How Green Paper Products achieved built-In scalability

Headquarters: Cleveland, OH, USA
Technology Stack: Storyblok, Shopify, Algolia, Klaviyo

Green Paper Products provides sustainable alternatives to environmentally harmful tableware and food service products. They have an impressive selection of high-quality biodegradable and compostable products. In its 13 years of existence, the company has grown significantly. As they grew, so did their product offerings, target market, demand, and client base. Unfortunately, the monolithic technology stack they had in place could not keep up.

Luckily, Green Paper Products had been working with VividFront, a Storyblok Partner. Being a full-service digital marketing agency, they were able to identify all the challenges and come up with a solution. In fact, the project was finalized in only 4 months. In May of 2022, the new website was live, just in time for the busy season. Shortly after the website launch, VividFront noticed significant improvements. A 16% decrease in bounce rate was one of them. Also, a 25% Increase in Direct Traffic Conversion Rate and a 12.5% Increase in Sitewide Conversion Rate.

Section titled The challenge of keeping up with the company’s growth The challenge of keeping up with the company’s growth

Green Paper Products has 13 years of experience in the industry. They have scaled their company to adapt to change, achieving great success in the process. They have renowned customer service and exceptional product offerings. This has helped them become a top direct-to-consumer supplier in the sustainable product space.

But, their website was becoming an obstacle to their growth. It was posing the following challenges:

• Lack of scalability. The Green Paper Products website could not scale as fast as the business. This was because of the architecture in place, which required a large amount of manual work. Adding new products and new pages, which aid their sales efforts, was very difficult.
• .NET structure. The original website was custom-built in .NET code. The two web developers built everything from scratch to fit Green Paper Products’ specific needs. This resulted in a large number of custom features. The .net environment and the non-standard language and configurations of the previous website created obstacles to true scalability.
• Lack of optimization. The setup prevented Green Paper Products from optimizing their website. They had to find a way to enhance their SEO and to better track the website’s performance.
• Inability to connect marketing platforms. Green Paper Products were unable to connect their website with their marketing platforms. A connection needed to build customer loyalty and reach target markets.

Section titled Achieving built-in scalability with headless architecture and Storyblok Achieving built-in scalability with headless architecture and Storyblok

When looking for a long-term solution, VividFront analyzed Green Paper Products’ original website. They wanted to understand their current and future website functionality needs. The conclusion was that Green Paper Products had a unique way of handling inventory, ordering, and shipping. Yet, the original website had excellent SEO value, so they wanted to keep that intact with the new site. They realized that no monolithic solution would be able to check all the boxes on Green Paper Products’ list of needs. Thus, they chose a headless solution when revamping the site, specifically Storyblok.

The VividFront team had previous experience with Storyblok. They had implemented Storyblok for WÜSTHOF, a global knife manufacturer. This experience in the headless realm allowed them to feel confident that Storyblok would be the perfect solution.

VividFront worked with headless technologies like Shopify, Algolia and Storyblok. The goal was to achieve a high level of functionality and optimize the website. The new setup was able to bring Green Paper Products' desire to grow and scale to reality through:

• Flexibility: They now have technical and content-based flexibility. This was necessary to deliver a better experience for managers and users.
• Fast time-to-market: The new setup makes it extremely easy to add new products and new pages. So, as their product offerings increase, they can easily showcase them.
• Integrations: The Shopify integration provided by Storyblok was used. This saved the development team a lot of development time, allowing for fast project completion. Besides, the website is now integrated with Klaviyo, their marketing automation platform.
• Improved SEO: VividFront implemented several types of content, such as a blog and FAQ section. The goal was to empower the new website with a boost in SEO opportunities. Now, users can buy eco-friendly products while learning more about ways to live a more sustainable lifestyle.

With the help of Storyblok and how content is organized, they unlocked a lot more data and things to report on by using Google Analytics. At the end of the day, the biggest win is the fact that the headless architecture allows them to integrate new features with ease. This means that any future need Green Paper Products might have will be met with ease and their website will never be in the way of their growth.

Shortly after the website launch, VividFront noticed some significant improvements:

• 16% Decrease in Sitewide Bounce Rate
• 25% Increase in Direct Traffic Conversion Rate
• 12.5% Increase in Sitewide Conversion Rate