SHAW/STEWART LUMBER CO.
Elevating the digital shopping experience for Minnesota’s leading builders and remodelers.
Since 1886, Shaw/Stewart Lumber Co. has served Minnesota’s finest homebuilders, remodelers, and commercial general contractors with premium architectural millwork. Renowned for being home to the Twin Cities’ only Marvin Design Gallery, Shaw/Stewart embodies personal service and top-notch quality.
Left: Legacy app
Right: Refreshed app
The Opportunity
Shaw/Stewart approached KRUTSCH to find a new development partner and saw this as an opportunity to update their entire solution stack: mobile apps, web app, admin portal, and cloud infrastructure.
Our design and development team worked with Shaw/Stewart to refresh their digital products, enhancing the user experience for ordering.
The Outcome
A refreshed mobile app and a brand new web-based app, tailored for construction professionals to effortlessly order building materials and millwork. Additionally, we revamped the portal for account and app management to enhance functionality.
The Goal
The mobile and web apps should empower customers to independently shop for building materials, without relying on Shaw/Stewart Sales Reps to fulfill their orders.
The Design Focus
Create a functional, modern interface that met the needs of Shaw/Stewart’s customers while following iOS and Android app store guidelines. We aimed to ensure visual consistency across all digital products, incorporating a style that reflects Shaw/Stewart’s public site.
The Development Focus
To support the Shaw/Stewart suite of apps, development rearchitected the supporting middleware for optimal performance. This involved reorganizing the existing product database, enabling users to effortlessly filter products within the app. We also implemented Firebase Authentication to deliver a seamless sign-up and login experience, making it feel intuitive from start to finish. By leveraging React Native, we ensured a smooth transition from building the mobile app to the web-based version. For deployment, we utilized Vercel to create and launch the portal used by admins and managers.
Getting to work
KRUTSCH started by hosting in-person workshops to explore the landscape of existing products and user roles. Our team completed a thorough heuristic review of the products to make suggestions on improvements.
We engaged directly with home builders, remodelers, and Shaw/Stewart sales reps through interviews, pinpointing successes and failures in the customer journey. The feedback from the interviews told us how quickly and easily customers can find the products they needed.
With the newfound knowledge from our research phase, we balanced customer wants and client requirements into our workflows. Next, we created wireframes to serve as the structure of the app. Before moving into high fidelity screens, we integrated Shaw/Stewart’s brand elements to design style scapes that showcased the look and feel of the final product.
The final screens shared common UI elements utilized in e-commerce platforms to decrease the learning curve for new users. The previous app used fewer icons and imagery, resulting in an increased number of users that relied on sales support to find products.
The result
We designed and built a complete suite of digital products for Shaw/Stewart. We gave customers the ability to filter products and reorder job site lists with ease in the mobile app. The new web-based app mirrored the mobile experience and allowed customers and sales reps convenient access on their desktop devices.
A new admin portal used similar components to provide visual consistency to the rest of the products. The back-end was completely rebuilt to decrease loading times and inefficiencies for the administrators and managers who use it.
App Promo
We developed dynamic marketing materials to support the promotion of Shaw/Sterwarts’ new mobile and web apps.
KRUTSCH provided a promotional webpage, a PDF flyer, and an email template.
These assets highlight the app’s fresh design and key features, and encourage new and existing users to explore what’s new.
