Gardeners Supply Company
Gardener's Supply Company created a world-class shopping experience and is using data-driven insights to fuel future growth thanks to their new ERP and Optimizely DXP
Sowing the seeds of a new digital space
Gardener’s Supply Company (GSC) is an employee-owned company providing environmentally friendly gardening products and information through its website, catalogues, and retail stores. The company found itself challenged to grow and increase new product to market efficiency and needed a digital solution to help them modernize their business operations.
They chose Optimizely DXP as a way to modernize their ecommerce site, provide their customers with an exceptional online experience, and create a strong foundation for future growth all while decreasing their overall martech stack costs.
Platform requirements
The project involved upgrading the ERP system from AX 2009 to AX 2012 R3 to modernize business operations. In order to scale, GSC needed to implement a new ecommerce platform to improve online shopping experience for customers and make a bigger footprint in the digital space. Finally, they had to obtain support and advice from a Dynamics AX and Optimizely expert to assist in critical projects that would unlock efficiency and fuel future growth.
Gardener’s Supply Company needed a digital experience that would allow them to increase their online presence, attract and retain new customers, and deliver exceptional service. They chose Optimizely Commerce Cloud for the robust features it offered, and the ability to segment and personalize messaging to their customers.
Flourishing digital experiences to meet customer expectations
After a series of workshops with the GSC team and a thorough review process to look at their documentation and understand the issues they were facing, Optimizely partner, Thinkmax came up with a plan to help them establish:
•Standard practices
•Solution architecture for AX restructuring, future growth, and the extensibility of the platform
•Connector and related installation and configuration aligned with their existing Retail Online Store
•Scalability and Performance optimization
•Project Governance
The challenge was to get through the implementation with minimal disruption and before the seasonal catalogue came out. We brought them up to speed with current retail online best practices, helped them streamline their infrastructure for greater operational efficiency, and put strong in-depth solutions in place to unify their retail stack and make them more agile and ready to adapt to the modern marketplace.
Shortly after their new site went live on March 5 February 9th, 2021, GSC saw incredible results. After Thinkmax guided them through a stabilization period of a few weeks, site traffic went through the roof and they were able to maintain conversions and improve site performance. Due to pandemic-driven increase in gardening, they had never seen so much activity before. All that traffic translated into an explosion in sales, earning them what was normally several months revenue in the first few weeks after stabilization. Despite anticipated glitches in the first two weeks after launch, the site still delivered impressive results.
Critical integrations
Connectivity to Microsoft AX 2012 was critical, as a previous implementation had left out that important piece of the puzzle. Their existing site was not providing the customer experience they aimed for, and they were dealing with some outdated applications and processes not fully integrating with the new site that were standing in the way of their growth.
Site is zipping along and weekend performance #'s look great...we are already almost at 1k orders for GSC direct. This week will be our highest-revenue week since the extra-long fiscal week 1, for 2021!!
![]()
Max Harris
Chief Marketing Officer Gardener's Supply Company
Project Facts
See the result at www.gardeners.com
