The Challenge

Partnering to bring visions to life.

The Container Store is a top retailer offering storage and organization solutions. Leadership wanted to realize their vision of increasing their online presence and meet their immediate and long-term business needs. To do this, The Container Store determined to migrate their website from the ATG Commerce Platform to an open-source solution. Credera was selected to leverage its experience with the ATG Commerce Platform and their knowledge of open-source alternatives to implement a framework, known as Broadleaf Commerce, and to build a new website using this framework.

“We reached a point when we could no longer be productive in what we needed to accomplish,” said Tom Birmingham, Chief Technology Officer, The Container Store. “We had to basically remove those underpinnings and replace it with something that was more resilient and could do what we needed to do – quickly.”

The Solution

Moving to an open-source model.

Credera performed an initial discovery phase to determine the feasibility, duration, and cost of the project based on the functional requirements provided by The Container Store and code from the existing website. Credera worked together with The Container Store’s team to migrate the site from a license-fee based model to an open-source model. This added the ability to scale for high-traffic periods without additional license fees, such as times when national television shows promote their products. Moving to an open-source platform also provided added functionality to allow customers to checkout anonymously—not having to create an account on the website prior to purchase and to have one shared view of a customer for both the website and retail store.

The Results

A foundation for the future.

“We now have a foundation to pretty much build anything we want on it,” said Melissa Collins, The Container Store's Vice President of Creative and Online. “That foundation can just keep growing with us.”

“Beyond the expertise Credera brings to an engagement, I really appreciate the camaraderie and shared sense of commitment that emerges when our teams work together,” said Birmingham.

Prior to the re-platform, The Container Store incurred insurmountable license fees during high traffic periods on their website, in addition to the infrastructure required to handle the additional load. As a result of moving to an open-source model, The Container Store benefits from the following:

• Increased flexibility – Changes to customer information made from the web or retail stores are effective in both systems.

• Improved customer experience – Customers are no longer are required to register with the website prior to purchase, which increased sales.

• Improved customer data – Ability to quickly set up additional infrastructure without the concern of additional license fees.

• Improved internal communication – Adoption of the agile approach has improved communication company-wide and resulted in higher quality solutions.