The direct-to-consumer
E-commerce platform
Client:
Serta Simmons Bedding
Industry:
E-commerce
Website:
sertasimmons.com
Magento, JMeter, JUnit, Selenium WebDriver
Direct-to-consumer web marketplaces have made it increasingly difficult for even the strongest retail brands to maintain the margins required of a three-tier distribution model. Forced to compete with tighter pricing structures, many traditional wholesalers are making a dramatic shift to selling directly to their customers online. The U.S. mattress market is no exception.
In the last few years, wholesalers and new market entrants have crowded the direct-to-consumer space, making it a highly competitive market. Undeterred, Serta Simmons Bedding, North America’s largest traditional mattress manufacturer, saw this as an opportunity given its nearly 150 years of expertise in bedding manufacturing.
Having maintained a successful wholesale business model since the company was founded in 1870, the company spun off an innovation business, Tomorrow Sleep, to make a quick entry. Forte Group helped it do just that — position itself as a brand with a future as rich as its history.
Background
- Direct-to-consumer web marketplaces have made it increasingly difficult for even the strongest retail brands to maintain the margins required of a three-tier distribution model.
- Forced to compete with tighter pricing structures, many traditional wholesalers are making a dramatic shift to selling directly to their customers online. The U.S. mattress market is no exception.
- Having maintained a successful wholesale business model since the company was founded in 1870, the company spun off an innovation business, Tomorrow Sleep, to make a quick entry. Forte Group helped them do just that.
Results achieved
- Tomorrow Sleep successfully launched in 2017 and grew from $0 to $30 million in less than a year.
- Built on a foundation of quality assurance, Tomorrow Sleep transitioned to an improved third-party logistics provider within three weeks.
- The launch made Serta a viable contender in the direct-to-consumer market: in just under a year, Serta acquired mattress upstart Tuft & Needle, further advancing the company’s direct-to-consumer business.
- Through technology, the world’s leading mattress producer was able to shift its business focus to align with the current of its customers’ expectations.
Business Challenges
- Enter the direct-to-consumer market smoothly and maintain success
- Overcome delivery stagnation and piled-up quality assurance issues
- Launch a fully functional storefront in just under six months
Featured-based Challenges
- Stabilize the system by getting rid of testing bottlenecks and improving performance
- Create a reliable manual and automated testing structure
- Establish seamless and uninterrupted customer experience
“Forte Group definitely was one of the factors for Serta being able to attract leading brands. With Forte’s help, we were able to make Serta an effective competitor in the direct-to-consumer mattress space.”
Brian Walker, Former Chief Technology Officer, Tomorrow Sleep
Solution features
The Forte team began working on getting the development of Tomorrow Sleep back on track with QA, direct placement, and staff augmentation services. The primary focus of Forte’s work was QA.
Forte built an automated performance testing platform, which was essential in stabilizing the system. With each code change, the automated platform would trigger 30 minutes of tests, which provided useful feedback that improved subsequent stages of development.
As part of its manual testing, Forte tested every system function against the system’s requirements to ensure it performed correctly. This required testing assorted data sets as well as usability testing.
With a quality assurance system in place, the Tomorrow Sleep e-commerce platform began to stabilize and show significant performance improvements.
Forte created a manual and automated testing structure to build QA into the development cycle.
Implementation of cross-browser tests that ensured that the e-commerce system worked flawlessly across all platforms.
Serta Simmons commissioned Forte to provide QA leadership, help build an in-house team, and take over the development of the e-commerce system.
QA and testing checkpoints were built into the delivery system.
Outcomes
$0 to $30 million in revenue in less than one year
QA and continuous integration implementation
Launch of an e-commerce platform in less than 1 year
