Folkway Music has been the go-to place for musicians looking for new, vintage, and one-of-a-kind guitars. Established in Guelph in 1999, the store quickly grew a worldwide reputation for its instruments and service. Folkway Music opened a second location in Waterloo in 2012 with an expanded showroom and service department, which became the sole location when the store closed its Guelph showroom.
Mark Stutman, Folkway Music’s owner, has earned the respect of musicians with his store’s inventory and customer service. In 2015, he made headlines when he helped identify a rare 1935 Gibson acoustic guitar that was discovered in Iowa. The family of the 92-year-old guitar’s owner found the guitar while helping him move out of his home. The guitar is one of under 1,000 built by Gibson and was worth more than $25,000.
When the family went to research the instrument online, the first search result was Folkway Music.
The Challenge
Folkway Music worked with an agency to design a new website, and we were tasked to build out the design in a custom self-hosted WordPress environment. Folkway Music’s website is unique in a number of ways:
- Instruments. Folkways Music has over 10,000 instruments in its database, from classic guitars to new banjos and ukuleles. We developed custom functions to make searching and filtering instruments simple for the Folkway Music team and its customers.
- Product images. Folkway Music has a product photography station in its store to produce its own website images. Most of its instruments are unique, and the team wants to provide customers with the best possible image quality while they’re browsing the site.
- Instrument archive. One of the requirements was to archive instruments once they were sold. The website’s archive section is a historical record of every instrument bought and sold at Folkway Music.
In 2019, we launched the site and migrated it from a self-hosted solution to WP Engine to improve its performance. Since then, we also migrated their image hosting from WP Engine to AWS to support the thousands of product images on the Folkway Music website.
While its catalogue was digital, Folkway Music still processed sales in person at its store or over the phone. The team prided itself on the relationships it built with customers, and ecommerce wasn’t something they wanted to introduce.
In 2022, the Folkway Music team reached out about adding ecommerce functionality to the website but wanted to ensure they could still deliver the same customer experience and existing payment methods along with being able to purchase instruments online.
The Solution
It was critical to Folkway Music that the existing website experience not be altered or affected by the introduction of ecommerce. Our Product Management team held multiple discover meetings with the Folkway Music team to understand all the requirements to build out a roadmap and design plan for this unique ecommerce installation. We needed to ensure:
- Instrument availability. Not every instrument is available for purchase online. Folkway Music needed a way to set the purchase flows for instruments, from in-store only to online and a hybrid flow.
- Inventory management. Customers can put an instrument on hold in the store as they arrange payment. The ecommerce integration needed to update website availability in real time if a store employee changed the inventory status in their point of sale (POS) system.
- Shipping cost management. Folkway Music ships worldwide. The ecommerce integration needed to support a complex instrument size, sales tax, and shipping cost matrix.
Moving to a solution like Shopify or BigCommerce was not an option, so we looked to WordPress and its WooCommerce solution. WooCommerce would allow us to add ecommerce functionality to the existing website with some additional coding to support the site’s custom features.
In addition to working easily with WordPress, WooCommerce also has a well-reviewed and maintained integration with LightSpeed, Folkway Music’s POS system. The integration would allow for the real-time updating of inventory information and provide a consistent backend billing experience for the Folkway Music team.
The Result
Folkway Music launched its e-commerce store in 2023 and had its first sale a few days later. The updated site kept 100% of its functionality, while adding in a full-featured e-commerce solution.
Today, Folkway is celebrating its 25th anniversary as the best source of new and vintage guitars for musicians worldwide.
Photo by Louis Hansel on Unsplash
