Top-Notch Digital Ecosystem & Consulting for a Leading Crafting Brand

Business challenges

Our client is one of the world’s top producers and retailers of smart cutting machines that allow users to create personalized designs at home. Their devices became even more popular during the pandemic, as people started spending more time at home, taking on DIY projects, and launching creative businesses. Experiencing strong growth driven by market demand, our client needed to scale rapidly to meet high sales expectations and requirements for their initial public offering.

To reinforce and future-proof their products, the company started looking for a trusted IT partner familiar with the latest retail mobile app development technology stacks. They found Intellias through reviews on an independent B2B research platform and determined that we had the expertise needed to quickly ramp up an engineering team. Our engineers relied on their advanced technical skills, knowledge of retail mobile app trends, and many years of experience to expand the functionality of our client’s ecosystem and offer a richer toolset to our client’s customers.

Consulting and software development services

Team formation

Our key challenge was to provide engineers who could work with retail mobile app development technologies that had just come out of beta. After carefully vetting candidates, we put together a team of our top six Android/iOS professionals to get started on our client’s project. Better still, we offered a full spectrum of software engineering specialists to cover everything from architecture design to DevOps. This core team laid the groundwork for strong strategic cooperation between Intellias and our client.

As our client was satisfied with our retail mobile app development services, they asked us to expand our involvement with two more development streams — one frontend and one backend — to keep up with their pace of growth. For this, we created an operating model that reflected our client’s staffing needs. We provided training in the latest tech stack to all engineers, which resulted in a high retention rate across our client’s teams. Moreover, this investment helped us ramp up our client’s project team from 6 to 38 engineers in just three months.

Mobile apps

Intellias engineers joined our client’s development department, working on two retail mobile apps that allow users to create designs and wirelessly control the cutting process on machines from iOS and Android devices. One of these apps includes features for owners of the client’s entry-level product that is intended for fast and fun craft making. The mobile editor we built provides lots of functionality for easily selecting existing designs, editing them, previewing them in real time, uploading images, organizing projects, and more — all within a few taps. This contributes to an enjoyable user journey with no learning curve.

Another mobile app retail consumers use with the client’s high-end product models has an extensive set of design functions, with a wide choice of materials and a straightforward checkout when making in-app purchases. Intellias frontend and backend developers worked on enriching the social media features of the graphic editor application with options allowing users to share and sell their designs via community networks. To build this complex ecosystem, we relied on our knowledge of web and retail mobile app development, cloud services, and database management.

Consulting approach

To fulfill IPO commitments, our client was considering a new business model to increase customer lifetime value on top of offering their retail mobile app platform to users. Based on their experience with Intellias building a structure to support scale, providing highly qualified engineers, and designing an entire environment, our client chose us as their consultant to lead this new project from scratch.

Moving up the value chain for our client, we provided consulting services at the discovery phase with a team consisting of a business analyst, designer, and manager. We helped our client create subscription plans based on well-defined user personas for hobbyists and business owners. To best suit users’ personal and commercial needs, we came up with free and premium offers, each unlocking a specific set of design features. Plugins that we built as additional components for the designer-grade desktop editor enabled our client to monetize their solution with a customized offering for users.

Business outcome

Having reached the mark of 5.4 million users globally, our client gained an additional 3.2 million users within the last year. They also held their IPO and had 1.8 million paid subscriptions.

Since the very beginning of our collaboration, our client had clear expectations in terms of the workforce they needed to swiftly scale and capitalize on their growth. This helped us establish productive ways of working and address our client’s customer commitments.

• Intellias helped the client take their companion apps to the next level by expanding functionality and increasing conversions.
• As part of our retail mobile app development services, we provided iOS, Android, frontend, and backend expertise to refine the ecosystem for craftmakers and win their appreciation.
• The subscription model designed by our consultants and implemented through desktop plugins allowed our client to reinforce their product offering and grow revenue.
• We set up an effective talent acquisition process for speedy onboarding of required specialists, drastically reducing lead times.
• The Intellias team grew from 6 to 60 engineers within nine months of cooperation, which supported the client’s need to scale with required quality and efficiency.
• Our developers demonstrated dedication and competence in retail mobile app development, ensuring high-quality deliverables and on-time releases.

Intellias specialists now account for more than a third of our client’s engineering staff across 19 teams. We have become a key strategic partner and continue working with our client in new directions while increasing our mutual trust and commitment.