Furncare
When the website becomes the bottleneck: how a premium B2B brand moved from broken infrastructure to a platform built for growth.
Client
Furncare
Sector
B2B / Care sector furniture
Challenge
Broken WooCommerce infrastructure failing B2B ambitions
Solution
WooCommerce to Shopify migration, NetSuite ERP integration, B2B experience design
Outcome
Premium B2B platform that the business is confident sending customers to
The Inflection point
Removing operational drag and building a B2B platform Furncare can scale with confidence.
Furncare had a problem that many growing B2B businesses will recognise. The infrastructure that had served them in an earlier stage of the business was no longer fit for the current (or next) one.
A family-owned manufacturer of premium, handmade furniture for the care sector - supplying care homes, interior designers, and contractors across elderly care and disability environments - Furncare had built a business with a genuinely premium positioning. High-end products, bespoke builds and a reputation earned through quality and craft.
The website told a completely different story.
An old WooCommerce site that hadn't kept pace with the business. It was hard to navigate, unable to showcase the product range properly, there was no connection to their NetSuite ERP and no structured way for the B2B buyers who formed the backbone of their customer base to do what they needed to do: browse a large, complex catalogue, check specifications, shortlist options, and enter a buying conversation with enough information to move quickly.
The site had become the bottleneck. Sales teams were fielding calls for basic product information. Interior designers couldn't get dimensions without picking up the phone. The gap between Furncare's brand ambition and their digital customer experience had grown wide enough to undermine trust.
At the same time, Furncare were undergoing a full brand refresh - new identity, new positioning and a new direction. The question wasn't whether to fix the website. The question was whether to use this moment to properly reset the foundations, or to paper over the cracks.
The right question wasn't 'do we need a new website?'
It was: what kind of platform does a B2B business like ours actually need to grow?
The Enemy: Infrastructure Built for an Earlier Stage
The root cause here wasn't poor design choices or a lack of effort. It was a platform and architecture that had never been built with B2B growth in mind.
A broken WooCommerce foundation
The site was fragile. It wasn't being actively maintained. Product pages couldn't adequately represent a catalogue that ran to hundreds of SKUs, many with bespoke configuration options, fabric choices, and dimensional variants. The browsing experience failed the very buyers Furncare needed to impress most.
No ERP connection
Furncare operated NetSuite as their core business system. The website had no functional link to it. That meant product data was manually managed, inconsistently maintained, and unreliable - an operational friction point that compounded on every customer interaction.
A sales team doing work the site should be doing
Interior designers and trade buyers were calling and emailing for information that should have been on the site; specifications, dimensions and fabric options. Every one of those calls was a failure of the digital experience - consuming sales time on conversations that should have started further down the funnel.
A brand that had grown beyond its platform
Furncare had evolved significantly as a business. They were expanding into new care sectors. They were working with interior designers on large, complex projects. They had a clear premium positioning. The website didn't reflect any of it. New prospects encountering the site for the first time were getting a completely distorted picture of the business they were considering working with.
The Decision: A Platform Reset, Not a Patch
Furncare didn’t approach Underwaterpistol looking for a like-for-like rebuild. They wanted to fundamentally change how ecommerce worked within the business.
When Furncare came to Underwaterpistol, the brief they had in mind was reasonably clear: move away from WooCommerce, improve the website, and bring it in line with the new brand.
What the project actually required was a more structured reset - one that addressed the commercial problem, not just the aesthetic one.
The core questions we needed to answer weren't technical. They were operational and strategic.
‣ What does a B2B buying journey for premium care furniture actually look like - and what does the site need to do at each stage of that journey?
‣ How do we connect product data reliably from NetSuite without creating an integration that would be brittle, expensive, or override content the team needed to manage?
‣ How do we build an experience that serves interior designers without compromising the broader customer journey?
‣ What does success look like for a business where the sale is never completed on the site, but the site determines whether the conversation ever starts?
These are the kinds of decisions that often get made fast because a business needs to launch. But they matter. Get them wrong, and they become the constraints the brand has to work around later.
We made sure to pressure-test the decisions behind the brief, understand where the risk sat, and make sure the foundations would still hold once the business was live.
What we built
Shopify as a scalable B2B foundation
Migrating to Shopify gave Furncare a stable, maintainable platform their small team could actually manage. Page building, content updates, product management - tasks that had previously required developer involvement - became self-serve. That operational independence matters for a lean team.
