Reeds Jewelers

Founded in 1946, REEDS Jewelers has grown from one hometown store to a full-service retailer, with retail stores in 18 states.

In 2001 REEDS Jewelers needed a technology partner to develop a new e-Commerce solution specifically for REEDS’ business to establish a national reach as a leading fine jewelry online storefront. REEDS needed a completely managed and supported e-commerce solution that could scale and grow as their online business grew. They needed a partner that could quickly adapt to new challenges for REEDS’ business and marketplace, as well as provide consultative guidance and expertise to grow the business together.

Over time, REEDS’ product catalog has significantly grown their online business through adding designers and brands such as PANDORA and Alex and Ani. This required significant features for the front-end customer-facing site and the site’s admin. Over time REEDS’ site requirements included multi-channel needs, marketplace integrations, back-office integrations, alternative payment methods, fraud detection, affiliate and email marketing, and high performance scalability during peak holiday seasons to meet demand.

Prior to moving to Magento, REEDS and Kadro had already developed and established a sophisticated and robust omni-channel solution for REEDS:

• B2C e-Commerce through http://www.reeds.com with both centralized warehouse fulfillment, in-store fulfillment, and store associate facilitated sales/fulfillment
• OMS integrated CSR phone-assisted interfaces for placing orders and editing orders
• Integration with back-office AS400 ERP system and POS system including store-level inventory, product pricing and promotion data, and all levels of order/fulfillment integration including EDI for drop-shippers
• Integration with 3rd-party marketplaces
• Ability for sales associates in retail stores to place orders for customers so that entire product catalog and customized/configurable items are available
• Customer service chat for engaging and assisting online customers

The biggest challenge for this project was to maintain parity to the existing custom site’s capabilities, performance, and integrations to achieve and preserve REEDS’ existing omni-channel solution.

REEDS Jewelers was Kadro’s first client in March 2001 and still our client today. It has been both a business and technology journey having developed and evolved a custom e-Commerce solution utilizing our J2EE Kadro Merchant platform, and then replatforming REEDS.com to Magento Commerce, which was launched in March 2018.

Site URL: www.reeds.com

• April 23 2018 – Kadro Announces Successful Launch of B2C Ecommerce Site for REEDS Jewelers On Magento Commerce

The Magento Commerce REEDS.com project consists of the following:

• Responsive Web design and implementation of their custom front-end for home page, multi-category listing landing pages, category pages with multi-option layered navigation, product detail pages handling 40+ different product types and variations, and multiple custom CMS pages.
• The most challenging aspect of the REEDS Jewelers project is in handling their wide variety of product types, variations, buying options and interfaces. These include multi-faceted product attributes, multiple fulfillment types, multiple brand types, products with dynamic elements (such as engravings), products with swatches, and product add-ons such as custom ring sizing fees and opt-in service plans. REEDS Jewelers also required parity with their prior site that was custom built for their specific business needs. The solution developed included migration of their backend product admin into a PIM (Product Integration Management system), that is fully integrated with Magento Commerce. The PIM includes features for bulk product loading, management of all product data, and management of all data feeds to external systems.
• Kadro also worked with our partner Reflektion, to fully integrate Reflektion’s product catalog search and Reflektion’s preview search and category pages. This enables high-performance dynamic category pages and layered navigation.
• REEDS.com includes an extensive set of Magento admin tools and front-end interfaces for managing and displaying their Jewelry and Watch glossary of terms. This is essential in educating the customer about the product. The glossary terms can be grouped in sets, mapped to product types and product attributes, and are then displayed dynamically alongside the product attribute values on the product detail page. This helps ensure a positive customer experience by making product education easy.
• REEDS.com also includes a large set of product and brand-specific education materials, that are fully integrated in the online shopping experience. Each major category landing page includes the listing of the sub-categories in that section plus the navigation to each associated education page.
• Kadro also migrated their pre-existing site’s admin for managing orders and fulfillment into a custom OMS (Order Management System) that is fully integrated with REEDS’ back-office systems operating on IBM AS/400. This also includes integrations with Pitney Bowes, UPS, Riskified, Worldpay, Oracle + Bronto, Channel Advisor, and RAPID/POS from IMC Software. The RAPID/POS integration streamlines the processes associated with the facilitation of online sales through REEDS store locations.
• The REEDS.com project also included integration with Akamai’s CDN for full-page caching.
• REEDS.com provides multiple payment methods including major credit cards with integration with Worldpay/Vantiv, Amazon Pay, PayPal, Affirm, Coinbase for Bitcoin, REEDS Gift Card, and REEDS private label credit card.
• Many other integrations include Olapic for user-contributed media content, Shoprunner for membership free-shipping, Oracle + Bronto for email marketing, store locator, and various affiliate marketing providers.