Saddleback Leather Company Buckles in for Fast Growth on BigCommerce

SOLUTION

Finding a powerful platform backed by a team dedicated to success.

Munson found out about BigCommerce while attending an Acumatica event. “When we saw BigCommerce and Acumatica paired up, it was a no brainer,” he said. “BigCommerce was easy to use and very powerful, just like Acumatica.”

Saddleback then started to migrate their site onto the new platform. “We wanted a platform where customer support matched the level we give our customers," he explained. “I talked to the CEO of BigCommerce, Brent Bellm, myself, which is rare for someone to be able to do. That gave us a clue that BigCommerce really valued the relationship. We found the customer service to be fantastic and super responsive.”

“The BigCommerce team we worked with was amazing,” he continued. “Our Implementation Project Manager was fantastic. We had a 3.5-month timeline to go live and he really pushed our team and the BigCommerce team to ensure we were done before the deadline and that any and all issues were fixed prior to launch. He went above and beyond to ensure we had a smooth launch.”

Tina Lytch, IT Manager at Saddleback Leather Company and Co-Founder of Love 41, is also ecstatic about the level of customer service Saddleback has received from BigCommerce.

“With BigCommerce, we have regular two-week meetings with our Customer Success Manager, and she’s actually there to help us succeed. I’ve never had that before,” she said. “I’ve been with the company for 15 years through all our different platforms, and we never had somebody that was on a team with us and wanted us to succeed. For the first time ever, I feel like Saddleback and Love 41 have a partner that wants to help us grow.”

Making marketing waves with new brands and innovations.

Switching to BigCommerce has helped the Saddleback Leather team become more agile in their sales and marketing techniques. Since first migrating, they have developed a robust blog filled with valuable SEO content that helps boost their rankings in search. Using BigCommerce’s native product page functionality, they are also able to improve SEO for their individual products.

“In each product it gives you all the fields that you need to populate,” says Lytch. “It kind of coaches you on what you need to place in the description for each page.”

In an effort to bring their physical goods into the future of the web, their team created Saddleback NFTs, a unique branding campaign which earned them a gold medal from the American Advertising Federation for Best Online Ecommerce Campaign.

“We have an artist on staff who created these beautiful pieces of art. We signed 100 of them for each bag, and every month last year we would release a new one. If you bought it, you would get the bag, the physical painting and the NFT of the art to go along with it,” Munson explained. “You can put it in your virtual house, your virtual office, in the entrance, wherever you want.”

While the company has been able to expand its digital flexibility, they’ve also been able to focus on growing outside of their core brand. Dave’s wife and business partner, Suzette, was inspired in her own way to help contribute to the company’s core principle of putting people first by creating Love 41, a brand separate from Saddleback that gives away 100% of its profits to families in need.

“We were taking a trip around the world and ended up in Africa,” she explained. “While we were in Rwanda, there were 300 to 400 street kids running at us who were hungry. It really kind of shook me. I kept having this recurring dream about it, and it really drove me to create this brand within Saddleback Leather where we give away 100% of the profits from our bags.”