retail store. Through strategizing educational and experiential elements such as endless aisle touchscreen displays and electronic shelf tags, I uncovered a niche in omnichannel evolution.
