Silk Software

BACKGROUND

Can you provide a brief description of what your company does?

1928 Jewelry manufactures and distributes costume jewelry, vintage custom jewelry is what they’re known for.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What was your main objective for working with SILK Software?

We wanted to replace our website with a new website. We actually had Magento Community and we wanted to move to Magento Enterprise. And our Magento Community experience wasn’t with a Magento partner. It did not go well. So we wanted to use a Magneto partner that was experienced. And our biggest thing was we wanted somebody who had experience integrating with the ERP system. We do everything in our ERP system. We’re using Vision, Microsoft Dynamic NAV, I guess they call it now.

How did you originally hear about SILK Software?

We contacted Magento and we also went on their site and we looked for their certified partners. We interviewed about four of their partners. What we were looking for was somebody who had local presence that could actually come to office and we could meet with them and tell them what we needed and then if we had problems, they could come. And we wanted them to be certified and have experience. And we wanted them to have experience with an ERP system, interfacing with an ERP system. And those were sort of our main – and we wanted them to have some people in this country that we can deal with. We’ve dealt with guys in Russia. We’ve dealt with guys in India. And it was just… and they do have some people there that they use. But you always can talk to their technical people, their designers here and get things responded quickly. So that was important to us.

SOLUTION

Can you tell me a more the scope of the project, and what parts they were involved in?

We had six websites that we were having them redesign. They did the total redesign with us. They had previously done ERP system interfaces. So they kind of have a way of doing it where they have staging database. They would have a MySQL database. They would bring all the information out of Magento and put it there. Then the ERP systems can go and pick it up there. And then when we need to send the information back, we send it back to that database and then it goes into Magento. They had a lot of that there. That way we are actually able to come up with it very quickly. I was really surprised that in no time, it went. It saved us a lot of time.

How long ago was the project completed?

We finished in August, last year.

Can you provide a general cost estimate for the project?

We had different phases. It was under $100,000 for the initial, and then maybe we spent over that now. We did a whole redesign just recently, about a month ago. We redesigned and we did a mobile site. We’ve been working with them kind of regularly actually for the whole last year has been great.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

How satisfied are you with the work they’ve done?

I’m very satisfied. I really like them. Their technical person that we deal with the most is James. You can call him on his cellphone and he responds quickly. They get their answers done. They work with the guys in China to get the work done. And I also like their designers. We dealt with four of their designers because we had six websites coming up at the same time. So we had different designers for different websites. It was great.

How do you feel about Magento as a platform?

I like Magento. I like Magento Enterprise much better. We were on a really early version of Community and I would have said that I hate Magento at that point. But I do, I like it. It seems like it’s growing and it’s going to have a lot of plugins that keep more and more coming out. I think it was a good choice.

What do you say are the main two things that have improved from Community to Enterprise?

Well, I’d say performance for sure. The system would just crash. It would just crash constantly. Maybe if we had a smaller website, it would work. But it really, honestly, did not work for us. The second, let me think, I’m trying to remember now the differences between Community and Enterprise .

Is there anything that you find to be unique or special about SILK compared to other developers that you may have worked with?

They have a really great issues software that you can use. That’s a nice way to communicate. They had nice internet tools, like for bug tracking and also for the project itself, when we doing the design phase and being able to communicate back and forth with the whole team. I thought that was good.

Is there anything that you would do differently a second time around or think that Silk could improve upon?

I know we had a little bit of trouble with our with our SEO. Then they advised us, if we wanted to really simplify the website. We didn’t want all this verbiage and all this stuff. The designers were fine on that. But then when we implemented it, the SEO went down. So then they had some SEO guys come in and say, well, you should add this, this and this. So it might have been better. I think in retrospect, it would have been better if they had had. And I talked to Don about that. It would be better to have somebody review that also, and not just the designers.