Les Frères Marchand is the oldest family of master cheese-makers in France. Their adventures began in 1880, in Nancy's central market, where you can still find the "Schmitt Marchand" store, which was the first to launch the family adventure.
Today, Les Frères Marchand are present in the Grand Est, Asia, Dubai and now all over France via online sales. There's also a restaurant in Nancy's Old Town.
We met for the first time in November 2020, initially working on online marketing and a website featuring the brand's activities, then deciding to create an online cheese shop together.
The Marchand online cheese shop is the first instance of my e-commerce platform, based on Symfony and Sylius. This platform is based on several watchwords.
Frères Marchand's employees are cheese-makers, not IT specialists, so for them, everything has to be as simple as possible.When a box is ordered on the site for several months, the site calculates the dispatch dates for each one, and displays the order of preparation and dispatch on the weekly report. Delivery labels are automatically generated at the same time as this report, allowing staff to concentrate on what they love and know how to do - make great products!
Marketing? It's psychology, and we must never forget that the people behind their screens are human beings, so the software has to be able to speak in complete sentences, to have a personality, a phrase like "An empty basket... It's so sad, isn't it?" is much better than "Basket status: Empty".
The whole platform is designed to have a "soul", no generic text, no random English words. It's a system designed for human beings, and one that quickly instills confidence. At the payment stage, before asking for your credit card number, the site explains that we only use service providers that are recognized and certified at European level. The customer has a name in mind before entering his credit card number, and therefore a name to turn to in the event of "fraud": me.
Not everyone is a tech expert, so everything has to be clearly explained, so that anyone who visits the store can make a stress-free purchase. The search engine, for example, has been designed to be quick and to the point: it simply asks "What do you want?"and is designed to find what you're looking for at lightning speed, which is why it's called "Lightning Search".
