Burrow is a US-based, B2C e-commerce company that produces and distributes bespoke easy to build uncompromising furniture. Its mission is to create products for the way people actually live their lives. Burrow was named one of the 10 most innovative retail brands in the world by Fast Company, and one of their luxury sofas was recognized as one of the 50 best inventions of the year by TIME. This Y Combinator-seeded company is growing rapidly within the near future with expansion across borders, the sky seems to be the limit.
Burrow had a strict product expansion roadmap, which meant scaling up development and the team. As recruitment locally is usually a long and strenuous process, the client sought to outsource a skilled team to ramp up the development while retaining standards.
The main challenges we were faced:
The key factors were and still are to ensure frontend design requirements are met, without impacting performance.
increasing unit & integration tests coverage up to 85%
time needed to reach the first contentful paint
making the app available offline
following RWD principles within every design update
One of the key elements of the beginning of the cooperation with Burrow was to focus on refactoring of the frontend from a legacy state management system to a cutting edge state management solution.
To achieve this, we started from a very quick onboarding of 1x full-time react developer and part-time project manager from our side. Within the next few weeks, that team scaled up and we started updating infrastructure to support the new state management framework. As this was a very open-ended task, along with the Product Manager on Burrow side we prepared a detailed plan so we could monitor the progress of the work and to make sure that we are always on the right track.
We followed Agile management using Scrumban that served as a framework for delivery and includes ceremonies like dailies, retrospectives or sprint planning that facilitated the development. Thanks to the smooth implementation of the best project management practices, we were able to deliver the best results.
This refactoring radically increased the performance and the ease of maintenance of the codebase. As expected this was a very fluid task, which was executed along with expectations set in the development timeline set by the client.
It has been over 9-months of close cooperation between Burrow and Merixstudio’s team. During this period we have had a contribution to the biggest update of the application consisting of product listing & details pages design updates, releasing a new product, new modifiers options and many more.
when browsing various products, user can easily configure layout for different screen sizes (1-, 2-, 3-column grid or carousel), choose the view that suits him best and thus improve its experience with Burrow
a very powerful feature that provides the user with a set of possibilities: browsing the gallery with detailed product images or advanced configuration of the product (color pickers for legs and fabric, arm height picker, cushions picker and others)
shopping is always an easy, simple and secure process thanks to the cart available on each page; a tiered sale thermometer displaying amount of money to spend to reach additional savings encourages users to put products in a cart
thanks to the integration with GraphCMS, which is a reliable warehouse for data, Burrow’s website administrator can quickly create new pages which are consistent with the whole website and thus launch new products right away
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