A Retail Makeover and Scalable Future for Rhea Lana’s with Sitefinity

Rhea Lana’s is an award-winning children’s consignment event business with over 100 franchises in 22 states. The company is an empowering training ground for mom-led businesses, helping families earn income from selling gently-used children’s items at Rhea Lana’s local consignment events. 

Built on a home-grown content management system (CMS), Rhea Lana’s platform lacked the calendaring and mapping features needed to organize Rhea Lana’s vast network of franchisees and 180 annual pop-up retail events.

“We needed our new website to help our franchisees grow and build their businesses,” said Rhea Lana Riner Founder and CEO, Rhea Lana’s. “It had to be aesthetically pleasing to our mom owners and be easy to use for both franchise owners and our corporate team making regular content updates.”

For Rhea Lana’s to continue servicing its audience of non-technical franchisees—and attract new ones—it needed a new website. And fast. It had to launch in time to unveil it at their annual owner’s conference. 

The company turned to implementing partner MHP Team SI. Given the tight timelines, ease-of-use requirements and critical API integrations with its POS system, MHP Team SI narrowed its search to Progress® Sitefinity®.

“Sitefinity makes it so much easier to manage content,” said Alex Hood, Chief Technology Officer, MHP Team SI, “Other systems are developer friendly, but the page editing and content organization experience is lacking for clients. We didn’t want that to happen to Rhea Lana’s, so Sitefinity was a clear choice.”

The new solution integrates with the company’s point-of-sale (POS) system to enable franchisees to log in and price each item for sale. It also integrated with Google Places. The site features a script to auto-detect a visitor’s location and connect them with a list and a map of their local events—right on the home page.

The new, streamlined customer journey removed several navigation clicks from the prior web experience to drive users to key conversion points. Users can independently publish content and manage inventory without reliance on IT.

The entire project from start to finish took only 12 weeks, an astonishing feat considering the integration complexity. 

The technical team was equally pleased, “One of the reasons we chose Sitefinity was because of the CI/CD process,” said Hood. “We’re a data company. So, the ability to look at the data—session recordings, heat maps, client feedback, and use that to inform updates is very important. We’re able to use Microsoft AZURE, Visual studio Team Services or AZURE DevOps to push out code changes to staging and production with minimal time frames and no downtime.”

Rhea Lana’s KPI’s demonstrated measurable success:

• 17% Increase in unique pageviews
• 13% Increase in sessions
• 8% Increase in users

Ahead, the company looks forward to further exploring personalization and optimizing content using A/B Testing with Sitefinity Insight. Because the current corporate site links off to individual franchise sites, the company will also be looking into using Sitefinity multisite capabilities.

“The feedback has been very positive,” said Riner. “When you don’t hear any complaints, that’s good in my book. We’re very pleased with both the site—and Sitefinity.”