Helen Milan was an early leader in the green home goods space and built a strong business over several years by curating beautiful, functional, and earth-friendly goods for home and travel from small-batch makers and independent manufacturers.
Helen Milan came to us looking for a site migration and refresh, specifically to solve issues around integration and mobile-first functionality. Beyond the technical aspects, we saw an opportunity to better organize Helen Milan’s product catalog, allowing for superior product discovery within interest categories, as well as a chance to highlight Helen Milan’s excellent blog content and photography.
We were able to create a seamless migration experience for Helen Milan and her team, maintaining customer order and address information, as well as building out a beautiful and performant mobile-optimized shopping experience.
Based on this foundation, Helen Milan was able to double down on customer acquisition as well as shipping automation to create a streamlined business.
The First Pier team is a joy to work with. We feel as though they are an extension of our small team.
Helen Thompson, Founder & CEO — Helen Milan
A replatform is judged on what survives it.
Helen Milan came to us for a migration and a mobile fix, and the unglamorous half of that job is continuity — customer records, order history and addresses arriving intact, so the people who already bought once are not asked to start over. Get that wrong and the new store is simply a new store, with a customer base of nobody.
The rest of the gain came from treating the move as permission to reorganize rather than a like-for-like port. The catalog was regrouped so products could be found by interest rather than by category label, and the blog and photography — already good, already there — were finally given somewhere to work. Orders rose 55% and conversion rate 15% on a catalog that had not fundamentally changed.
Migrations get scoped as a technical exercise. The technical part is the price of entry; the merchandising decisions made while everything is already in pieces are where the return is.
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