A rapidly growing wellness E-Commerce company with a social impact mission seeks to implement advanced technology and user experience to meet growing demands.
OURA is a wellness E-Commerce company with a long-standing mission to help children with terminal illnesses, as one of its co-founders is a fighter and survivor in the same. Over the years, OURA has launched multiple wellness products that have captured the loyalty of many customers. Practical Logix was invited to build a new E-Commerce platform for OURA with Shopify Plus that offered more benefits and met the growing demands of their loyal customer base. Practical Logix implemented the platform with the “Headless” architecture, a new polished experience for online shopping, and de-coupled integration with Shopify Plus and other third-party systems. The new platform was reused to launch other websites, including Ouragins.
Challenges
- Effectively convey the story of OURA’s core mission – Social Impact
- Advanced E-Commerce technology to meet current and future demands
- Simplified and immersive experience for users to make educated shopping decisions
- Reusability of the platform to launch more impactful websites under OURA
Conveying the Social Impact Story and Mission
OURA’s co-founder’s story substantially impacted Practical Logix’s engagement with the company. It became the primary reason for the PL team to work on its platform passionately. Hence, helping OURA convey the core mission and message to the existing and new customers was a challenging but enthusiastic task. After conducting extensive strategy sessions with the OURA team, PL and HDMade (PL’s design partner) arrived at effective strategies and user experience workflows that stood out from similar platforms. Practical Logix and OURA believed each product had a story to tell that complemented the company’s background and story.
The websites emphasized storytelling, brand awareness, innovation focus, and a direct, meaningful relationship with the company’s core values.
Headless CMS with De-coupled Shopify Plus Integration
Responding to substantial growth in customer base and revenue, OURA expressed the intention to step into the future in both technologies and a marketing strategy. Practical Logix helped strategize and implement an architecture seamlessly integrated with Shopify Plus service, provided a customizable interface with a backend Content Management System, exposed selected capabilities via a set of APIs, and a front-end that responds to the configuration in the CMS. This “Headless” architecture paved the way for multiple benefits, including:
- Opportunity for performance improvements
- Customizable product link structure – advantageous for SEO purposes
- Efficient and de-coupled third-party integrations
- Seamless expansion to additional markets
- Easy to switch platforms in the future if needed – Shopify to Magento or WooCommerce
Measurable and Immersive Shopping Experience for Customers
Practical Logix believed passionately in OURA’s background and products; hence, the resulting platform was an immersive storytelling medium for each product and how it made a difference. The technology, design, and user experience provided a competitive advantage, including focusing on OURA’s patented technology in its Fabric. The new website helped convey the value of this technology and create a positive vibe in its prospective customers. Utilizing the components of the Headless architecture, OURA’s team was able to configure the look and feel of the website using the CMS and Shopify interface together. They can also measure customers’ critical interactions using advanced analytics. This, in turn, helped them to grow the users further and more rapidly.
Reusability
As a parent company, OURA has ventured into multiple product lines. After a successful journey with Ouragami, they established a new brand called Ouragins, in which they manufacture and sell nursing uniforms and medical scrubs. Considering the effect of medical professionals on all our lives in the last few years due to the pandemic, this line of products had its own story to tell. The strategy, technology, and user experience Practical Logix implemented for Ouragami were reused to build the new platform for Ouragins seamlessly.
Outcomes
Most E-Commerce applications in the industry are built on a monolithic architecture with tight integration to the underlying E-Commerce platforms such as Shopify, WooCommerce, etc. Breaking away from this and making a decoupled headless application required extensive research, development, and collaboration with the Shopify team to ensure all existing features were integrated without friction. The outcome was worth the effort. OURA is a technologically advanced E-Commerce platform with more flexibility in meeting its growth and performance requirements. Since the launch of its new platform, OURA has grown at an unprecedented rate due to two main reasons:
- Tapping into the potential for new marketing strategies offered by the platform
- Ability to have prospective customers related to the products
Practical Logix is proud to have been part of helping OURA accomplish its goals and continued growth.
