17 Patterns

Founded in 2014 by art director & designer, Nosca Inc, London-based 17 Patterns produces British-made wallcoverings, fabrics and soft furnishings.

17 Patterns curates, manipulates and restructures specially-commissioned artworks into a dynamic repeat design in collaboration with the artists.

Patterns draws inspiration from past and present design disciplines, delivering a highly original display of pattern and colour. Artworks and designs are taken on a creative journey driven by experimentation and innovation, injecting bold and exciting designs into 21st century interiors.

The Brief

As a growing business, 17 Patterns had reached a stage where their manual processes and systems were no longer suitable. As well as selling to the public, 17 Patterns also deal with wholesalers, retailers, architects and designers, etc, both in the UK and internationally.

Each of these customer types and geographies require a different shopping experience. From pricing and discounts to VAT calculations, shipping rules and invoicing. And 17 Patterns needed automated processes in both the website experience and backend systems to cater for all the different customer types and geographies.

Our Approach

To kick off the project, we started with a detailed discovery process to get a full understanding of what the 17 Patterns team wanted to achieve, what their customers needed and what pain points we needed to resolve in their processes.

We then scoped a series of interconnected systems which would handle the requirements in the most efficient way. We created a statement of work to fully detail and prioritise all requirements and deliverables, and to ensure there was 100% clarity before development began.

The development started with a proof of concept approach. Building initial systems and processes to allow the 17 Patterns team to visualise the proposed solutions, and better understand how their processes would improve as a result. Ensuring these processes worked well for the 17 Patterns team, was critical to project success.

After proof of concept, a collaborative process was used to make refinements and tweak the website and backend experiences one stage at time. Each time ensuring the 17 Patterns team could feed back and adapt their understanding of how their internal processes would need to change as a result.

Integrated trade customer experience

The site changes allow for trade customers to purchase on the same website as the public, avoiding the expense and complexity of a separate trade platform. Trade customers can apply for an account, the 17 Patterns team can then approve and apply the agreed discounts or pricing models. Additionally, VAT display changes also as required between customer types and the 17 Patterns team can change pricing models at role level, rather than changing individual customer records.

Geography-based currency and price switching

The website will now recognise your country of origin and change both currency and pricing/tax as appropriate. This makes for a much-improved customer experience while improving the efficiency and margin control of the 17 Patterns business.

This process needed to work seamlessly with the role-based approach above to ensure pricing was always accurate and profitable across both customer types and geographies.

Automated dispatch and tracking

Previously, the order management and dispatch processes had been fully manual. Sending manual order details to the dispatch team, and then updating the customer manually with tracking information.

We built an automated process whereby order details would be automatically sent to the dispatch team, tracking information automatically pulled and the customer would receive this in their order update email.

This saves the 17 Patterns team a significant amount of manual processing time while improving the customer experience and process accuracy.

Sample ordering and promotion

As the product range is design-focused, the ordering of samples to architects, designers, etc is a critical part of the process. To ensure excellent customer experience while controlling costs, a bespoke process was created to manage the pricing and shipping cost promotion when ordering samples.

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