Joybird combines the classic with the contemporary in an innovative way. The furniture brand specializes in the sleek lines of mid-century modern furniture styles, but its approach to customer messaging is thoroughly 21st century. 

But it wasn’t always that way.

For Joybird, the key to customer loyalty is creating joyful experiences that forge deep emotional connections. But a legacy technology stack, inaccessible data, and dependence on one-off workarounds thwarted those efforts at almost every turn.

Today, after retooling its stack top to bottom, Joybird can create those joyful experiences with free-flowing data that powers “right message/right time/right customer/right channel” messaging and generates a rich profile of each customer at every step of the customer journey.

About Joybird

Founded as an e-commerce furniture company in 2014 and acquired by La-Z-Boy in 2018, Joybird established itself immediately in a market niche between more inexpensive assemble-it-yourself furniture and custom designs with price tags to match. 

The company’s value proposition, then and now, is this: “Joybird was founded on the idea that people should never settle when it comes to their home furnishing, but rather have the freedom to be boldly original.”

In recent years the company has expanded its initial e-commerce-only presence into a wholesale business and five showrooms around the United States. 

Shoppers now can sink into a sectional sofa, try out an occasional chair, or contemplate the work-from-home experience at a Joybird desk—in-person and online. Besides helping customers connect their virtual and physical experiences, the showrooms give Joybird even more data to better understand its customers, their needs now, and what they might want down the line.

A Major Concern: Modernizing the Technology Stack

Adding physical outlets to its previously online-only universe created major challenges—among them, understanding where Joybird’s customers are shopping: on the website or visiting a showroom.

The company’s legacy tech stack had been built solely to serve online customers. This worked at the time, but its data systems and communication platforms didn’t give Joybird the unified customer views and supply-chain efficiency the company needed to continue its evolution into a fully hybrid operation.

The solution: build a modern, scalable tech stack that serves customer and company needs through

1. a data warehouse that houses profile and modeling data. 
2. a complex messaging service that fuels immediate messaging to customers and funnels data back to other sources such as the supply chain, production, and logistics. 

3 Challenges to Overcome

Teams throughout Joybird found themselves stuck in the gap between its data and the engagement channels where its customers engaged with the brand:

• For stakeholders: Business units found it difficult to make informed decisions because the company lacked a uniform, real-time event stream and locked data away in silos.
• For engineers: Joybird’s siloed data forced engineers to spend days and weeks building workarounds and one-off solutions to manage customer events. But even with this significant time investment, the company didn’t have everything needed to convert its data into essential customer insights.
• For marketers: As the rest of the e-commerce world shifted into automated messaging and one-to-one personalization, the marketing team was stuck in batch-and-blast mode. Lack of real-time data access and messaging meant Joybird couldn’t reach out to customers at crucial points in the customer journey, such as repeated product browsing, abandoned carts, and other lucrative marketing initiatives to capture sales and build customer relationships.

The Solution: Real-time Data Streaming

Why Joybird Partnered With Iterable: Joybird’s team needed an ESP that would help the company anticipate and respond to the seismic shifts in customer expectations and relationships with brands.

Joybird realized measurable business value in three key areas with Iterable in its new, streamlined tech stack, which also includes RudderStack for data architecture and customer data platform and Snowflake for the data cloud. 

Joybird now enjoys these benefits:

• Data flexibility

The nature of Joybird’s business means the company has complex data structures, so it needed a platform that would give them maximum flexibility.

The company can achieve its goal of staying in communication with its customers wherever and whenever they engage with the brand, whether on a website, responding to an ad or social media campaign, or in a store. 

• Cruising in the fast lane and the slow lane

Be gone, batched and siloed data! Joybird now enjoys a free flow of accessible data flowing in and out of its data warehouse and Iterable in two major configurations:

• • The fast lane: This sends real-time data and event streaming to Iterable to trigger custom messages based on customer behavior, such as welcome/onboarding or cart abandonment.
  • The slow lane: Here, data from many sources—inventory, transactional, and behavior—goes into Joybird’s data warehouse for analytics, modeling, and building segments and can get pushed back into Iterable for messaging.

• Robust segmentation

With its previous ESP, Joybird needed a custom integration in order to segment the way the team wanted. With Iterable, Joybird is able to leverage existing front and backend events for more customized segmentation and testing without tapping into developer resources. Iterable’s ease of use empowers Joybird to create dynamic segments using a variety of data sources like a customer’s distance from a store, lifetime value, RFM model labels (recency, frequency, monetary value), and style preferences from website interactions. 

Results: Faster Activation, Less Down Time

Joybird’s new tech stack delivered measurable business value almost immediately: