In 2012, White House CTO Todd Park invited 60 education leaders from public, private, philanthropic, and government communities to answer one question: How can we use data to improve student outcomes?
Teams were asked to leverage openly available, machine readable, and interoperable datasets that could be aligned with student-level data to come up with a prototype that they could present to leaders at the White House. From there, the top ideas could be further developed through private, public, philanthropic or other channels.
One of these teams was led by Arthi Krishnaswami, an information designer and visualization expert. Her concept, a platform code-named RyeCatcher, was inspired by the experiences of special education students and its goal was to create a system that supported students in at-risk environments and their families to find the right services and intervention programs.
Arthi had a clear vision of what she wanted RyeCatcher to become, and what it needed to achieve. She just needed the right partner to help build it&mdash;in a scalable and sustainable way.
<h2>The challenge</h2>
Beyond the typical challenges that every startup faces, such as budget, resources, and time, RyeCatcher had another unique constraint: it needed to work for different states&rsquo; educational structures.&nbsp;
The other major consideration was security. It was a top priority for Arthi. &ldquo;A lot of what we capture in the platform is quite sensitive, so we needed to safely and sustainably scale in a way that protects the integrity of the data for the people who matter the most&mdash;the students,&rdquo; says Arthi.
RyeCatcher chose HFC to help them:
<ul>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Build a platform from scratch that supported students, schools, and parents in discovering and accessing services and programs</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Expand on the system with a long-term vision in mind, with features such as permissions, attendance, events, and consent systems</li>
</ul>
<table>
 <tbody>
 <tr>
 <td>
 &ldquo;When RyeCatcher came to HFC, all we had were a series of components that were part of a prototype. HFC took that and turned it into an enterprise platform that serves school communities.&rdquo; &mdash; Arthi Krishnaswami, Founder, RyeCatcher
 </td>
 </tr>
 </tbody>
</table>
<h2></h2>
<h2>HFC&rsquo;s approach</h2>
Because Arthi didn&rsquo;t have a large team, HFC stepped in to fill the gaps, providing frontend, backend, and UI/UX design services.
The team took an iterative approach, adapting and improving the software&rsquo;s functionality based on user feedback, advances in technology, sustainability, usability, and real-world requirements.

Built for the long term - What HFC originally built was relatively simple by design. There was a &ldquo;needs mapper,&rdquo; or questionnaire that parents, students, or teachers could fill out. An algorithm would then map students to different types of programs or support based on the responses to the questionnaire.
As time went on, HFC added more functionality, such as taking attendance, providing a continuous education data record year over year, and permissioning and consent for events. For example, if a student was going on a field trip, teachers could get the parents&rsquo; consent for the trip through the platform.
But even though the team took an iterative approach to building the product, they made sure to build with both security and the future in mind, from the very beginning. &ldquo;HFC incorporated, for example, SSL (Secure Sockets Layer)&mdash;which seems like a no-brainer today, but in 2013, SSL wasn&rsquo;t common in education software, even though it&rsquo;s critical for data security,&rdquo; says Arthi.

Data security - Because of the sensitive nature of the data that RyeCatcher contains, HFC designed the platform to limit the amount and types of data that get pulled into the system. For example, it does not collect any PII data or social security numbers, and any data that it contains about a student is stored in separate tables, and only identifiable by student ID. This, along with the fact that names of students are not included in the notes&mdash;only initials&mdash;makes it relatively easy to anonymize student data.
For the most sensitive data in RyeCatcher, there&rsquo;s an entirely encrypted area of the system called &ldquo;My Notes.&rdquo; Say a social worker meets with a student and has a sensitive conversation with them that requires follow-up and verification. In RyeCatcher, the social worker can simply write, &ldquo;Student had a sensitive conversation with me in class today, will talk to parent to understand more,&rdquo; and write a personal memory aid with more details about what was said in the &ldquo;My Notes&rdquo; feature. What&rsquo;s unique about &ldquo;My Notes&rdquo; is that it is fully encrypted, even for everyone at RyeCatcher&mdash;the only way they can tell that this feature is being used is because they pay for the data storage. &ldquo;HFC has helped us build this tiered privacy architecture to make sure that we don't ever compromise student data, even unintentionally,&rdquo; says Arthi.

A specialized AI insights engine (in progress) - One of the most exciting features that HFC is building into RyeCatcher is an AI engine that&rsquo;s trained specifically on RyeCatcher&rsquo;s needs mapper data over the last 10 years.&nbsp; This will allow caseworkers to ask questions like, &ldquo;What's the most common type of note?&rdquo; and &ldquo;What are the age ranges where certain types of behaviors happen?&rdquo; and help them as they work with students with a wide range of different needs.

Technical elements - In the very beginning, to make RyeCatcher&rsquo;s stack as modern and efficient as possible&mdash;with limited resources&mdash;HFC built the APIs using Ruby on Rails and developed the frontend with an Angular tech stack. This combination facilitated the loading of large data sets into the user interface effectively.
Fast forward five years, and RyeCatcher&rsquo;s stack needed to evolve. Due to limited budget, HFC containerized the stack to ensure consistent environments, simplify deployment, and improve scalability and maintenance. This approach helped RyeCatcher avoid expensive upgrades while still being able to deploy the necessary updates.
<table>
 <tbody>
 <tr>
 <td>
 &ldquo;HFC really thinks ahead to make sure the software will work long term. It may take a bit more work in the beginning, but 10 years later, your tech will still be running.&rdquo; &mdash; Arthi Krishnaswami, Founder, RyeCatcher
 </td>
 </tr>
 </tbody>
</table>
<h2></h2>
<h2>The results: A platform that&rsquo;s &ldquo;changed the way schools operate&rdquo;</h2>
Since its original launch in the 2014&ndash;15 school year, in schools across four states, RyeCatcher now provides tools to support the full ecosystem of school professionals and social workers using the platform.&nbsp;
HFC designed and developed an identity and access management architecture for the platform with permissions for 11 types of users&mdash;the only one of its kind&mdash;designed to solve for the complexity of in- and out-of-school providers, and the strict data privacy requirements for this environment.
&ldquo;There are other similar products today, but none that do it as comprehensively as what HFC has built,&rdquo; says Arthi. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s changed the way schools operate, and built a new standardized way for how teachers and parents should be thinking and communicating with each other in terms of sprint, growth, and feedback.&rdquo;
Just a few of the outcomes of RyeCatcher&rsquo;s partnership with HFC:
<ul>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">A platform that annually serves over 2,000 users, 16,000 students, and 38 schools</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">An estimated 4&ndash;6 hours saved per week for 47% of pilot users</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">A platform that makes it easier to coordinate programs and services on behalf of students, facilitates communication between parents and teachers, and improves school team responsiveness</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Successfully patented RyeCatcher in the US, Singapore, and Canada (a rare feat for software)</li>
</ul>
What began as a prototype in response to the task set out by the White House has, after many years of user research and refinement, evolved into a platform that&rsquo;s used by schools today to create a community of support for every student.
RyeCatcher has just celebrated its 10-year anniversary and with an eye to the future, Arthi is looking to scale up, bringing RyeCatcher to schools across more states in order to provide students with the services and support systems they need to succeed.
<a href="https://www.happyfuncorp.com/contact-us">Looking to build social innovation products with complex privacy and data handling requirements?</a>

Ryecatcher: From White House Datapalooza to Creating the Student Support System of the Future

As one of the largest home goods brands in the world, this company had a considerable amount of customers, revenue, and international business.
But it was facing a significant challenge with its online experience.
<h2>The challenge</h2>
Even though it had an e-commerce website, it didn&rsquo;t have standardized code&mdash;specifically, for two major parts of the business: its online checkout and in-store sales experience.&nbsp;
With the majority of the company&rsquo;s revenue coming from in-store design-related sales, the lack of a standardized code base was making it difficult for its development team, both in terms of pushing new features and maintenance.&nbsp;
The client chose HFC to help:
<ul>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Improve its cart and checkout experience</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Architect an improved release process</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Rebuild its code base in a more streamlined way to minimize repetitive work and human error</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Support its in-house front-end and back-end team with embedded HFC team members to quarterback projects and drive strategy</li>
</ul>
The company&rsquo;s consumer-facing online store is a website where customers can browse products and place online orders, whereas the in-store design application is what its associates use to place orders for customers in its brick-and-mortar stores while providing a white-glove &ldquo;work with a designer&rdquo; experience.
Although the code for both the online store and in-store design application started off at the same point, it had deviated over the years. This resulted in several problems.&nbsp;
There were often bugs that were fixed in one version but not in another. Features and functionality were lost if they weren&rsquo;t pushed for both the consumer-facing online store and in-store design application. And even if a team fixed multiple bugs, it could be wiped out entirely when it got to the development branch, which caused the QA and development team to have to do extra work.&nbsp;
<h2>HFC&rsquo;s approach</h2>
After years of this approach, the company approached HFC to modernize and improve its user experience in earnest.&nbsp;
When HFC came in, the team assessed the situation and took a holistic approach to the challenge:
<ul>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Start with a detailed audit including research, interviews with the client&rsquo;s team leads, and analysis of the existing code.</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Break releases down into smaller, more digestible components.</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Standardize the architecture by deduplicating and carefully merging together the code that had deviated previously, and using QA regression tests to ensure that no functionality was lost in the transition.</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Design a process that empowered the client&rsquo;s team to properly build components, feature-flag bugs or issues, and roll out features in a more systematic way.</li>
</ul>
&ldquo;We needed to help the client standardize things because they were essentially paying a tax on every feature they were developing."
&ndash; Jonathan Zaleski, Director of Technical Architecture, HFC
<h2>The results:</h2>
To bring things back to basics and create standardized code across the client&rsquo;s in-store design application and consumer-facing online cart and checkout experience, HFC helped the client&rsquo;s development team implement industry best practices and designed a process that empowered them to:
<ul>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Faster, more predictable code releases due to the team not having to constantly re-implement functionality that was lost during merge processes</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">75% of previous copy-and-paste code eliminated thanks to a new combined code base</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">One version, compared to seven or eight different versions of previous code requiring maintenance</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">A broad cultural shift as a result of the impact of the partnership with HFC, with client team members proposing more user-oriented solutions that improve the shopping experience for customers</li>
</ul>
By being able to provide support with delivery transformation, organization, and optimization HFC was able to help this leading home goods brand streamline its complex release process and dramatically improve efficiency across the board for its engineering team.
With this project and other similar projects in the works, the client&mdash;and its code base&mdash;are&nbsp; now set up for continued worldwide growth and success.
Want to improve your e-commerce experience and increase sales, while reducing the burden on your in-house team?&nbsp;
<a href="https://www.happyfuncorp.com/contact-us" title="Contact Us Form">Let&rsquo;s chat!</a>

As one of the largest home goods brands in the world, this company had a considerable amount of customers, revenue, and international business.

How This Leading Home Furnishings Purveyor Reduced Repetitive Work for Its Team by 75% by Streamlining Its Release Process

A popular premium audio storytelling brand, Audible gives users access to a vast library of audiobooks, podcasts, and original content through a subscription-based model. For its marketing team, reaching new audiences and listeners is a major goal&mdash;a connection that, unsurprisingly for a digital content company, mostly happens on its website.
<h2>The challenge</h2>
Audible had a problem. Its previous CMS (content management system), Movable Type, was difficult for its marketing team to use. Even making basic changes to a web page required technical knowledge or developer support.

That meant that even though its marketers had amazing creative ideas for reaching new customers through blogs, landing pages, and other content channels, they couldn&rsquo;t execute on those ideas quickly or easily.

Audible chose HFC to help them:

<ul>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Assess whether a new CMS was a better fit for their goals and content requirements&nbsp;</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Empower their team to turn their blog properties into more robust marketing funnels</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Optimize the blog for organic search by improving load speeds, Core Web Vitals performance, and Lighthouse scores, while ensuring Audible&rsquo;s team could build beautiful pages without developer support</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Migrate all their blogs to a new modern platform with consistent layouts and content types.</li>
</ul>

<table>
 <tbody>
 <tr>
 <td>
 &ldquo;HFC has enabled us to migrate content, create new blogs faster, and grow the space to be truly global to meet the needs of these new markets&rdquo; &ndash; Nate Cook, Director of Global Marketing Web Development
 </td>
 </tr>
 </tbody>
</table>
<h2>HFC&rsquo;s approach</h2>
Taking a comprehensive view of Audible&rsquo;s requirements and the team&rsquo;s pain points, HFC jumped in with the aim to get Audible set up on a new content management platform that gives its creative teams more autonomy and the structure to build and create content with minimal external support.

Rethinking the architecture - HFC&rsquo;s blog CMS strategy for Audible had two main pillars: Contentful CMS and the Next.js framework.
<ul>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Contentful provides an easy-to-use way to structure and manage content, and exposes an API (REST|GraphQL) that is automatically updated based on the content structure.</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Next.js would give Audible&rsquo;s team a more customizable way of building static pages that provides blazing fast experiences. HFC chose Next.js because it can be connected easily to the Contentful API, which lets designers and developers customize content freely using React components.</li>
</ul>
<table>
 <tbody>
 <tr>
 <td>
 &ldquo;The Contentful migration was the best thing that ever happened to all of the editors and once we were on there, people raved about it. It's very self-explanatory and easy to use.&rdquo; &ndash; Nate Cook, Director of Global Marketing and Web Development
 </td>
 </tr>
 </tbody>
</table>

Setup - HFC built out all the elements that Audible&rsquo;s creative and marketing teams would need, so they could customize the front-end of the blog however they liked without needing to code anything.&nbsp;

<ul>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">For example, HFC built custom apps within Contentful that integrate with the Audible API so editors could easily pull in elements like cover images, titles, authors, and so on. All they have to do is paste in the unique identifier for that title in the marketplace&mdash;this saved the editors 10x the time it would&rsquo;ve taken to pull hundreds of books into a single blog&mdash;and made their team very happy.</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">HFC also created a more straightforward CI/CD workflow for Audible using ACS and Fargate AWS services, which would allow the setup to be cloned easily in the future</li>
</ul>
Migration - After building Audible&rsquo;s European and global blog structure on Contentful, HFC is now migrating all the blogs to this structure for consistency.
<ul>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">With this migration, HFC is refactoring the front-end pieces on the US and global blogs &ndash; cleaning up the European migration while migrating the US blogs</li>
</ul>
Streamlining - Audible has seven different blogs, each managed differently by its team of roughly 50 editors. HFC is streamlining every blog to be built on the same platform with the same structure so they can be updated and managed more efficiently, and have the same structure and SEO capabilities.&nbsp;

Another major pain point for Audible&rsquo;s team is they have two code repositories to support the US and Europe regions, which HFC is also helping to consolidate.

Design - After given some initial requirements, HFC architected, designed, and implemented Audible&rsquo;s instance of Contentful, which can now support a recent brand refresh, continued SEO growth, and seven global blog properties (and counting).

Ongoing optimizations - Next steps: optimize the blog for accessibility, translations, and continuous Core Web Vitals and other performance improvements.
<h2>The results: A CMS that empowers creative teams to tell more stories&mdash;while saving editors 10x the time</h2>
Now, all of Audible&rsquo;s blogs are on one modern tech stack and have a cohesive brand look thanks to consistent layouts and content types.
With the standardized and optimized content and visual layouts that HFC built, Audible&rsquo;s team can easily populate and configure content, which also results in a much more predictable look across the blog.
With Contentful, they no longer need to create APIs and Audible&rsquo;s technical team doesn&rsquo;t need to create or maintain any blog management dashboards.
Just a few of the outcomes of Audible&rsquo;s partnership with HFC:
<ul>
 <li>20% increase in conversion rates</li>
 <li aria-level="1">Hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual purchases</li>
 <li aria-level="1">7 regional blogs launched for the US, UK, France, Canada, French Canada, Italy, and Spain</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Increased agility and ease of use for editors</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">7 million page views across global blogs in 2023</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">A brand-new Jira ticketing system and process that improved the team&rsquo;s ability to plan, track velocity, and work in a more agile way</li>
</ul>

With a new CMS and structure, HFC has given Audible the tools the team needs to create new content and campaigns, while reducing the burden on their development team. Now, Audible is set to launch their next blog, Australia, with the updated backend and tools that HFC built.

Their editors now have the support they need to easily publish engaging content on the blog, optimize pages to rank in search engines, and maintain a consistent brand with prebuilt templates.
<a href="https://www.happyfuncorp.com/contact-us" title="Contact US">Need help with improving your online content strategy?</a>

How Audible Unified 7 Global Blog Properties Into a New User-Friendly CMS With HFC’s Help

Before the crypto world caught fire, there was Paxos.&nbsp;
Paxos had been in the crypto asset business since 2012 and was the first to secure regulation in New York City in 2015, and from the beginning, its products were successful with institutional customers that were building their own integrations to Paxos&rsquo; APIs.
However, retail customers could only access Paxos&rsquo; products through third party exchanges, or they had to bring their own wallets&mdash;which was often a challenging user experience.
To capitalize on this opportunity and expand their customer base, Paxos wanted to build a B2C trading interface for retail investors. Their vision: a user-friendly retail experience that united new and existing products.

<h2>The challenge</h2>
HFC was brought in with the key task of consolidating Paxos' existing products and developing new offerings, all under a unified umbrella. This involved revamping Paxos' trading interface, introducing a stablecoin and digital wallet offering, and integrating a tokenized gold offering.
One of the challenges of this was that it required merging an outdated application into a larger brand-new application. On top of that, the new application needed to accommodate both institutional users along with individual consumers, which meant the UI had to be user-friendly and be able to guide users (who may need to understand what a wallet is, how quickly transactions occur, and so on) through the more complex flows of crypto trading and wallet management.
Paxos chose HFC to help them:
<ul>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Design a new product to harmonize with Paxos&rsquo; existing products, which were comprised of separate systems and built on different technology</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Design a user-friendly interface for retail investor trading that aligned with Paxos&rsquo; existing experience</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Update the marketing website to support the launch of these new offerings</li>
</ul>

<h2>HFC&rsquo;s approach</h2>
Paxos already had a deep bench skilled in backend development, but there were quite a few disparate teams that needed to be brought together.
One of the first things HFC did was to overhaul Paxos&rsquo; marketing website&mdash;an exercise that helped bring disparate teams inside Paxos together. The team also built a design system that could be deployed across a variety of touchpoints.
HFC also recognized that it needed to augment Paxos&rsquo; existing team with additional resources for frontend development, UX, and product management. So, HFC deployed two teams to embed themselves within Paxos:&nbsp;
<ul>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">a small, interdisciplinary product team that collaborated with stakeholders internally to ensure the product was designed effectively and could be executed by the technical team within the allocated time and budget, and&nbsp;</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">React developers who joined Paxos&rsquo; in-house engineering team to collaborate on the buildout of the new product</li>
</ul>
Design direction and branding - HFC adopted a design system-heavy approach from the outset, wireframing and gradually refining as the project progressed. This approach facilitated the creation of high-fidelity designs, which created more consistency and engineering efficiencies through the execution stages.
HFC also developed the design direction for the project, leveraging Paxos' existing branding materials and expanding on them to fill in functional UI elements required for the new product. This resulted in a more powerful and well-rounded design system that both streamlined production and ensured a cohesive user experience. Ultimately, this approach helped improve product development and implementation too because the design prioritized a seamless and enjoyable crypto trading experience.
Requirements gathering and collaboration - Even though the crypto industry is relatively new, there&rsquo;s a high level of complexity and technical knowledge required. Because of this, it was crucial to have a holistic understanding of the requirements and stakeholders involved.&nbsp;
HFC led product workshops with cross-functional stakeholders, and engaged in collaborative sessions with the Paxos team to unpack the challenge, gather requirements, and understand their customers&rsquo; needs and preferences. This collaborative approach was essential to establish clear project goals and ensure stakeholder alignment.
Responsive design and user experience - After gaining a deep understanding of professional traders' needs and preferences (for example, where to display crucial data across various breakpoints), the HFC team delivered responsive designs for a robust usability- and accessibility-focused trade experience.

<h2>The results: A better user experience for 12M+ active wallet users</h2>
As a result of HFC&rsquo;s and Paxos&rsquo; multidisciplinary approach and strong collaboration, the team successfully revamped Paxos' trading interface, consolidated and integrated existing products like tokenized gold, and introduced new offerings such as stablecoin and a digital wallet in a cohesive way.
Each of these products has its own complexities&mdash;for example, the digital wallet offering involves a KYC (Know Your Customer) process, which requires collecting information from users through a multi-step flow. This is for verification and integration with third party services for secure financial transactions&mdash;banks also use KYC to verify details and documents like drivers&rsquo; licenses or passport images.
Not only did the new product offerings and user experience improve customer satisfaction and retention, they also increased Paxos' competitiveness in the digital asset custody market by attracting institutional clients and expanding its market reach.
Just a few of the outcomes of Paxos&rsquo; partnership with HFC:
<ul>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Successful launch of key new products including the PAX stablecoin and a digital wallet</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">$120 billion in stablecoins issued and redeemed in the past 5 years</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Over 12 million active wallet users&nbsp;</li>
</ul>
Now, Paxos is equipped with a new website that clearly communicates their unique regulated digital asset offerings to both institutional and retail customers, and is set to power the financial markets of the future.
<a href="https://www.happyfuncorp.com/contact-us">Need help with building or integrating digital products in a unified and cohesive way?</a>

How One of the World’s Leading Regulated Stablecoins Moved Into the Retail Investor Space—and Now Counts 12M+ Active Wallet Users

Lennar isn&rsquo;t just a home construction building company. As of 2023, the company was the second largest home construction company in the United States based on the number of homes sold.
From single family detached houses to condominiums and townhouses, Lennar builds a variety of different types of homes for both today&rsquo;s and future generations.&nbsp;
What was unique about Lennar was that the team wasn&rsquo;t simply looking for a product engineering firm to build an app or give its website an overhaul&mdash;they were in the midst of evolving their operation to take on a product mindset. The goal: to work more efficiently and gather better data throughout the homebuilding process.
With its recent growth and success, Lennar was hitting a tipping point, and needed an operational platform that provided real-time data and made day-to-day tasks for the team.
<h2>The challenge</h2>
The team was contending with outdated technology and manual processes, which not only impeded their work, but also made it difficult from an enterprise planning standpoint to understand where and how the company&rsquo;s resources were being used.&nbsp;
To better manage their data and reduce dependencies on offline processes, they decided to embark on a transformation of their approach to technology and data management at the firm.
The task for HFC? To build this new MVP, which could act as a template for the broader organization and also support Lennar&rsquo;s team in transitioning to a more product-led organization that focused on building and delivering products that focus on value and acted as a primary driver of growth.
Lennar chose HFC to help them:
<ul>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Pull all required data out of its many existing sources so that it could be incorporated into a new, unified system.</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Design and build HomebuilderOS, a scalable operations platform on top of Lennar&rsquo;s legacy backend systems (like their ERP, project management platform, and CRM).</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Develop a product-led approach for the organization that would help its team transition away from paper-based to digital workflows.</li>
</ul>
<h2>HFC&rsquo;s approach</h2>
This project featured multiple stakeholders, objectives, and deliverables. From a technical, design, and strategic perspective, HFC&rsquo;s team identified a few challenges that would be key to achieving the results that Lennar&rsquo;s team wanted.
For this partnership to be successful, some of Lennar&rsquo;s existing systems and tools had to be modernized first. HFC would also have to embed a team of specialists to work closely with Lennar&rsquo;s in-house experts and stakeholders, while managing the experience design side of the project.
Close collaboration with internal and external stakeholders - Lennar was being advised by EY (Ernst &amp; Young) through this modernization process, and HFC partnered with stakeholders from both groups throughout the project to ensure their collective vision was being translated into reality.
Embedded teams - HFC assembled a team of full-stack engineers, designers, front-end engineers, and QA specialists.
Data gathering - To lay the foundation for the rest of the project, HFC worked with Lennar&rsquo;s internal team to pull all the required data out of existing sources in an organized way so that it could be implemented into the new system being built. This was a challenge because many of the existing legacy tools, such as Oracle, were not easy to integrate with or update.
Design and build - The key deliverable was a new internal-facing platform: HomebuilderOS. HFC designed and built a robust web application on Azure, leveraging serverless JS functions, a GraphQL API, MSSQL database, and ReactJS frontend as key components.
<h2>The results: A new platform that formed the bedrock for a company-wide digital transformation</h2>
Now that the company had new systems in place to manage data in real-time, the organizations could transition away from paper, spreadsheet, and access-based workflows.&nbsp;
Lennar&rsquo;s coordinators, finance, and concierge associates teams could now log in through a modern and dynamic online experience and easily access up-to-date data that was relevant to their roles by filtering by person, role, department, or region.
Just a few of the outcomes of Lennar&rsquo;s partnership with HFC:
<ul>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">A successful digital transformation that powered the transition to a product-led organization, with new standardized operations and procedures</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">HomebuilderOS launched in three regions nationwide, setting the stage for the team to scale up and roll out to an additional 40 regions&nbsp;</li>
</ul>
Beyond improving quantifiable metrics like conversion rates and time saved, Lennar&rsquo;s partnership with HFC proved out the intangible benefits of digital transformation and how improving the technology and tools can make day-to-day work easier for a team.
Their global team is now able to easily access the data they need, and with HomebuilderOS, they have made significant progress and are set up for continued success on their digital transformation journey.
<a href="https://www.happyfuncorp.com/contact-us">Want to evolve your business with digital products that enable real-time collaboration and data sharing?</a>

Supercharging Operational Efficiency: How This Home Construction Company Replaced Its Legacy System With a New Operations Platform

Andy Hunter, co-founder of Electric Literature and LitHub, had an ambitious goal: he wanted to help independent bookstores succeed&mdash;and disrupt a world that&rsquo;s dominated by Amazon.&nbsp;
He believed that if he could take even 1% from Amazon's online book sales and redirect the bulk of those profits to indie bookstores, he could not only create an important lifeline for those businesses, but also give them some exposure that they may not have the funds or technical skills to create for themselves.
He envisioned an online retailer that collaborates with independent bookstores to distribute profits directly to them. So, Bookshop.org was born.
<h2>The challenge</h2>
Bookshop.org had a major challenge: it was going up against a titan in not just the bookselling industry, but all of e-commerce: Amazon.
Andy knew that for Bookshop.org to stand a chance, it needed a flawless online experience&mdash;and a partner that could provide branding, design, and in particular, engineering expertise, to bring that vision to life.&nbsp;
Everything hinged on the website, and it was critical that the system could connect with suppliers to get an inventory of books, send the orders generated on Bookshop.org to the supplier to fulfill them, and finally ship those titles to customers&mdash;just to name a few.
It was a tall order.
<h3>Bookshop.org chose HFC to help them:</h3>

<ul>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Create an online destination that lets book lovers browse and find their favorite books</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Build a tight integration that could ingest millions of products from Ingram, their primary book data and order fulfillment platform, and the largest book distributor in the US</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Design a referral system that lets local bookstores put up a page on Bookshop.org (that they can send customers to and earn commission checks from) and track where customers come from so the Bookshop.org team can calculate what they owe their bookstore partners at the end of every month</li>
</ul>
<h2>HFC&rsquo;s approach</h2>
Deploying a highly specialized team, HFC set out to build a digital experience for Bookshop.org that could take on one of the biggest online book sellers in the world.

Little did they know that soon, everyone would be buying books online because of the pandemic. In just a few short weeks, customers would no longer be able to step foot into bookstores, which were faced with closure&mdash;unless they could come up with a creative solution.&nbsp;
But because HFC built a flexible and scalable system right from the get-go, that meant Bookshop.org was perfectly positioned to take online orders from thousands of local bookstores around the country and pay them a cut of the sales to keep their businesses going.&nbsp;
<h3>The approach HFC took to create a resilient platform that could support Bookshop.org&rsquo;s huge unexpected opportunity:</h3>

Website - HFC built the new website on Solidus, a customizable Ruby on Rails platform, because it provided the best balance between out-of-the-box functionality, customizability, and cost.
Due to Bookshop.org&rsquo;s unique demands, HFC significantly customized Solidus (which typically caters to smaller ecommerce websites) to be able to manage high traffic volumes&mdash;and over two million unique SKUs&mdash;effectively.
Partners - One of the biggest technical challenges in this project was making sure Bookshop.org&rsquo;s website connected with Ingram, a book data and order fulfillment platform and a leading distributor in the industry.&nbsp;
But Ingram&rsquo;s infrastructure is more suited to physical bookstore operations, lacking the real-time capabilities that are essential for ecommerce. To bridge this gap, HFC developed a system that made it possible to manage this extensive inventory and order data far more easily.
Ingram also used to send detailed order updates later in the day or days after, which wasn&rsquo;t ideal in a world where customers expect next-day or even same-day delivery. So, HFC designed an automation so that every order update now triggered a series of preset tasks, which sped up the order and fulfillment process.&nbsp;
Other than automated handling of fulfillment, HFC also created customizations in the Solidus dashboard to show detailed Ingram-specific order/line item status codes and their meanings. This helped the customer service team quickly understand the status of the order and take necessary actions.
Integrations - Besides Ingram, HFC also built other custom integrations specifically tailored to Bookshop.org&rsquo;s team&rsquo;s daily workflows and processes, including:&nbsp;
 
<ul>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Stripe Connect, a marketplace payout platform</li>
</ul>
<ul>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Google Analytics to track website performance</li>
</ul>
<ul>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Mailchimp to capture and segment customers for emails</li>
</ul>
<h2>The result: An online bookshop with infrastructure that could rival Amazon</h2>
Bookshop.org came to HFC as a pitch deck, and in just six months, launched in the market&mdash;right as the COVID-19 pandemic was about to hit.
With the world going into lockdown, Bookshop.org saw an explosion of traffic and sales that no one could anticipate&mdash;and that could&rsquo;ve been catastrophic for a website that wasn&rsquo;t designed for scale and resiliency.&nbsp;
But due to the preparedness and optimizations by HFC, Bookshop.org was resilient and performant right from the start, even with the massive spikes in traffic and sales&mdash;an impressive feat because most high-traffic applications require months or even years of trial and error to achieve stability.&nbsp;
<h3>Just a few of the outcomes of Bookshop.org&rsquo;s partnership with HFC:</h3>
<ul>
 <li>$65 million in revenue in the business&rsquo; first year</li>
 <li aria-level="1">Over $30 million contributed to independent booksellers since its inception in 2020</li>
 <li aria-level="1">Hundreds of millions in gross sales in the last four years</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">A website that could support 2 million visitors monthly</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Affiliate partnerships with publishers such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Buzzfeed&nbsp;</li>
</ul>
But more importantly, Bookshop.org was also able to serve as a lifeline for independent bookstores, especially during the unforeseen challenges brought about by COVID-19. With huge revenue figures, substantial contributions to independent booksellers, and a sustainable business model that channels the majority&mdash;about 80%!&mdash;of profits back to local bookstores, Bookshop.org exemplifies how a mission-driven approach to e-commerce can be successful while benefiting the wider community.
&ldquo;This is the smoothest launch I've ever had.&rdquo;
&ndash; Andy Hunter, CEO
 Need help building a highly customized online platform to support your unique business model?
&nbsp;<a href="https://www.happyfuncorp.com/contact-us">Let&rsquo;s chat!</a>

Bookshop sells books online to help indie bookstores IRL

How This Online Bookshop Took on One of the Biggest Booksellers in the World—and Did $65 Million in Revenue in Its First Year

A family-owned business for three generations, Architectural Designs sells home plans to builders and homeowners across North America and internationally, with designs for everything from starter homes to elaborate luxury homes.
Over the years, the company has evolved from its magazine days to an online search engine for house plans, incorporating new processes and technology to create a better experience for both their customers and prospective customers. Today, they are a business with millions of monthly website visitors, a commanding presence on social media platforms like Pinterest and Instagram, and strong growth year over year.
Jon Davis and Kitty Connor, Architectural Designs&rsquo; CEO and COO, manage much of the company&rsquo;s strategy and day-to-day.
<h2>The challenge</h2>
Architectural Designs was facing a variety of challenges with its website and digital experience that impacted its e-commerce revenue, the effectiveness of its marketing, and even communications with its designer partners.
They needed to revamp their digital experience&mdash;quickly. So, Jon put out a call for help in his network. &ldquo;Two people gave me a list of names, and HappyFunCorp was the only name that was on both lists,&rdquo; says Jon.&nbsp;
Architectural Designs chose HFC to help them:
<ul>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Find ways to minimize the opportunities for human error in their e-commerce experience</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Automate the modification request process, an important service offered to customers, reduce friction for customers who want to make changes to home plans, and create a streamlined process for designers handling the changes.</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Improve how customers are segmented and tailor their marketing communications.</li>
</ul>
&ldquo;The range of talent at HFC is so broad that if you need something&mdash;whether it&rsquo;s technical, front or back end, marketing, whatever it takes to run a digital business&mdash;there are experts who can come in at a moment's notice and help.&rdquo; &ndash; Jon Davis, CEO
With the new website, Architectural Designs&rsquo; conversion rate shot up, tripling their previous conversion rate just 18 months earlier.
<h2>HFC&rsquo;s approach</h2>
After assembling a team with deep technical expertise in building for scale, HFC revamped the digital experience for a range of core areas in Architectural Designs&rsquo; business:&nbsp;
Website - To improve the website&rsquo;s online shopping experience, HFC used Elasticsearch to create a fast, customized search engine on Architectural Designs&rsquo; website to make it easy for customers to find just the right plan in a catalog of 25,000+ plans. Today, HFC continues to enhance and modernize search with generative AI.&nbsp;
Finance - HFC designed a tool for Architectural Designs&rsquo; finance director that automates designer payments with emails itemizing monthly payment breakdowns to designers. This eliminated the need to manually prepare and send hundreds of emails a month taking up significant time.
Partners - Architectural Designs&rsquo; sells a list of materials that customers can purchase when they buy a home plan that itemizes everything needed to build the home and is generated by an outside partner.&nbsp;
HFC built a new system that made it easy to track revenue, track and fill orders and store the lists for future distribution.&nbsp;
Integrating the tech stack - HFC built a suite of custom integrations specifically tailored to the Architectural Designs team&rsquo;s daily workflows and processes, including:&nbsp;
<ul>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Mailchimp for drip emails and newsletter campaigns</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Sendgrid and Twilio for transactional and programmatic marketing emails</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Avalara for state sales tax</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Gemini for generative AI</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Tableau for analytics and reporting</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Shopper Approved for customer ratings</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Wordpress for the company blog</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Braintree for payment</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Paypal for invoicing and payment plans</li>
</ul>
Modification process - Before, if Architectural Designs&rsquo; customers wanted to change a plan&rsquo;s foundation type or adjust anything on a house plan, every step was handled by staff through email. With annual requests exceeding mid-five figures a manual approach was no longer sustainable and HFC built a tool to automate the process by shuttling modification requests from clients directly to the designer for a quote and back to the customer with minimal human effort needed. Requests that were formerly tracked on a spreadsheet are now managed in a templatized system providing a personal quote to every customer and a mechanism to make the purchase and there&rsquo;s a reporting system behind the tools to track success.
<h2>The results: A sustainable, best-in-class e-commerce business</h2>
HFC helped Architectural Designs completely transform their digital experience for all of their partners and stakeholders, including customers, builders, and designers. Not only did the custom automation and integrations significantly increase time and cost savings, they also helped scale the business and prepare it for sustainable growth.
These are just a few of the outcomes of Architectural Designs&rsquo; partnership with HFC:
<ul>
 <li>10x revenue growth</li>
 <li aria-level="1">Tripled online conversion rates</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Thousands of quotes sent monthly as a result of an accelerated self-serve flow online</li>
 <li aria-level="1">Thousands and thousands of contacts in their email list</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Reduced drop-off in the sale process by automating alerts to the team when someone has abandoned their cart, so they can follow up</li>
</ul>
<h2>&ldquo;Working with HFC was fundamental to our success&rdquo;</h2>
From their early days as publishers to becoming marketers, to now leveraging technology to stay ahead of the industry&rsquo;s constant changes, it&rsquo;s clear that Architectural Designs has a strong sense of where their business and customers are headed in the future.
&ldquo;We're working towards using AI for search, we&rsquo;re investing in virtual tours,&rdquo; says Kitty. &ldquo;We're adding a sophisticated viewing system to the website to give customers the tools they need to actually visualize what their home will look like.&rdquo;
But the most important thing for Jon and Kitty is being able to stay nimble and maximize their biggest opportunities efficiently, even as the company continues to grow.&nbsp;
&ldquo;With HFC, we can say, &lsquo;Hey, I have this idea. Can you help me make it happen?&rsquo; We can dial things up and down, which gives me incredible flexibility. That choice to work with HFC was fundamental to our success, especially against heavy competition.&rdquo;
By keeping their team nimble and leveraging technology to continuously improve both the customer and employee experience, Jon and Kitty are ensuring that Architectural Designs can adapt quickly&mdash;and setting the business up for sustainable success.
&ldquo;If a business doesn't evolve, it becomes irrelevant and dies,&rdquo; says Kitty. &ldquo;We're always ready to pivot&mdash;we&rsquo;re forever evolving.&rdquo;
Want to improve your online experience and convert more customers, while reducing the burden on your team?&nbsp;
<a href="https://www.happyfuncorp.com/contact-us" title="Contact Us">Let&rsquo;s chat!</a>

How This eCommerce Business Tripled Conversion Rates and 10X-ed Revenue With a New Digital Experience

Most people know Samsung as a brand that makes appliances and devices like TVs, laundry machines, smartwatches, and smartphones.
Today, many of Samsung&rsquo;s devices (like the very cool <a href="https://news.samsung.com/us/experts-explore-ai-wearable-tech-revolutionizing-sleep-health-sxsw-world-samsung-sleep-day-2024/">Galaxy Ring</a>) are part of a connected ecosystem of products and services aimed at improving consumers&rsquo; health. For example, it has a wearables and smartphone lineup that uses data about users&rsquo; habits and physical activity to track progress and help them live a healthier lifestyle.&nbsp;
In 2020, Samsung was poised to officially launch a new initiative: Samsung Health.
<h2>The challenge</h2>
Samsung needed a partner to help it work with a selection of fitness studios to expand its digital footprint by creating tailored apps using third party content&mdash;Samsung Health was going to be on not only Samsung&rsquo;s Smart TVs, but also the entire Samsung device ecosystem (similar to Apple&rsquo;s health app).
Samsung recommended HFC as a partner for these fitness studios, each of which had its own unique content and brand positioning. The goal was twofold: attract fitness partners to build their own apps on Samsung&rsquo;s Smart TV platform; and set up Samsung's own integrated health app, which leverages content from those providers.
Even though some of these partners had iOS or Android apps, this would be the first time creating an OTT app (&ldquo;over the top&rdquo;; a media service offered directly to viewers over the Internet&mdash;no cable needed) for all of them. Samsung Health chose HFC to help them stitch together a new OTT experience for these studios with customized front end apps specifically for the Samsung Smart TVs.
<h2>HFC&rsquo;s approach</h2>
The team combined HFC&rsquo;s expertise in TV-based experiences with the unique value-adds of Samsung Health to design and build individual experiences that felt just right for each individual brand.&nbsp;
To maximize speed and compatibility with other technologies in these companies&rsquo; tech stacks, they leveraged the Tizen OS&rsquo; Web Development framework to build ReactJS-based apps for these Samsung partners:
Ob&eacute;, a digital-first startup and neighbor of HFC&rsquo;s in Brooklyn that offers a limited catalog of free content on Tizen that viewers can try out and even have their workouts tracked in the Samsung Health app, as a no-risk lead-in to the full Ob&eacute; offering.&nbsp;
Barre3, which has a network of physical studios around the world as well as a digital offering, opted for near-parity with their web experience, which gives existing subscribers access to its full content catalog. Users can also track workouts both in Samsung Health and across other Barre3 digital touchpoints as well.
Echelon, a digital-first streaming company and connected fitness machine company, launched an experience primarily aimed at existing subscribers. Although this experience initially didn&rsquo;t have an integration to their workout bikes, it did come with a limited selection of free content as well as workouts that didn&rsquo;t require connected equipment. In 2023, we helped Echelon launch Bluetooth pairing with connected equipment.
Each app logs activity to Samsung Health as well as user and video playback behavior.
<h2>The result: A revolutionary way to bring the fitness studio into living rooms across the country</h2>
Ultimately, HFC developed three out of the five Tizen partnership apps that were included in Samsung Smart TVs&rsquo; Health app, creating a seamless digital experience for all of their partners and stakeholders, including customers, builders, and designers.&nbsp;
Not only did HFC work with Samsung Health and its partners to significantly increase time and cost savings, this project also helped scale up the Samsung Health business and prepare it for sustainable growth.
Just a few of the outcomes of Samsung Health&rsquo;s partnership with HFC:
<ul>
 <li aria-level="1">Initial app launch to tens of millions devices</li>
 <li aria-level="1">Robust apps that logged activity to Samsung Health as well as user and video playback behavior</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">A solid foundation for continuous optimization and improvements for these apps after the initial launch on millions of TVs</li>
</ul>
<h2>Conclusion</h2>
Building an app isn&rsquo;t easy and can come with challenges throughout the product lifecycle. Building a new platform of apps&mdash;ensuring compliance with different partners and adhering to unique brand identities for each one&mdash;is even bigger and more complex.
By bringing in an experienced partner with deep expertise in building connected experiences, Samsung Health was able to empower fitness studios to build custom TV apps quickly, and set its customers up for richer and healthier lives&mdash;right from their living rooms.
Want to create a connected and cohesive digital experience across devices?&nbsp;
<a href="https://www.happyfuncorp.com/contact-us">Let&rsquo;s chat!&nbsp;</a>

We launched multiple Tizen apps in Samsung Health’s expansion to TV, bringing native fitness experiences to millions of homes.

How Samsung Health Launched Its TV App Offerings

In 2016, Twitter acquired the streaming rights to NFL's Thursday Night Football, the keystone of a strategy to bring live streaming video &ndash; with rich Twitter integration &ndash; to the masses. While the internal team would build the web and mobile products, the company planned to develop products across the latest OTT hardware from Apple, Google, and Amazon. HFC became their technology partner for the premiere of the service, a mere 12 weeks away.
We kicked off with a visit to San Francisco where we embedded with the Twitter team to ramp up as quickly as possible, work through technical questions, and iterate on design as the backend integrations and logic were built out.
The app included content from Periscope, Vine, Moments, as well as Trending tweets, but the centerpiece was the live streaming video with a timeline of related Tweets. Twitter for tvOS and Fire OS shipped in September 2016 to positive press and user reviews, and top placement within the app stores. Apple named Twitter for Apple TV <a data-cke-saved-href="https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2016/12/apple-unveils-best-of-2016-across-apps-music-movies-and-more.html" href="https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2016/12/apple-unveils-best-of-2016-across-apps-music-movies-and-more.html">App of the Year</a> for 2016. We continued to support the product until it was eventually taken in-house.

We helped Twitter launch onto new TV-based platforms with live streaming video

Launching X into the Livingroom

Jon Davis is owner of Architectural Designs, a one-time print magazine that has grown from digital upstart to market leader in house plans sold online. (House plans are designs for homes that can be built by contractors.) Jon and his team deal in dreams, and they&rsquo;ve been on a remarkable run, building out a lead in the market &ndash; Jon calls it his &ldquo;moat&rdquo; &ndash; with HFC as a partner for over five years. Jon&rsquo;s other half in the office, Kitty Connor, joined the company in 2012 and puts AD&rsquo;s success this way, &ldquo;every year I have been at AD has been better than the last one.&rdquo; This is a bit of an understatement.
<h3>Here are some highlights</h3>
<ul>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">
 AD&rsquo;s Alexa rank, a measure of overall popularity, was once well below the former house plans leader, but AD now has a commanding lead in 1st place among the competition.
 </li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">
 They average millions of visitors per month, with a commanding presence on social media platforms like Pinterest and Instagram
 </li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">
 They&rsquo;ve grown their email list deep into six figures.
 </li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">
 2020 was AD&rsquo;s biggest year on record, +70% revenue YoY.
 </li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">
 January 2021 was the biggest month on record for AD, more than doubling sales from the January before and nearly tripling the January before that.&nbsp;
 </li>
</ul>
AD&rsquo;s revenue growth has consistently outpaced housing starts over the years, including 2020 when COVID-19 gave the industry a bit of a boost. Remarkably, through all of the growth the AD team has remained nearly the same size. Jon attributes this to his team&rsquo;s can-do culture and focus on work/life balance that mirrors HFC&rsquo;s &ndash; &ldquo;You [can do more with the same people when]&nbsp; you have the right people ... who understand that, hey, 9:00 to 5:00 is for work.&rdquo; The team&rsquo;s success wouldn&rsquo;t be possible without drive and a tight-knit culture, the latter evidenced by their daily group lunches. HFC has also helped to supercharge this winning combination with wide-ranging automation.
AD&rsquo;s relationship with HFC has evolved from a one-off redesign project into a powerhouse partnership that has helped the company take the lead in their industry through a transformative redesign, innovative tooling to streamline operations, and a comprehensive marketing strategy tailored to the unique research habits and purchasing cycle of AD&rsquo;s customers.

Architectural Design’s team has grown to become the top player in house plans sold online

Building a Durable, Best-in-Class Ecommerce Business

PVH is a leading American clothing company that owns Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein, and also licenses brands like Kenneth Cole and Michael Kors.&nbsp;
With such a global reach, PVH recognized that its impact on sustainability was huge. It wanted to launch a new sustainability plan at The Copenhagen Fashion Summit&mdash;the largest event in the world for sustainability in fashion&mdash;alongside a beautiful new web experience dedicated to the future of sustainable fashion, dubbed &ldquo;Forward Fashion.&rdquo;
<h2>The challenge</h2>
Forward Fashion wasn&rsquo;t just a website. It needed to house a suite of multimedia content including reporting, content, storytelling, and thought leadership.
This digital hub also needed to be able to continue to evolve with PVH&rsquo;s strategy over time, so longevity and usability were key considerations. PVH&rsquo;s team also wanted to be able to easily update and add content on their own without a lot of technical support.
And finally, given that PVH is a fashion brand, nailing the look and feel in the design&mdash;along with pixel-perfect implementation&mdash;was critical.
PVH chose HFC to help them:
<ul>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Build a user-friendly and nimble digital hub for the team to advance its strategy and share content and storytelling through thought leadership and beyond</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Recommend and implement a new CMS that could support the many different types of media needed</li>
</ul>
<h2>HFC&rsquo;s approach</h2>
HFC designers partnered closely with PVH&rsquo;s design agency, Futerra, to develop designs that fit the style guide and component library for the project.&nbsp;
After hearing Futerra&rsquo;s design requirements and PVH&rsquo;s goal of building easily customizable pages after project handoff, HFC decided to go with a static approach for the build of the online hub.
With long-term hosting requirements not yet finalized, and a static approach meant that Fashion Forward would be able to live on any type of hosting setup, which provided more flexibility given the lack of clarity.
And because this was a content-driven website with SEO being a major consideration, this approach boosted performance since the site would be hosted straight from a CDN, thereby avoiding runtime compilation.
The tech stack
<ul>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">DatoCMS via GraphQL</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Next.js</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Linaria</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Netlify (which was later changed due to new client requirements)</li>
</ul>
HFC selected <a href="https://github.com/callstack/linaria">Linaria</a> as a CSS-in-JS solution because it offered more flexibility (like dynamically scoped CSS per component) and also allowed the team to fall back on an environment that used PostCSS or a preprocessor if needed.
This decision was mostly influenced by agency workflow considerations and this project&rsquo;s specific need for flexibility. Linaria also has the added benefit of not requiring any run-time dependency, which is a performance gain over most CSS-in-JS alternatives.&nbsp;
The CMS&nbsp;
Content and data for this static website was managed through external APIs. And given PVH&rsquo;s requirement to be able to create completely unique pages (not just from a set of prebuilt templates), HFC understood that they needed a CMS (Content Management System) with strong modular content features.&nbsp;
<table>
 <tbody>
 <tr>
 <td>
 What is modular content? Modular content (sometimes referred to as &ldquo;blocks&rdquo;) is the concept of having atomic components make up a page. In other words, you&rsquo;d build a web page using each module as a building block, as opposed to creating a page using a template with a predefined structure.&nbsp;
 </td>
 </tr>
 </tbody>
</table>
This led the HFC team to recommend a headless CMS. Unlike traditional CMS platforms like Wordpress or Squarespace, a headless CMS splits up the management of a website&rsquo;s content and backend model.
Based on past experience with headless CMS platforms, HFC recommended DatoCMS, which combined a straightforward UI (user interface) and a high level of customizability, using GraphQL or REST APIs to retrieve the content.&nbsp;
The framework
Next.js was the best fit due to project requirements and from an agency perspective, the value of Next.js was that it offered a unified framework for node-based Server-Side Rendering (SSR) as well as the ability to export to Static Site Generation (SSG).
<table>
 <tbody>
 <tr>
 <td>
 SSR vs SSG: These are both ways to render a webpage, and depending on the type of webpage you&rsquo;re trying to view, one is better than the other. For example, SSG creates fast-loading pages that are pre-rendered while SSR renders a page in real time, which ensures that any dynamic elements on the page (like a real-time stock chart) are up-to-date.
 </td>
 </tr>
 </tbody>
</table>
This &ldquo;Universal&rdquo; approach meant that the team had a common tool for both styles of projects, and also future proofed the website in case it needed SSR functionality (like adding user authentication) later on.&nbsp;
<h2>The result: A beautiful online home for sustainable fashion</h2>
Launched in time for The Copenhagen Fashion Summit, the Forward Fashion website features stunning photography, videos, and other engaging content.
As a result of a truly collaborative effort, the PVH team can easily populate the hub with simple yet elegant content modules, continually updating and adding to it. Forward Fashion can continue the work started in Copenhagen over the coming years, cementing PVH&rsquo;s position as a leader in sustainability.
Looking to build a multimedia content hub that&rsquo;s user-friendly and easy to maintain?
<a href="https://www.happyfuncorp.com/contact-us">Let's chat!</a>

How This Global Fashion Brand Created a Multimedia Content Hub for Sustainability

WeWork has become the most visible brand in shared office space around the world, though most of its business has been focused on long-term rentals. With an on-ramp to membership that could require big commitments, the company was looking for options to allow workers &ndash; especially freelancers, travelers, or early stage startups&nbsp; &ndash; to engage with the brand on a shorter term basis. That idea became WeWork Now (originally MadeByWe), a caf&eacute;, design goods shop, and desk or conference room rental space open to all, right in the center of Manhattan.
HFC worked closely with the We team, providing technology leadership and engineering on back- and front-end for the software powering the platform. In addition to building a reliable, easy-to-use, and attractive system, we were responsible for architecture and scalability. Guests can drop in, buy a flat white at the Bluestone Lane counter up front, then use the responsive web app to reserve a spot in the expertly-designed workspace in back. Staff use a native iOS app to administer check-ins and monitor guest flow and availability.
HFC was engaged in July 2018, and WeWork Now launched in January 2019 (under its original name, MadeByWe) to a positive reception at <a data-cke-saved-href="https://www.google.com/maps/place/WeWork+Now/@40.7393892,-73.9894097,15z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x0:0x7d6e978e510f6f70!8m2!3d40.7393892!4d-73.9894097" href="https://www.google.com/maps/place/WeWork+Now/@40.7393892,-73.9894097,15z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x0:0x7d6e978e510f6f70!8m2!3d40.7393892!4d-73.9894097">902 Broadway</a>.

We built the technology underpinning WeWork Now, a retail/cafe/workspace share in Manhattan

Launching a New Experiment in Temporary Workspaces

Following the success of the Twitter livingroom applications, we connected with Disney about a new initiative: Movies Anywhere, an evolution of its unified movie licensing ecosystem. Disney had worked out deals with the major digital content stores &ndash; iTunes, Amazon, Google, etc &ndash; and enabled users to sync Disney films purchased across these stores so that they could be collected in a single library, available across any device. It would be a huge step forward in Disney's digital strategy &ndash; one differentiated from the other major studios &ndash; and the livingroom would be a key element.
We kicked off with an onsite in Burbank with the Movies Anywhere team, sharing our research on the state of UX in the livingroom app space as well as some demos of key interactions and design concepts for the major interactions. We set upon designing the experience across the various livingroom platforms &ndash; Apple TV, Roku, Google TV, Fire TV &ndash; each with its own conventions, technical limitations, and idiosyncracies. Our ultimate goal was to create an experience that was worthy of the Disney brand &ndash; intuitive, high-quality, and enjoyable.
Due to the hard launch deadline, we were actively building the Roku and Apple TV applications against the API while designs were created and tested with users. Many of the ingredients of developing the app, outside of the core feature set, were things we'd encountered before, namely extensive event tracking, encrypted DRM video streams, building against evolving APIs. We were able to keep velocity up throughout the project through a combination of experience and strong communication with the other teams.&nbsp;

