QuaTeams

Children's Wear Digest
Company. . . . . . . . . .Children's Wear Digest
Industry. . . . . . . . . . . .Children's Apparel
Solution. . . . . . . . . . . .Online Catalog

Background
CWDkids started out in 1987 as a mail order retailer of children's clothing. With an already successful mail-order catalog business, the company decided to enter the world of online commerce with an online catalog in 1997. CWDkids wanted to present a friendly, functional and fun site in order to attract existing and new customers to their brand. Their original site was created from scratch by a developer but CWDkids soon found that they needed to expand the site's functionality beyond its capabilities in order to provide their customers with a more satisfying customer experience. CWD needed a new site.

In 2000 another development group started backend development on a new site but was unable to see it through to completion; QuaTeams took up the task of seeing the new design and development through to fruition.

The Customer's Needs
CWDkids wanted a site that would display their products in an attractive, easy to navigate online catalog format, have dynamic pages that changed on subsequent viewings (to keep the site looking fresh), and the ability for their customers to add a whole outfit (top, pants, and shoes) to their shopping cart with a single click. The CWDkids staff also required an extensive secure administrative site that allowed them to constantly update the items available, modify the content of the site pages, create and track promotions and sales, and graph the success of marketing campaigns. Additionally, CWDkids' fulfillment center required a secure site that allowed them to quickly receive, process and track incoming orders.

QuaTeams Solution
A team was assembled to analyze the customer's needs, develop a solution and deploy it live. We employed Quagga, a proprietary Java web component system, to build the site. The use of Quagga allowed the site to be created quickly, while allowing for significant future expansion. An administration site was provided which included site management tool for uploading content, editing items, modifying promotions, and reporting. Uploads and edits were automatically staged in order to protect the live site from unintended changes. CWDkids was also able to retrieve information for analysis including customized graphs that include sales information. The fulfillment interface utilized SSL to securely display order and customer information. All customer records were index and retrievable from a simple query interface.

Conclusions
The site was a huge success. QuaTeams, through its use of effective team building and innovative software, enabled CWDkids to establish an impressive presence online. The transformation of the webpage added a significant new revenue stream to the existing brick and mortar and catalog sales and extended their reach to an international marketplace. CWDkids is now reported to be the 2nd largest children's clothing catalog after Land's End. Since the launch we have built a collaborative relationship with CWDkids that has resulted in customer-for-life. The scope of our relationship has grown overtime to include system security, systems administration, 24x7 monitoring and response services, and database administration.