25/12/2017
It’s not just fabrics – it’s more than that…
Castel Maison is one of Simple Task’s clients. We are happy to share with you the story about our collaboration. Enjoy!
Castel represents a luxury textile brand, founded in 2000 by Stephane Silverman. It brings a fresh approach in the industry, followed by collections of highest quality fabrics. Castel has its own classically chic style, recognized all over the world.
Castel nourishes a certain depth to its line that allows its fabrics to be recognized between the competition. We’re happy to say that Simple Task helped them in the process.
The years are passing by, but the Castel’s mission remains the same: ‘’ We strive to offer the best service and fabrics to interior designers and architects. Product creates image and the service creates business. It’s not just fabrics…’’
How everything started?
The man behind Castel Maison is Stephane Silverman. Stephane’s parents worked in honorable French textile houses in US, so he was familiar with the industry since he was a child. After finishing his studies of economics and renewable resources, he started working in one textile company, as a sales director. In the same time, he was also managing export for another company. He was building his own path by gaining experience in the industry.
In 2000, Stephane started his own business, his own fabric company – Castel Maison, in New York. The name is chosen after a village in France called Castellaras. It means ‘’The castle of a beautiful place’’. It has a great symbolic, because Castel Maison represents the house of beautiful fabrics.
History of Castel Maison
New beginnings are tough, and it takes a lot of effort and hard work to succeed. Let’s see how this story begins…
Castel Maison was first located in a home office in New York. The first collection was launched in six US showrooms, in spring of 2000. The idea and the business model was to have a close collaboration with the suppliers and courier companies, in order to provide the best service, regular maintenance of the inventory and a fast delivery of fabrics to its clients. Castel also created a warehouse for storage of the samples.
Couple of months later, Castel launched its second collection, and the company continues to grow. They spreader the number of US showrooms and new suppliers. The company continues to offer two new collections every year, and to constantly improve their services.
The headquarters of the company moves from a home office to a small studio, and the number of employees grows. Castel always strives to improve many things, by developing a web based software system and custom solutions for managing orders, freights, delivery system, logistics, communication and real time reporting.
Despite the market challenges, Castel continues to grow. They are constantly working on the evaluation of fabric industry trends and the upgrade of their system in order to satisfy all changing needs and to ensure excellent customer experience.
During the period 2010 – 2014, Castel launches a new website with a range of new features. Also, the company works on their social media and global presence, by developing their blog and social media accounts. The number of offices, warehouses and national sales grows, and every new year bring Castel to the next level.
What Simple Task did for Castel Maison?
The name of the project was ‘’Le sens du luxe’’ (it means ‘’The sense of luxury’’). The idea was to create a luxury fabric e-commerce, a portal both for business users and regular customers.
Simple Task changed the existing e-commerce website working both on Backend and Front-end, including the maintenance and hosting. We also worked on UI/UX and on creation of a bulk order. Technologies we used were: PHP 5.6, Magento 1.9.3.7, Apache 2.4, MySQL Server 5.5, Elastic Search, Restful API and Grunt.
During every project, there are some difficulties. With the development for Castel, we faced some challenges. One of them was the implementation of a custom import of products and their custom search with new search filters, adapted to the project. Also, we added an additional feature – Elastic search.
Realization of this project brought many benefits. The website has a new responsive design, adapted to all mobile devices. Also, new website platform offers the segmentation by user types. Depending on being a regular or a business user, or a Castel’s partner, each user type offers different features. For example, different visibility of some products and their stock stats, products prices etc.
Catel Maison is constantly launching new ideas in the interior design and fabric business. This is what keeps the company in the very top during all those years. We are sure happy to be the part of this project. We wish them all the best in many new years to come!