Launching a Milestone in the Disney Digital Ecosystem

Disney Unifies Your Movie Library

Smart Design reached out to HFC to assist in building a bold new vision for Gatorade &ndash; one that combined the cutting edge of sports science research with new hardware devices that Smart had been building. HappyFunCorp was called in to architect and build the cloud and client software that powers the experience.
The platform, dubbed Gx, allows team managers and hydration specialists to track athletes&rsquo; hydration utilizing a responsive web dashboard, a web-enabled scale, and smart bottles that report fluid consumption in real-time.&nbsp;
The centerpiece of the cloud system is the Recommendation Engine, which combines biometric data with details about an upcoming exercise event to generate science-backed recipes for athlete hydration.
Gx has been deployed to elite sports teams around the world, and received an <a data-cke-saved-href="https://www.fastcodesign.com/product/gatorade" href="https://www.fastcodesign.com/product/gatorade" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Innovation by Design Finalist</a> nod.&nbsp;

Gx is a multi-device hydration ecosystem designed for pro athletes 

Building a Robust Platform for the Future of Hydration

Emburse first reached out to us to help make some improvements to the company's mobile apps &ndash; then named Abacus &ndash; on iOS and Android. The platform is a B2B expense-tracking app &ndash; part of a family of products from <a data-cke-saved-href="https://cards.emburse.com/" href="https://cards.emburse.com/">Emburse</a> &ndash; that features web touchpoints as well as mobile.&nbsp;
We kicked off our engagement with a review of the existing codebases, tooling, and practices, with recommendations on how to pay down some technical debt while hitting product release deadlines. HFC worked closely with the in-house team to develop a number of new features for the mobile apps, as well as whitelabeling the mobile codebases.
HFC additionally partnered with Emburse on its Node-based API, helping to shape the archicture, deliver new functionality and help scale the growing web team.

Our team worked closely with Emburse to build keystone new features

Accelerating Mobile & Web to Hit Product Milestones

In 2014, Andy Hunter joined literary publishing house Black Balloon Publishing with a mission put before him: to build an online presence that would resonate with budding writers.After having successfully launched Electric Literature, Lithub, and other sites using Wordpress, Andy had developed a more ambitious vision for Catapult &ndash; an online community of budding writers, given better tools to help each other develop than ever before. We set to work on a custom Ruby on Rails-based platform that would scale with Catapult&rsquo;s trajectory.We worked with Catapult&rsquo;s book designers to craft a visual style that felt of and for real writers. We designed a flexible interface for the editorial team and iterated the design to fit their needs as well as the needs of Catapult readers. Catapult launched successfully in September 2015.

Catapult's magazine launch helped rapidly build a community around thoughtful content from unique voices 

Launching a Digital Literary Magazine 

Shelley Bernstein launched the Ask app at the Brooklyn Museum with the backing of Bloomberg Philanthropies and after meticulous user testing. The feature set allowed museumgoers to message staff and ask questions about pieces they saw. The secret sauce to help facilitate this process were specially-placed beacons throughout the museum &ndash; the locations of which were transmitted along with messages from the app so that answers could come quickly and accurately from staff. Unfortunately, about 15% of messages arrived without beacon data attached and Android users were being left out entirely.
HFC was tasked with developing an Android version of Ask and with making improvements to the iOS app. In the course of developing for Android we revisited the logic for finding the nearest beacon &ndash; something that had caused problems on iOS &ndash; and developed in-app tools to facilitate testing, then carried over our learnings back to iOS. The process was recorded by Shelley and her team in detail on the <a data-cke-saved-href="https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/community/blogosphere/2016/02/23/code-release-going-from-ios-to-droid-solving-ibeacon-issues-along-the-way/" href="https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/community/blogosphere/2016/02/23/code-release-going-from-ios-to-droid-solving-ibeacon-issues-along-the-way/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Brooklyn Museum Tech blog</a>.

We helped Brooklyn Museum expand their Ask app to Android and made some experience improvements along the way.

Enriching the Experience at Brooklyn Museum

As a the leader in audio books, Audible wanted to emulate the same great experience consumers had with audio book app and build an HR app that welcomed new employees to the company in advance of their start date with pertinent information to set them up for success on the job day one.When we began our work, there was no technical solution and employees received static information via email. &nbsp;Zoe Rumford, VP of Human Resources, saw an opportunity to improve upon this given her prior experience with more developed tools &ndash; a fully functional HR app for employees that included employee onboarding. After researching the marketplace for off-the-shelf solutions, it was clear that none existed that suited Audible&rsquo;s needs.We set off to build a simple, flexible tool that would not only meet HR and new employees&rsquo; needs, but would also meet Amazon&rsquo;s.

We worked with Audible HR to level up employee onboarding with a customizable app 

Improving the Employee Onboarding Experience

"After building the foundation for Catapult&rsquo;s online presence, we set out to take their in-person writing workshops online a year later, allowing students from around the country to participate rather than just the NYC metro area.
In a few short months we had to understand the unique dynamics of writing workshops and deliver an experience that was demonstrably better than competitors in the space, all while making the system easy to use and unburdonsome for existing staff.
We found that the biggest potential pain points of the system were in class registration and giving feedback on peers&rsquo; writing. Using an Agile approach to the problems and armed with feedback from instructors and students, we were able to deliver, test, and improve rapidly.
Among the solutions delivered were a low-friction class application process that differentiates itself from other platforms by allowing account creation after payment; a custom commenting platform that is responsive, real-time, and private; plus an online &lsquo;salon&rsquo; for classes to meet and chat during designated times. Catapult has the tools it needs to continue to scale its classes business into the future.
Sadly, Catapult's online writing program grew during the pandemic but was shut down in early 2023.

We helped Catapult scale their in-person writing workshops to reach writers around the world

Bringing Writing Education Online

Let's build something great.

When you reach out to us, our senior staff are here to help learn more about your needs and hand-pick a team that you’ll love.

Whether you're starting from the back of a napkin, a pitch deck, or a prototype in the marketplace, HFC can work with your team to craft award-winning digital experiences across user classes and channels.New Product teams from HFC offer a blend of strategy, user experience expertise, and technical acumen that comes from launching dozens of innovative products with startups and Fortune 500s alike for more than a decade.

New Products

Want to build a new application or platform from the ground up?

At a time of accelerating technological change including mainstreaming of AI/ML, many businesses are taking a hard look at their legacy technology. The tools and practices that worked before may not be competitive for long.
HFC partners with businesses looking to modernize, offering analysis, guidance, and technical execution that unlocks new potential.
For more than a decade, we&rsquo;ve helped startups and Fortune 500s alike level up their technology &ndash; and their teams. How can we help you?

Modernization

Reconfigure your stack to make it easier to scale and maintain, including adding new technologies like AI. 

Want to uplevel what you've already built? The landscape is more competitive than ever, and businesses are looking to find ways to optimize their offerings and gain an edge. 
With HFC's Product Accelerator, you get an actionable roadmap and full support whether you need to add a new feature, build a mobile counterpart, or scale your architecture.

Product Accelerator

Get some external support to uplevel an existing product or application.

<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant-ligatures: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit; font-weight: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">Sometimes you need to bring in reinforcements when you're keeping up with business demands and growth.
HFC can help you recruit, assemble, and integrate a team that's tailored to your project needs, whether you want to develop or a more sophisticated design system

Embedded Teams

We'll help you assemble a custom-built team that can hit the ground running and make an impact—fast...

The look, feel, and functionality of your digital touchpoints are critical to how your business performs. 
HFC has designed winning products for over a decade, taking a user-centric, technically minded approach. How can we support your business?

Experience Design

Craft seamless digital journeys across every touchpoint.

<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant-ligatures: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit; font-weight: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">Not all collaborations have a clear beginning and endpoint, and not all problems can be solved through an RFP process.
From ongoing strategic support to one-off audits, HFC can provide both breadth and depth of product and technical experience as your consultative partner.

Strategy

Get both big-picture planning and tactical support at all stages of your product journey.

Our Work

We have a passion for building consumer internet products that move the needle for businesses.