1-800-Flowers integrates e-commerce across more than a dozen brands, cultivating brand relevancy with Contentstack

1-800-FLOWERS’ previous content management system was device and channel-specific, with a different approach needed for each channel. For desktop B2C experiences, the system contained full HTML pages and snippets. For mobile web, a vendor proxied the traffic and had to override the HTML to allow for a mobile-friendly experience. Native mobile apps had their own process entirely. The experience was fractured and resource-intensive to manage. 

“While this architecture worked well in earlier years, it became brittle as the internet and e-commerce landscape evolved,”  Matt McHale, Senior Vice President, Application Development, 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, Inc., said. “It became difficult to change page layouts, requiring updating hundreds of HTML snippets each time. This also created dependencies on our external mobile provider, since their transformations would break. It was easy to cause issues by injecting code directly into the CMS.”

1-800-FLOWERS knew that a composable technology stack would be a good fit for their needs, since they wanted a content structure that was completely independent of the client serving the content, and independent of the look and feel of the layout itself. Ideally, with more than a dozen brands to promote, all platforms would be served from a single system to allow for streamlined and consistent content management. 

Additional goals for a CMS included:

• Scalability: Quick and efficient addition of new brands, replicating successful models to deploy new sites with minimal effort.
• Flexibility: A templated approach that was flexible enough to work for all brands, with sufficient guardrails to ensure stability. 
• Operational efficiency: Managing and updating content seamlessly across brands and platforms, without being tied to specific devices or layouts. 
• Performance: Optimized for fast content delivery to ensure a smooth and responsive user experience across all sites. 
• Integration: Robust API capabilities and webhook support to enable automated updates and real-time content synchronization. 

With these criteria in mind, 1-800-FLOWERS chose Contentstack, which now acts as a single centralized hub to power its digital platforms. This helps the business control the content and layout of homepages, landing pages, category listing pages, product detail pages, merchandising information, and more. 

By leveraging Contentstack’s content management API and webhook capabilities, 1-800-FLOWERS can push data to systems throughout the service stack and pull data into apps. Examples include pulling in shipping calculations, or feeding data from its Product Information Management system via API so that new products can be automatically set up as pages, and content editors can seamlessly modify product displays.

One of 1-800-FLOWERS’ unique challenges is the management of multiple brands through a single tech stack. Now with Contentstack, a template stack contains the content model for all pages and components, and each brand has a cloned stack that can be customized with different content, themes and pages specific to that brand. When a new content type or content model change is needed, the template is updated, and the changes sync down to the brands, so that they can use the new feature. Since the content model is pre-configured with all supported components, brands can manage their content independently to create data-driven, personalized experiences that quickly respond to consumer trends or customer feedback, while maintaining consistency and efficiency across the platform. 

“Creating a uniform structure while providing flexibility for each brand to showcase its identity has been a major goal for us,” McHale said. “Capabilities like Modular Blocks allow us to create components that may not be used by every brand. For example, floral shoppers often need to find same-day deliveries based on the availability of local florists. Using modular blocks, our floral brands can enable a zip code filtering component to facilitate this, while brands that primarily ship their deliveries can opt not to include this feature. This flexibility helps us to maintain a cohesive brand identity across our portfolio while allowing each brand the freedom to tailor its content and functionality to best serve its target audience.”

Another goal for 1-800-FLOWERS is the ability to merge quality content and commerce into a unified experience, and to support this, the business has recently migrated its blog content to Contentstack. “We’re building a true customer community, where customers can not only purchase product, but also access helpful content that guides them through life’s meaningful moments and helps them build relationships,” McHale said. “We’ve powered our e-commerce sites for several years through Contentstack, but bringing authored content into the mix, and layering in personalization — those are the big things of the future, allowing us to deliver a differentiated e-commerce experience to our customers.”

Next on the roadmap for 1-800-FLOWERS is to continue to explore the inter-relationship between content and commerce, becoming more targeted with recommendations and leveraging AI to support customers in finding the perfect gift, ultimately increasing their engagement with the brand. 

Key wins for 1-800-FLOWERS with Contentstack include:

• Platform stability: The website is now more stable than it was on the previous CMS, and content can be updated quickly and without disruption or downtime. Webhook capabilities ensure updates are propagated efficiently across the platform. 
• Marketing autonomy: Marketing teams can now update content quickly and independently, without extensive technical support. This autonomy has sped up the content creation and approval process, leading to more agile marketing campaigns.
• Brand unification: As its brand portfolio continues to expand, spinning up new brands can now happen in two months. 1-800-FLOWERS can simply clone a stack, and empower team members to start populating sites with brand-specific content immediately.