Supporting artists with an online community and ecommerce

The mission has always been to inform, encourage, and inspire all artists, from the hobby artist through to supporting professionals who have made their art their career. Alongside the membership activity and exclusive online content is a large online store stocking over 20,000 items at discounted rates.

The organisation had not kept up to date with technology and urgently needed to re-platform from Magento due to it imminently  reaching the end of life and the inevitable lack of support. The business owners were looking to sell the business but recognised that the technology would be a barrier. The challenge for our team was to quickly learn existing processes and a complex legacy backoffice system, with the prospect of the back office also changing in the near future. A new PIM was also on the roadmap. The known short-term changes also involved a new brand for SAA. There were a lot of moving parts!

Element78 did a rapid assessment of the existing back office environment, including warehouse management, stock controls, finance, marketing and customer service. It was evident that the client would need some level of flexibility to ensure future changes could be addressed without the need to rebuild the website again. At the heart of the solution was a flexible integration layer that could manage the two way flow of data to and from website shop, PIM and legacy ERP. 

A new rebranded website was designed and implemented, utilising Umbraco and Ucommerce. 

The website was launched as the current software reached the end of life, and all legacy accounts and data moved over. The site has delivered significantly improved revenues compared to the previous solution, which was a key reason for the SAA being successfully acquired in 2022 by Cass Art.