Diono Buckles Up for Growth with BigCommerce

Taking a digital-first approach

Design, engineering and innovation are hallmarks of its products. Family, travel and safety are pillars of its brand. Diono, founded and headquartered in Seattle, Washington, is a visionary manufacturer and seller of an ever-evolving range of all-in-one convertible car and booster seats, strollers, baby carriers and related accessories. 

Established in 1999, Diono has been producing safe travel solutions to enable families to experience the #JoyOfTheJourney wherever their excursions may take them.

CEO Tim Maule joined the company in 2017. With more than 30 years of experience with children brands, Tim brought to Diono a new vision and fresh focus for repositioning the company as a digital-first business. This was Tim’s top priority and it’s what eventually led him to BigCommerce.

Challenge

Letting go of the woes of Woo

“I inherited a website with WooCommerce built in that just didn't work. It just fell over the whole time. It was not stable and required daily, if not hourly, attention to keep everything live. The biggest issues I had with the site were that it was structurally unsound, unstable, commercially inflexible and unscalable. It was a disaster,” Tim said.

The company did try to make things work on the platform, but by the end of 2019, it was clear the brand needed to migrate to a whole new platform. To tackle the intensive process, Tim turned to his friend and mentor, Fred Lebhart, CEO of Efelle Creative, a BigCommerce Elite Agency Partner, for guidance. 

Solution

All in with BigCommerce

Fred introduced Tim to BigCommerce. In March 2020, the two sat down and drew out the vision for Diono’s digital-first approach and which providers would align best to the brand’s strategy. The conversation turned to what ecommerce platform to select and that’s when Fred said, "Well frankly, at the moment there's only one that I think we should use, and it's BigCommerce." 

“At that time I didn't know a great deal about BigCommerce, but as we drew out and built the tech stack and came to a consensus on what we wanted to achieve, Fred was even more convinced BigCommerce was the right choice for us to go with. I recall him saying, ‘Yep, this is the one to go for,’” Tim said.

“When Tim first reached out he was on a broken WooCommerce store that we had to fix before we could get the new site started. I think showing Tim a path forward that alleviated much of the pain points they were experiencing was intriguing. Moving to a much more complex site with a robust technology stack enabled us to add nearly a dozen integrations, including robust content management and localization through FusionCMS, Salsify PIM and BigCommerce,” Fred said.

Diono used a BigCommerce Implementation Project Manager to keep the various teams and overall project on track. At the end of the day, Diono had launched five headless ecommerce stores on BigCommerce in less than 12 months. These stores operate in the US, Canada, Mexico, the UK and other places within Europe. 

“We have gone as all-in as possible to make BigCommerce the center of everything we're doing. It's a testament to the platform that we can get a complex website with a complex tech structure in five different instances done in less than a year,” Tim said.

Apps and integrations: Getting the most out of what’s available

The Codisto Channel Cloud app, an all-in-one multichannel marketplace listing tool for Amazon, eBay and Walmart, runs on all the sites as does Yotpo for product reviews, Klaviyo for automated SMS and email marketing and ShipperHQ for product shipping and fulfillment. “We also have integrated the Mercado Libre integration that allows us to operate online marketplaces throughout Latin America,” Tim said.

Diono was an early adopter of B2B Edition, which offers enterprise-level B2B functionality to enable B2B operations online and provide customers with seamless transactions and self-service account capabilities.

“We do not have our own brick-and-mortar stores, but we supply other retailers and marketplaces like buybuy Baby, Walmart, Amazon, Google and eBay. That's why we were attracted to B2B Edition. It allows all of our specialty and independent trade customers to order through our BigCommerce site. They can see into our inventory and place, pay for, and ship orders without worrying if inventory is too low or out of stock. It simplifies the purchasing process and makes it more efficient,” Tim said.

Individual consumers can shop on Facebook and Instagram and pay directly on Diono’s website using an array of payment solutions that include Braintree, Fast, ApplePay, GooglePay and all the standard payment processors through Stripe. 

Diono also reaps the benefits of using BigCommerce's native integration to Google BigQuery, a serverless, multi-cloud data warehouse that sends data to Google Data Studio. It helps Diono manage and analyze its data with built-in features like machine learning, geospatial analysis and business intelligence.

Results

More capabilities. Greater growth.

Today, by using a Google plugin, all of Diono’s websites are multi-language sites. “In the US we offer English and Spanish. In Canada it’s English and French, and in Europe we offer 27 different languages. And in terms of currency, people shop in their local currency,” Tim said.

For the time period comparing March 1, 2021-December 31, 2021 over April 29, 2020-February 28, 2021, Diono experienced a 44% increase in transactions, a 48% increase in average order value (AOV) and a 114% increase in revenue.

Looking Ahead

Embracing innovation to excel in the marketplace

In 2022, a lot of Diono’s focus will be on global marketplaces, maximizing what BigCommerce has to offer and keeping abreast of the platform’s innovations so they can execute quickly. 

“If BigCommerce continues to innovate, and bring fresh thinking, fresh ideas and easy, flexible and quick scalability, then BigCommerce will help us scale very quickly. We are all in with BigCommerce. I want Diono to be the cutting edge on absolutely everything because if we're all in, we might as well use the platform to the absolute best of its abilities,” Tim said.

BigCommerce will continue to be all in with Diono as well, bringing excellence, innovation, and opportunity to its world of ecommerce.

Published: May 2022