Design Commerce Technology + Design Miami
2022

A platform for incredible design and collectables

  • Giovanni Vocale

    Director of Product Design and Engineering

  • Devang Thakkar

    CPO, CTO

  • Thomas Galbraith

    CEO

  • Brian Johnson

    Director of Platform Engineering

  • Angela Sze

    VP of Product

  • Anastasiya Uraleva

    Design Engineer

  • Hoa J'Mie Pham

    Design Engineer

  • Sasha Komarova

    Design Engineer

Problem

  • Let people feel and experience the fair online
  • Secrecy on prices and availability of items
  • Isolate visually different tenants, brands, collections

Process

  • Proof that open-source and affordable WooCommerce can be used to power backend to a more modern Next.js app
  • Create pages for Category, Collection, Product, Store
  • Integrate and customize Matterport to offer immersive fair experience
  • Hire and train 3 junior design engineers with no work experience

The Work

Challenges

  • Curio vs Galleries vs DMBX
  • First few months spent on cart from multiple seller, and account creation. Decided then to just use Wordpress pages for now.
  • Limitations with wordpress authoring content
  • Difficulties developing in Wordpress
  • Bugs in Wordpress GraphQL: pagination not working correctly
  • Bugs in Strapi: deployment with Postgres
  • No product market fit: no one purchase $10.000 item online. DMBX (less then $1000 items) as solution
  • Create tools for interior designers: did not have the chance to start building such
  • Our funds eaten by Design Miami fair losses

Stats

  • Q2Q3Q4
    Unique Visitors47,39481,027 (141.9% to 57,100 goal)114,200
    New Social Followers2,6273,300 (110.4% to 3,645 goal)6,600
    Engagements54,25465,100 (107.7% to 70,115 goal)130,200
    Impressions2,085,0402,500,000 (143.5% to 3,588,448 goal)4,000,000
    Newsletter Signups5622,000 (110.2% to 2204 goal)4,000