Heath Ceramics

Heath Ceramics is one of the few mid-century American porcelain manufacturers still in operation. Since 1948, the company has been making tableware and ceramic tiles by hand in Sausalito, CA. Founder Edith Heath was an influential artist and modernistic designer. Today, the digital age and traditional craftsmanship come together at Heath. To improve its existing online shop the company engaged AOE media, a system integrator specializing in content management and E-commerce, with locations all around the world including California.

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The former Heath Ceramics webshop was no longer at the leading edge in terms of user-friendliness, filtering options, or functions. Heath looked around for a supplier who brought not only technical prowess to the table, but also high design affinity. The redesign per se had been tasked to the world-renowned agency Method, but their sophisticated design ideas still needed to be implemented with a pragmatic yet sensitive approach. For Heath Ceramics, AOE media combined the content management system TYPO3 and the enterprise version of Magento, an E-commerce platform. Method’s innovative design required many customer-specific modifications to both systems. AOE successfully met the extraordinary challenge of melding TYPO3 and Magento with high complexity and absolute flexibility, yet fully seamlessly.

The specifics:

For page structure and editorial content, for example about the company, there is an autonomous TYPO3 instance.
Magento adopts this structure and adds categories like “Bowls”, “Plates” and “Glassware”, as well as collections like “Plaza Line”, supplementing the navigation set up in TYPO3.
The pages taken into Magento pull content from TYPO3 via a widget. This connector for importing TYPO3 pages and their content into the the Magento shop was developed by AOE media especially for Heath Ceramics.
Heath Ceramics can configure each page as desired to publish only TYPO3 content, only shop content, or a mix of both.

Heath Ceramic's new webshop

State-of-the-art in design and functionality

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The project also features other user-friendly highlights. For example, at the customer’s request AOE added a Custom Color Family filter and “Some included” view to the filter functions provided by Magento. The Custom Color Family filter lets users sort the product overview by color family instead of specific colors, which reduces the number of color choices to a manageable number and makes life easier for both user and shop administrator. The unusual “Some included” view, in the form of a half-full bulletpoint, shows whether a given product is included in a category or collection. For example, if the user filters for blue bowls, they will see that they are available in all collections except “Alabama Chanin” and are also included in the categories “Accessories” and “Serving”.

Heath customers can also set up wedding registries. AOE media modified the Magento standard to let registry owners see what products have already been purchased. In addition, a flexible registry was implemented that allows registry owners to redeem the purchased product value in the form of a coupon for other products if their wishes change.

Last but not least, the Mix & Match feature lets customers assemble their own sets and get discounts on them, making the new Heath Ceramics an all-round convenience package for users and the site operator alike.

Link:
http://www.heathceramics.com

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Good things for good people

Edith Heath (1911-2005) founded Heath Ceramics in 1948. Today, over sixty years later, Heath Ceramics is considered among the most enduring examples of mid-century design. Found in restaurants, homes and museums around the world, Heath is synonymous with simple, functional and thoughtfully designed tableware and tile. Many of Edith’s original pieces are also on display in the permanent collections of museums such as MOMA and LACMA.