Brown Jordan honors their 75-year legacy of innovation with Bear
Brown Jordan

Brown Jordan honors their 75-year legacy of innovation with Bear

North America’s largest outdoor furniture brand chooses Bear as part of massive digital transformation.

Brown Jordan is the American pioneer of outdoor furniture. When they modernized their processes from end to end, they chose Bear as their partner in ecommerce.

Powered by Bear

Location
Pasadena, CA
Publishes to
Tropitone, Castelle, & Winston
Bear Powered Listings
5,000+

Founded by Robert Brown and Herbert Jordan in 1945 in Pasadena, California, Brown Jordan is best known for outdoor furniture that’s so stylish you can bring it indoors. With a focus on craftsmanship, heritage, design, and innovation, Brown Jordan is proud of their long legacy of partnerships with top furniture designers like Walter Lamb, Bain Capital Green, and Richard Frinier.

With a mandate to adapt their technology infrastructure to accommodate fresh designers and new ecommerce demands, the company found itself at a crossroads: adapt or stagnate.

Adapting a 75+ year legacy of innovation in outdoor furniture

“No one bends metal like Brown Jordan."


When Julie Daniel, senior vice-president of marketing and ecommerce at Brown Jordan, heard this saying, she wasn’t sure what it meant. “Then I went to one of our factories,” she says, “and I actually watched how we produce our furniture. We custom make all our products, and we literally take one long piece of aluminum and use multiple machines to heat it and bend it to its desired shape. Our furniture is defined by our curves. It’s art you can sit on."


Julie has learned a lot about Brown Jordan’s legacy since she started with the company nearly five years ago. When she discovered the Smithsonian Gardens had acquired the Brown Jordan Day Lily chair as part of its Horticultural Artifacts Collection, she knew she was working for a company with a rich history.


“Brown Jordan has been known for its innovation for years,” Julie says. “We were the first to treat wrought iron furniture with a rust-resistant finish to minimize maintenance, for example. Our original Walter Lamb chair is celebrating a major anniversary this year. This is why craftsmanship and innovation are core principles of our brand.


During the summer of 2021, Brown Jordan began strategizing the next stage of their innovation—this time, focused on technology.


“On the design side,”Julie says, “we’d been focusing a lot on bringing in fresh new designers who force us to step outside our comfort zone—people like Ann Marie Vering and Toan Nguyen. But we also needed to develop new technologies to make it easy for those designers to work with us, so we’re attracting the best talent.”


On top of a new website and a massive update to their designer platform, Brown Jordan needed a way to connect and centralize their massive catalog across their Tropitone, Castelle, and Winston ecommerce brands. This need is what brought them to Bear.

Challenge

Automating hours of manual work to get precise about ecommerce ROI

“When we first started our relationship with Paragon and Wayfair,” Julie says, “I almost killed the relationship three months in because it was too much work. We have a team of one working on ecommerce listings and we didn’t have the time or resources to fill out their manual forms. We needed a way to make ecommerce simple, or we just wouldn’t care.”


Julie’s philosophy is that any ecommerce channel is only as successful as its tech stack, because companies need precision when identifying ROI for each asset—and it’s too time consuming to do this manually. “We needed an automated process to allow us to look at the data and understand what's working and what's not working in ecommerce for us.”

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Solution

A centralized dashboard of all listing statuses

When Brown Jordan started working with Bear, they were able to upload all their inventory and distribute listings to their desired channels through a single point.


Lori Hahn, senior ecommerce coordinator at Brown Jordan, says, “With CommerceBear I can keep an eye on how many items are active or inactive or on pause. It helps me see the status of every item with every merchant, across the board.”


With CommerceBear, Brown Jordan can keep up with the myriad pricing adjustments across all their listings and channels. “It happens so often that Wayfair and Amazon aren’t selling our products at the right price,” Lori says. “With CommerceBear I can see whether or not they adjusted their pricing and fix any errors quickly.”

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Three brands and 5,000 listings in one place
Castelle

Berkeley Collection Lounge Set

See for Yourself
Published To
BED BATH & BEYOND RANK
Location
Pasadena, California
Category
Outdoor
online Channels

Results

Three brands and 5,000 listings in one place

Parent Company Brown Jordan Inc. uses CommerceBear for three pillar brands: Tropitone, Castelle, and Winston. In total, they have over 5,000 listings powered through Bear.


“We needed a partner that had expertise in the furniture industry and a sense of urgency,” Julie says. “This is what we get from CommerceBear—it’s an extension of our team.”

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You see Brown Jordan in real life at High Point Spring Market. They are located in the IHFC - M111, Main, Floor 1.

You see Brown Jordan in real life at High Point Spring Market. They are located in the IHFC - M111, Main, Floor 1.

You see Brown Jordan in real life at High Point Spring Market. They are located in the IHFC - M111, Main, Floor 1.
Three brands and 5,000 listings in one place
Castelle

Berkeley Collection Lounge Set

See for Yourself
Published To
Overstock Rank
Location
Pasadena, California
Category
Outdoor
online Channels

Results

Three brands and 5,000 listings in one place

Parent Company Brown Jordan Inc. uses CommerceBear for three pillar brands: Tropitone, Castelle, and Winston. In total, they have over 5,000 listings powered through Bear.


“We needed a partner that had expertise in the furniture industry and a sense of urgency,” Julie says. “This is what we get from CommerceBear—it’s an extension of our team.”

‍

You see Brown Jordan in real life at High Point Spring Market. They are located in the IHFC - M111, Main, Floor 1.

You see Brown Jordan in real life at High Point Spring Market. They are located in the IHFC - M111, Main, Floor 1.

You see Brown Jordan in real life at High Point Spring Market. They are located in the IHFC - M111, Main, Floor 1.
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SOLUTION

When Venessa started working with Bear, she found out that managing metadata for large platforms didn’t need to be so complicated.“When you’re working with channels like Wayfair,” Venessa says, “there’s a taxonomy for each product and that filters down to the metadata you have to work with. Bear has based their spreadsheet off Wayfair’s—because it’s the most extensive in the industry—but it’s much easier to use and the listings are pushed out to everyone.”With Bear, Dovetail’s metadata is centralized in one place instead of several across various channels. To launch and manage products at scale on Wayfair, Perigold, Overstock, and Houzz, Venessa uploads digital assets, keywords, product descriptions, etc. to one place. From there, Bear takes care of disseminating and customizing that information to each channel depending on how the listings need to be built and presented.