Rhode Island-based Colonial Mills manufactures and distributes braided rugs of all shapes and sizes, in addition to home décor accessories made with braided rug material, including baskets and chair pads. The company has been family owned and operated since 1977 and their products continue to keep pace with today’s home fashion trends. The company is proud of their product line’s “made in the U.S.A.” status, and they’re very proud of their office pup, Pam, who is always ready to greet visitors to the Colonial Mills headquarters in East Providence.
Colonial Mills had engaged Brave River for IT services for several years, when they began to experience challenges with keeping their e-commerce website up to date. Specifically, they lacked full control of their site, built in Drupal, and therefore couldn’t implement flash sales when they wanted to, so they were missing out on valuable opportunities to increase sales at important times of the year. And the site was being hosted and maintained by a company that wasn’t providing them with great support.
We began the project by working with Colonial Mills to learn about their business and the specific technical challenges they faced. We got to know their data and what was required for site functionality. For example, as both a retail and wholesale e-commerce site with 20,000 SKUs, specific pricing and checkout rules were required for each customer type. We analyzed the capabilities available with various e-commerce solutions and worked with Colonial Mills to select BigCommerce. In addition to implementing their new e-commerce solution, we developed a middleware solution to integrate sales data between their SyteLine ERP platform and the website.
Key/Notable Features:
Colonial Mills’ new BigCommerce e-commerce site now offers them full control over the ability to promote products, create special pricing rules and the ERP/website integration has streamlined accounting and reconciliation.