Our challenge was to scale and optimize Splendid Spoon’s core e-commerce platform to uphold more users and allow greater flexibility in offering new products. Besides, we also implemented the demands of the marketing team to increase the conversion of new users.
Splendid Spoon is a plant-based wellness brand, delivering ready-to-eat, nutrient-dense meals. Founded in 2013 to help the 91% of Americans who don’t eat their recommended daily servings of veggies, this New York-based company makes meals healthier during busy days.
With an already established business model and client base, they were looking to grow their product from end-to-end (from subscription’s payment to the meal’s preparation and delivery), in a healthy way, of course.
“Everyone at Labcodes advocates for building features in a way that isbest for our customers, and is utterly committed to fixing problems andpainpoints for our customers. It's almost unbelievable that we've found thislevel of empathy and commitment to our customers in a consulting shop.”
JAMES REMEIKA
Director of Technology, Splendid Spoon
In 2019, Splendid Spoon started to evaluate the company’s next steps. So they first contacted us in July of that year after understanding they needed to adjust their business model to expand their operation. They had a demand of a few thousand orders per week, in a subscription model with 3 different plans of 5-day meals.
Through research with their clients, Splendid Spoon realized that their main demands were a larger menu, new dishes and the possibility of ordering extra meals (expanding the original 5-day subscription to a 7-days-a-week plan).
The primary problem was that their original products were hard-coded into the platform, which meant that changing anything and/or adding new products required a lot of work.
A FASTER, SLICKER, AND MORE FLEXIBLE SOFTWARE
Our first course of action was to update their platform to be easier, quicker, and more efficient to make changes in the future.
We created a new data model to start delivering value and meeting marketing deadlines right away. In parallel, we started isolating the code’s complexity, refactoring chunks of code at a time, improving the code itself while keeping those deadlines met.
MAKING THE MARKETING TEAM INDEPENDENT
To empower the marketing team, we implemented a Content Management System. The goal was to allow the team to take control of the operation, cutting the middleman when they needed to make any changes in their pages and hot sites. Now Splendid Spoon has the entire domain over analytics SEO, AdSense, and Google metrics.
First, every engineer on our team at Labcodes is a tremendous Python developer. I trust that every feature implementation will be delivered with impeccable code quality and a highly maintainable design. But more importantly, every engineer has taken the time to deeply understand our business and is customer-focused.
JAMES REMEIKA
Director of Technology, Splendid Spoon
NEW SUBSCRIPTION PLANS
We started to expand and adjust the platform’s capabilities, allowing clients to order meals 7 days a week instead of only 5. Therefore, Splendid Spoon increased both their weekly meal orders and their client base.
During this time, we made an effort to pave the way for other products. And it paid up big time.After the Wellness Shot, we added yet another product of the same category: the Detox Shot. This new implementation took only around 3 days to complete.
With all the refactored code and the creation of new data models, Labcodes built a feasible solution for the growth problem Splendid Spoon had. A less complex code means that all the teams were able not only to keep an expansion pace that kept Splendid Spoon growing but to test new features as early as possible.
Also, we reduced the points of contact during dispatch. With less complicated steps, the dispatch time dropped from 50 to only 8 minutes. This improvement made it easier to correct any delivery errors (even though they are almost extinct now), reducing delays and costs.
With Labcodes behind the wheel of our software platform, we increased our customer base by about 50%, launched 2 totally new product categories and are well on our way to building a much more flexible e-commerce platform that will only increase our release velocity going forward. In terms of site reliability and support quality, our MTTR has fallen from days to hours.
JAMES REMEIKA
Director of Technology, Splendid Spoon
