Monroe Workshop
Monroe Workshop is a Los Angeles based furniture studio, specializing in handcrafted, modernist inspired design. If you’ve had a seat at the Ace Hotel downtown, or sipped a coffee at Verve on Melrose, you’ve unknowingly enjoyed the natural, nonchalant beauty of Monroe Workshop’s work. Known for their custom pieces and looking to expand to other kinds of clients, Monroe Workshop came to us to create an e-commerce experience and online store.
Content Strategy, Design, Development, Digital, UX.
Matt is the message
Handcrafted is one of those hipster terms that’s been slapped on anything that’s just passed through someone’s fingers. But Monroe Workshop is different. It’s a place where the founder, Matt Monroe, can be found every day in his sawdust-ladden Silver Lake workshop, making each piece with his own two hands. We wanted to make sure that this message was never lost in the cold efficiency of E-commerce.
Our strategy put Matt at the center, and featured imagery that feels authentic, unstagged, unpretentious, Blessed with the talented work of photographers Nicki Sebastian, Victoria Wall Harris, Douglas Lyle Thompson, Joel Schmelzer, and Laure Joliet, the imagery captures the beauty of the pieces, the people who use them, and their creators.
An artisan-friendly business platform
It’s hard enough to do an artform well. But throw in the need to make a business out of it, and it gets that much harder. Our first challenge was coming up with an E-commerce solution that could be supported by Monroe Workshop, with little time for the headaches of accounting, inventory, payment processing, website management, and fulfillment. We turned to the Shopify platform, and its Liquid API, for a solution that could check all boxes with an ultra user-friendly backend.