Funky Chunky Furniture sells real wood furniture, made by real people. Their audience doesn’t want to sacrifice style over substance, prioritising quality items that are built to last. As most of Funky Chunky’s products are made-to-order, the website had to facilitate the process of choosing the right product as seamlessly as possible as it’s the only point of contact between the customer and the merchant.
Funky Chunky’s previous website was on the EKM platform. The business had experienced rapid growth and was set to turn over record-breaking profits by the end of 2021, and so it became apparent that a new website was needed to keep up with higher demand. The old site was also failing to perform on mobile – in 2021, 70% of website traffic came from mobile, yet the number of transactions was equal across mobile and desktop. We decided to design and build the new website on Shopify Plus in order to provide the flexibility, ease of administration and scalable growth needed to meet their business goals. Many of Funky Chunky’s products have numerous variations (length, colour, material etc), so we knew we would have to come up with an innovative way to manage inventory.
We worked closely with the Funky Chunky Furniture team to design, develop and launch a Shopify website that could deliver on performance, speed, SEO, functionality and design.
We approached the build from the ground up, beginning with a full technical, front end and user experience audit to pinpoint problems, goals and what was currently working for the client.
Our development team then created a custom Shopify theme using Shopify CLI, Tailwind and Webpack to make the build process as fast and as efficient as possible.
We created various opportunities for upselling across the website, using Nostro to integrate intuitive product recommendations based on product viewing history and related products.
More intelligent inventory management and order tracking were integral to the success of this build – we knew we needed to implement a solution so the business could continue to grow further. Linnworks was integrated to automate much of the inventory management process, creating a better experience for both the customer and the Funky Chunky team.
A robust migration plan was designed and implemented to limit any negative impact on organic rankings post-launch. Using Matrixify, we were able to successfully bulk migrate data from EKM to Shopify Plus, and upload all 301s/redirects. A slickplan was created based on the existing site structure, using competitor analysis and keyword gap analysis to determine additional pages and collections to be included.
The blog section of the website was previously under-utilised, ranking for only three keywords in 2021. We carried out extensive keyword research and competitor analysis and found that there was potential to turn the blog into a hub of inspiration to boost sales. We split the blog into several sections, which include ‘how to’ guides, styling tips and interviews. This would allow the site to rank for more specific, long-tail keywords, thus increasing organic search visibility.
The new Funky Chunky website launched in March 2022. *Feb 2022 vs Feb 2023