Cedar Chest

www.mycedarchest.com

The Client

Cedar Chest is the anchor store in historic Thorne's Marketplace, located in downtown Northampton, Massachusetts. Cedar Chest is a unique specialty gift store with over 20 departments, including House & Home, Garden, Office, Beauty and Pet Gifts and Treats.

In April 2006, Cedar Chest opened Cedar Chest Kids, adjacent to the main store in Thorne's, selling hard-to-find children's toys like WebKinz and Ugly Dolls, as well as pre-school developmental toys, puppets, and clothing.

The Challenge

Cedar Chest wanted a complete look & feel overhaul for their website to correspond with the new marketing materials used at store level. They asked us to create a unique, modern design.

The Result

Using Cedar Chest's logo and color scheme, we designed a clean and modern website. Tortus has also created several seasonal CSS stylesheets for Cedar Chest, giving the site an authentic feel matching the marketing used in-store.

Tortus created an ecommerce system that features a running receipt as customers shop with shipping estimates based on zip codes, built in Ruby on Rails for speed and accessibility. Cedar Chest can also upload and manage products and promotions through a Content Management System (CMS).

Tortus' content development team created optimized content for the product descriptions on Cedar Chest to help improve Cedar Chest's search engine placement.

Cedar Chest also asked Tortus to help create an email marketing campaign, which would highlight both activities in-store and sales offered online. Using Tortus' broadcast email software and Tortus' content development team, Cedar Chest now has an effective email marketing campaign in place, often receiving the most visitors to the site hours after the emails have been sent.