A family-owned business for three generations, Architectural Designs sells home plans to builders and homeowners across North America and internationally, with designs for everything from starter homes to elaborate luxury homes.
Over the years, the company has evolved from its magazine days to an online search engine for house plans, incorporating new processes and technology to create a better experience for both their customers and prospective customers. Today, they are a business with millions of monthly website visitors, a commanding presence on social media platforms like Pinterest and Instagram, and strong growth year over year.
Jon Davis and Kitty Connor, Architectural Designs’ CEO and COO, manage much of the company’s strategy and day-to-day.
The challenge
Architectural Designs was facing a variety of challenges with its website and digital experience that impacted its e-commerce revenue, the effectiveness of its marketing, and even communications with its designer partners.
They needed to revamp their digital experience—quickly. So, Jon put out a call for help in his network. “Two people gave me a list of names, and HappyFunCorp was the only name that was on both lists,” says Jon.
Architectural Designs chose HFC to help them:
- Find ways to minimize the opportunities for human error in their e-commerce experience
- Automate the modification request process, an important service offered to customers, reduce friction for customers who want to make changes to home plans, and create a streamlined process for designers handling the changes.
- Improve how customers are segmented and tailor their marketing communications.
“The range of talent at HFC is so broad that if you need something—whether it’s technical, front or back end, marketing, whatever it takes to run a digital business—there are experts who can come in at a moment's notice and help.” – Jon Davis, CEO
With the new website, Architectural Designs’ conversion rate shot up, tripling their previous conversion rate just 18 months earlier.
HFC’s approach
After assembling a team with deep technical expertise in building for scale, HFC revamped the digital experience for a range of core areas in Architectural Designs’ business:
Website - To improve the website’s online shopping experience and design for every screen type and size, HFC used Elasticsearch to create a fast, customized search engine on Architectural Designs’ website, making it easy for customers to find just the right plan in a catalog of 25,000+ plans. Today, HFC continues to enhance and modernize search with generative AI.
Finance - HFC designed a tool for Architectural Designs’ finance director that automates designer payments with emails itemizing monthly payment breakdowns to designers. This eliminated the need to manually prepare and send hundreds of emails a month taking up significant time.
Partners - Architectural Designs’ sells a list of materials that customers can purchase when they buy a home plan that itemizes everything needed to build the home and is generated by an outside partner.
HFC built a new system that made it easy to track revenue, track and fill orders and store the lists for future distribution.
Integrating the tech stack - HFC built a suite of custom integrations specifically tailored to the Architectural Designs team’s daily workflows and processes, including:
- Mailchimp for drip emails and newsletter campaigns
- Sendgrid and Twilio for transactional and programmatic marketing emails
- Avalara for state sales tax
- Gemini for generative AI
- Tableau for analytics and reporting
- Shopper Approved for customer ratings
- Wordpress for the company blog
- Braintree for payment
- Paypal for invoicing and payment plans
Modification process - Before, if Architectural Designs’ customers wanted to change a plan’s foundation type or adjust anything on a house plan, every step was handled by staff through email. With annual requests exceeding mid-five figures a manual approach was no longer sustainable and HFC built a tool to automate the process by shuttling modification requests from clients directly to the designer for a quote and back to the customer with minimal human effort needed. Requests that were formerly tracked on a spreadsheet are now managed in a templatized system providing a personal quote to every customer and a mechanism to make the purchase and there’s a reporting system behind the tools to track success.
The results: A sustainable, best-in-class e-commerce business
HappyFunCorp helped Architectural Designs completely transform their digital experience for all of their partners and stakeholders, including customers, builders, and designers. Not only did the custom automation and integrations significantly increase time and cost savings, they also helped scale the business and prepare it for sustainable growth.
These are just a few of the outcomes of Architectural Designs’ partnership with HFC:
- 10x revenue growth
- Tripled online conversion rates
- Thousands of quotes sent monthly as a result of an accelerated self-serve flow online
- Thousands and thousands of contacts in their email list
- Reduced drop-off in the sale process by automating alerts to the team when someone has abandoned their cart, so they can follow up
“Working with HFC was fundamental to our success”
From their early days as publishers to becoming marketers, to now leveraging technology to stay ahead of the industry’s constant changes, it’s clear that Architectural Designs has a strong sense of where their business and customers are headed in the future.
“We're working towards using AI for search, we’re investing in virtual tours,” says Kitty. “We're adding a sophisticated viewing system to the website to give customers the tools they need to actually visualize what their home will look like.”
But the most important thing for Jon and Kitty is being able to stay nimble and maximize their biggest opportunities efficiently, even as the company continues to grow.
“With HFC, we can say, ‘Hey, I have this idea. Can you help me make it happen?’ We can dial things up and down, which gives me incredible flexibility. That choice to work with HFC was fundamental to our success, especially against heavy competition.”
By keeping their team nimble and leveraging technology to continuously improve both the customer and employee experience, Jon and Kitty are ensuring that Architectural Designs can adapt quickly—and setting the business up for sustainable success.
“If a business doesn't evolve, it becomes irrelevant and dies,” says Kitty. “We're always ready to pivot—we’re forever evolving.”
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