A showroom feel for the browser-only shopper
Remote work put Herman Miller’s ergonomic chairs near the top of many wish lists. But when the physical showroom visit is no longer part of the buying journey, a heritage brand name is not enough—especially against price-sensitive direct-to-consumer rivals. For Herman Miller brand Design Within Reach (DWR), the answer was an e-commerce rebuild that could replicate showroom guidance and tailor itself to each visitor.
“The furniture industry has historically been behind consumer startups,” said DWR Director of Digital Design Eric Ishii-Eckhardt. “To be on par, we have to offer more consumer-centric experiences.” To close that gap, DWR brought in BASIC®, the branding and digital agency known for work with Google, Airbnb, and Patagonia. “Working with BASIC® gave us the best of both worlds—the e-commerce expertise of an agency and the in-house knowledge of the DWR team,” Ishii-Eckhardt said.
One team, one file
A client-agency relationship usually means juggling separate workstreams, versions, and handoffs. DWR and BASIC® deliberately dissolved that boundary. “Instead of separate workstreams, we established a partnership built around the idea of co-creation and leveraged different aspects of our teams’ expertise,” said BASIC® CEO Matt Faulk. “When it came time to design and build, we operated as one singular team.”
Operating that way required a single source of truth for design files. DWR had already struggled with collaboration among its internal product designers, and adding an outside agency would only compound the problem. The team moved to Figma, which runs in the browser, allowing both sides to work in the same file simultaneously.
BASIC® Senior Designer Garret Schauteet described the efficiency gain as a near-14-hour workday across time zones: “At the end of our workday, the DWR team can just pick up where we left off. We didn’t have to worry about handing off the latest version or updating links.”
Testing before launch
The redesign was grounded in 110 hours of customer research and usability testing with more than 200 participants. The mission: answer the key shopping questions customers usually resolve in a showroom. “Using Figma prototypes for usability testing, we were able to run tests, iterate quickly, and keep moving forward,” said UX Designer Raechel MacKenzie. “We quickly gathered insights using an interactive website prototype that looked and felt like the real thing.”
DWR.com launched in early July 2020 with a fully responsive design and video chat with sales associates. The early results were strong: shoppers using live chat were nine times more likely to complete a purchase than those who did not. “We typically anticipate a small drop after a big website release, but instead we saw an immediate lift in site purchase,” Ishii-Eckhardt said. The transparent process also helped sell the work internally, since the CEO and other executives could follow quick links to prototypes along the way.
A design system beyond DWR
Beneath the customer-facing polish lies what the team considers the project’s real payoff: the first design system for the entire Herman Miller brand family. “We used the DWR website redesign as an opportunity to create our first design system for all of Herman Miller brands,” Mackenzie said. BASIC® helped define the art direction, and a shared core set of components was built to scale over time.
For DWR, the design system accelerates development with repeatable components and lets content authors assemble pages by dragging in pre-built pieces and swapping out images and text—opening design capability to non-designers across the organization. “We now have a common design language for the Herman Miller family of brands,” Ishii-Eckhardt said. With asset libraries stored in the cloud in Figma, the system can be shared with internal and external partners worldwide.
As Herman Miller turns attention to its other e-commerce properties, the goal remains the same: translating the in-store consultative experience to a browser window.
