Spartina 449 Creates a Digital Flagship With Creatuity
In a seaside cottage, on the small coastal island of Daufuskie, the concept behind Spartina 449 began. Kay Stanley, the company’s CEO and founder, was inspired by the simplistic beauty of the South Carolina island. She wanted to create a brand that could couple linen, leather and colorful patterns to create a cute and elegant style that could be worn barefoot on the beach, or to dinner with a pair of heels – and that is exactly what she did. In the past decade, Spartina 449 has taken off. The brand is now featured in retail stores across the country, as well as available online, on their Magento Commerce Cloud website.
Many of their sales are attributed to their migration to Magento 2. Mary Finnegan from Spartina 449 recalls that “prior to the M2 migration, the website was unstable and at risk of going down at any moment. It was not optimized for mobile, so it was painful for our customers to shop on their phones.” They wanted to create a stable environment for their ecommerce business, that was scalable with the rapid growth they were experiencing. Creatuity and Magento helped turn this goal into a reality.
In order to drive growth, the Creatuity team executed a M2 migration and a custom theme designed by Spartina 449, on Magento Commerce Cloud. Spartina 449 needed a digital flagship that would bring the island lifestyle it is known for to life. When customers step foot into a Spartina store, they immediately get a sense of who Spartina is; they wanted the digital experience to complement this in-store experience.
Spartina 449 needed a digital flagship that would bring the island lifestyle it is known for to life. When you step foot into one of our stores, you immediately get a sense of who we are, and we wanted the digital experience to complement the in-store experience while meeting the needs of our on-the-go customers.
Mary Finnegan, Director of Marketing, Spartina 449
To accomplish that, Spartina 449 and Creatuity teamed up to design a site with more space than ever to showcase lifestyle photography and videos, while minimizing the number of steps customers need to take to checkout on their device. The new site design combined with Magento Commerce Cloud’s ability to handle high traffic and large order volumes resulted in increased conversion rates across all devices (17 percent increase). Additionally, they have seen a 33 percent growth in year-over-year revenue growth, a 9 percent increase in year-over-year average order value,
According to Finnegan, Spartina 449 “chose Magento Commerce Cloud because of its agility and value.” It offered Spartina 449 the flexibility to integrate their back-office systems, while being robust enough to provide solutions to fulfill their specific business needs. Creatuity’s successful track record with Magento 2 migrations and their breadth of experience made them a great fit for Spartina 449 during the transition. Not only does Spartina 449 now have the adaptability it needs to handle high traffic scenarios, but it also allows them to use CMS plugins like BlueFoot, which enables their admins to act as frontend developers as needed.
Spartina 449 put their confidence in Creatuity and Magento and they were not let down. Finnegan said the biggest difference the transition made regarding Spartina 449’s customer experience was the improvement in mobile experience. They knew that their target audience, women ages 25 to 65, were always on the go and therefore, Spartina 449 needed to provide them with a seamless mobile experience. Since the migration, they have seen a 30 percent increase in mobile conversions, and a 10 percent improvement in average page load time.
