The Challenge

David Zwirner had been running on the Drupal CMS platform, but in order to take the next step and start innovating on the business model – it was time to extend beyond the traditional thinking of ‘content management’ into ‘Digital Experience Management’.

David Zwirner had multiple challenges that were both operational and customer experience oriented. From a customer experience perspective the industry is seeing a shift in how art work is viewed, discussed, negotiated, and how relationships are tracked and formed.

The operational shift is due to the insertion of technologies and as the target audience shifts to a younger demographic the way buyers want to purchase art is changing. While this is known - systems need to be developed to enable different experiences for different types of customers.

The Approach

Our activities to date had been focused on understanding and delivering digital experiences that meet customer expectations, but we wanted to start thinking bigger picture - what if we could predict market behavior at the next Exhibition by leveraging our newly captured customer data? We would no longer need to hold surplus inventory to events, need unnecessary storage, multiple freights, multiple art handlers, and layers of unnecessary risk can be mitigated.

Now that the platform was solidified, it opened up new opportunities – things like list packaging, sales automation and personalization engines – however, the existing platform wasn’t fit to scale into the new set of capabilities. We worked together to define the platform that’ll deliver on personalization – and Sitecore was the perfect solution.

The Solution

In 6 months, we conducted a seamless ‘lift and shift’ from Drupal to Sitecore. With Sitecore, we now have the ability to write personalization rules, change digital experiences depending on previous engagement points, and provide better insights cross-departmentally.

Re-platforming was a huge success. Before Sitecore, the DZ team would do 1 viewing room every 6-8 weeks, and now with Sitecore - they are doing 3-4 a week.