Shopify also gave Furncare a platform that could grow with them: one capable of supporting more sophisticated B2B functionality as the business continues to evolve.
NetSuite ERP integration
One of the most consequential technical decisions in the project was how to handle the NetSuite connection. The approach needed to make product data consistently available on the site without creating an integration that was inflexible, expensive, or prone to overwriting content the team managed directly in Shopify. The connector approach we implemented served product data from NetSuite onto the site while preserving editorial control over content - an important distinction when the team needed to manage descriptions, images, and supplementary information independently of the ERP. ERP data quality sets a ceiling on what's possible and NetSuite product data had been entered by sales teams over time, with inconsistency in how fields were populated, which is normal inside a growing business. But once that data starts powering the ecommerce experience, those inconsistencies become visible fast. This is why we audit the data, establish clear field ownership and governance before the integration goes live. Otherwise, Shopify is not the problem but it is where the problem shows up.
B2B catalogue and discovery experience
The product experience was rebuilt around how B2B buyers actually use a catalogue site: browsing by category, filtering by specification, shortlisting options across a large range, and then entering a conversation with sales ready to go. Product pages were enriched with content that the old site couldn't carry; dimensions, specifications, swatches, colour options, product families and groupings. The goal was to move as much of the pre-sales information exchange as possible onto the site, so that when a buyer picked up the phone, the conversation could start from a position of shared context.
Fabric Finder
Furncare's fabric range has hundreds of options - a genuine navigation challenge for interior designers specifying products for rooms and environments. The Fabric Finder gave buyers a dedicated browsing experience for the fabric range: filterable by colour, visually presented, and structured to reduce the friction of identifying the right options across a large catalogue without having to manually examine each individual product.
B2B self-serve specs access
Interior designers don't need a conversation to check if a product fits a space, they need a specification document. Logged-in trade buyers can now download technical specifications directly from the site, giving them what they need for room planning and fit checks without waiting for a response. Fewer low-value enquiries for the sales team. More autonomy for the B2B buyers who already know what they need.
HubSpot lead capture, properly connected
HubSpot was already in place at Furncare, but the site wasn't feeding it properly. Custom forms were implemented across the site to create structured, trackable lead capture - moving the business away from informal call-us behaviour and towards a digital sales process that could be measured, followed up, and improved over time.
The outcome
The business moved from actively avoiding sending people to the website, to confidently directing customers there. That's a meaningful shift.
When the problem is positioning, conversion rate does not tell the full story.
Furncare needed the site to do something more fundamental: reflect the quality of the brand, make the range easier to understand, and give B2B buyers a clearer path to specification.
That was the real measure of success.
The outcomes that matter here:
‣ The site now properly reflects Furncare's premium positioning. The gap between the brand and the digital experience has closed.
‣ Interior designers and trade buyers can self-serve the information they need - specifications, dimensions, fabric options - without consuming sales time on basic enquiries.
‣ Product presentation supports the bespoke ordering process: buyers can browse, shortlist, and enter a sales conversation already oriented around specific products and configurations.
‣ HubSpot is now being fed by the site in a structured way - creating a lead management capability that didn't exist before.
‣ The team can manage the site themselves. Content updates, product changes, page management - this is no longer developer dependent.
The project was delivered on budget, UAT was smooth and launch was seamless.
More importantly: Furncare now have a platform they believe in. When the website becomes the first point of contact for an interior designer evaluating a £50,000 project, that confidence is commercially significant.
what this tells us
Furncare is a good example of a pattern we see often in B2B businesses with a strong product, and a weak digital presence. The infrastructure problem isn't always obvious until the business tries to grow through it - and by then, the gap between where the business is and what the platform can support has become a commercial liability.
The inflection point wasn't a crisis. It was a brand refresh that created the moment to ask the right question: not whether they needed a new website, but whether they were solving the right problem.
That question - and the willingness to answer it properly before writing a line of code - is what separates a reset that lasts from one that creates a different set of problems two years from now.
For B2B businesses at this kind of moment, the technical work is rarely the hard part. The hard part is understanding what the platform needs to do commercially, and making the right architectural and integration decisions before the scope is locked.
Technology
Shopify Plus
NetSuite
Shopify Search & Discovery
Matrixify
GA4
Hubspot
Mailchimp
Services
Shopify Plus build & migration
B2B ecommerce
ERP integration
UX / UI design
SEO & Data migration
Performance & accessibility
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