The joy of purchasing—also know as “adopting”—a Cabbage Patch Kid is all the more pleasing to customers and more profitable to the company, thanks to the ingenuity of Rock Paper Scissors and collaborative efforts of innovative partners. To make the process of online sales easier for both customers and Cabbage Patch employees entailed a complete rebuild of the website with a new content management system (CMS), visual design, and state-of-the-art, custom shopping cart.
As an online retail store that showcases all of the company’s current products, the Cabbage Patch Kids (CPK) website is a valuable piece of corporate real estate. BabyLand General in Cleveland, Georgia, the birthplace of Cabbage Patch Kids since 1978, has cultivated a fan base devoted to an intricate, multi-tiered product line of collectibles from one-of-a-kind, hand-stitched babies to mass-produced vinyl models. Additionally, inventory frequently changes with the birth of new babies and the adoption of others, so keeping the product lines current is a challenge. All in all, the process of searching for Kids and eventually adopting one’s desired choices must be positive, user-friendly experiences.
With a deep respect for the brand’s history and the corporate culture, RPS augmented the website, implementing some design and content management updates that showcased a more searchable inventory. At the same time, a brand new shopping cart was installed with the new features for Cabbage Patch including multiple images of dolls for each product with a zoom feature and special online features for the Cabbage Patch Collector’s Club.
On the inventory management side they also improved the back-end functionality for the staff by adding features such as accurate, meaningful reporting and easier management of products.
“In addition to the inventory redesign, one of the most critical aspects of this effort was researching various e-commerce platforms to find the one that ideally fulfilled CPK’s unique requirements,” says Amanda Sutt. “From a pool of national providers, we narrowed the choices, which we presented to the Cabbage Patch team. With our help, they chose Magento for the shopping cart.” The next step for RPS was to select a development partner that would customize the software for CPK.
In addition to building the new shopping cart and maintaining CPK’s website, RPS has consulted with CPK about social media marketing, website reporting analysis, and more. The adoption of new designs and technologies continue through creative exchanges of ideas, planning and implementation based upon strategic goals.
