A look into Cuisinart’s digital transformation success

Today, the critical role of the digital customer experience in business has become even more evident, especially for retail and ecommerce brands.

As a result, many companies are using digital transformation to move into the ecommerce realm and close customer experience gaps, yet the road to digital success can be a difficult one – or a little easier, if you have the right strategy and tools.

Cuisinart’s path to digital transformation

Historically, leading kitchenware brand Cuisinart relied solely on brick-and-mortar stores for sales, offering their products exclusively through retail and distribution partners. So when the company wanted to enable direct-to-consumer (DTC) sales and move into the online marketplace, they faced a twofold challenge: digital transformation and business transformation.

For their web presence, they had been using a legacy CMS application, but it became a stumbling block to them as it started posing operational risks. It was also missing the modern features and functionalities necessary to create sophisticated digital experiences for their customers, such as personalization, robust search and experimentation

On top of that, Cuisinart lacked ecommerce capabilities. At the time, their website mainly served to provide product information and direct the web visitors to a retail location, so their web presence wasn’t a true commerce platform. This means adjusting their strategy to include retailers, distributors, and an online DTC channel was crucial for their advancement.

The increasing challenges and limitations with Cuisinart’s legacy platform, coupled with their goal of including ecommerce in their business strategy, lent to the urgency for change.

The Cuisinart team had a six-month timeline to implement a modern experience platform and migrate their current site over. To achieve their goals, they needed to find the right solution vendor and implementation partners to support their digital transformation journey.

Digital agency Whereoware answered the call and helped Cuisinart realize their digital ambitions in record time, transforming their website using the Optimizely digital experience platform (DXP).

Cuisinart’s legacy CMS was not sustainable in terms of reliability, extensibility and functionality. They needed a new platform that allowed them to deliver personalized online shopping experiences across devices and stay agile in a fast-changing marketplace.

The combination of Optimizely’s DXP solution and the Whereoware team’s experience and implementation expertise has enabled Cuisinart to successfully accelerate their digital transformation and start selling DTC online quickly through their new website, which eventually ended up winning them a Gold MarCom Award in the Digital Media – Website category.

Adopting Optimizely’s DXP has also helped Cuisinart regain control of their digital presence with increased visibility into the platform. This made it possible for them to not only manage their search engine optimization (SEO) with greater ease, but also to move more quickly in adapting to market changes and making improvements to their website experience for better customer engagement.

Learn from the success of Cuisinart

Are you curious about the specific steps Whereoware took to help Cuisinart accelerate digital transformation and drive ecommerce success? Would you like some proven tips that can help you achieve similar results?

During the interview, Chad also shared valuable insights on how retail companies can digitally transform their business to stay competitive in the new normal, providing expert advice on how to develop and implement an effective strategy for your own digital transformation.