Grainger put a stake in the ground and then they called Devbridge
Grainger is a business-to-business distributor of products used to maintain, repair and operate facilities. More than three million businesses and institutions worldwide rely on Grainger for products such as safety gloves, ladders, motors and janitorial supplies, along with services like inventory management and technical support. While Grainger customers come from all industries and sizes, one thing is common among them—they all demand an effortless experience. One way Grainger is finding to satisfy a specific customer need is through its new digital solution, Gamut. With a daunting name like Gamut, Grainger put a stake in the ground on what customers can expect from this new e-commerce platform, and then they called Devbridge.
Grainger founded Gamut.com to provide useful information to industrial professionals who seek time-saving solutions for challenging projects. The Gamut team knew of many firms with expansive retail knowledge, but none that could adequately fulfill Gamut’s vision to help customers quickly find the right product among thousands—until they learned about Devbridge.
Upon meeting with the Devbridge team, Gamut’s leadership quickly found a partner who they believed could help Grainger realize its vision. Gamut partnered with Devbridge to design and build a robust, fully custom platform aimed to empower customers.
From vision realization to product execution
Gamut’s primary vision is to help customers faced with technical and complex projects that may be unique in nature make fast and confident selections. What the company was looking to do in its industry was unheard of. There weren’t any off-the-shelf e-commerce solutions that provided the level of customization at this scale, given the sheer amount of information the company needed to display to customers in a coherent, well-orchestrated way.
Within three months, Devbridge designed a working prototype of the e-commerce experience. Through numerous user testing sessions the prototype outperformed several existing sites and was further improved. Devbridge continued to build out a scalable, agile delivery framework to rapidly ship the full suite of products to market.
Custom product information management system
Devbridge’s product management and engineering team worked in close collaboration with Gamut’s product managers and IT team. Together, they developed the Gamut e-commerce platform to provide tremendous flexibility that met Grainger’s very specific requirements for merchandising categories across multiple hierarchies, with SKU counts in the hundreds of thousands. The resulting merchandising product is a proprietary information system that manages and organizes a comprehensive list of product attributes, application-specific imagery and rich technical data for more than 400,000 products across 32 categories.
Enhanced user experience
Being able to transform data into useful information that makes the customer experience more efficient was critical to this project. Several Devbridge designers worked in tandem with the collective team to create a truly unique user experience. Together, the group built a robust, responsive platform that allows users to quickly search and easily find products based on usage and need.
“Devbridge was the ideal partner to help us realize our vision. The team built a robust platform that allows Gamut to provide the right information at the right time for customers to make fast and confident selections.”
– Brian Walker Gamut President
Transforming the industry
Gamut.com was designed to benefit customers during specific and important buying occasions. Along with other initiatives, Grainger believes that Gamut.com will help create an even stronger partnership with its customers. Gamut.com takes a tremendous amount of information and displays it to users in a coherent, well-orchestrated way, providing a unique user experience we believe will transform the industry.
Read the full Press Release
Note: Gamut.com is being integrated into Grainger.com®.