Gardenart: Turning 270 Products Into a Catalog Retailers Can Buy From

The new Gardenart site sends buyers deeper than the old one did. Visitors who arrive from a Google search for a specific chair family now land on a page that shows the frame material, cushion specification and finish options, then move on to two or three related products before they open the contact form. The site went from a brochure that described a company to a catalog that answers design questions.

That was the goal when we started the rebuild with Gardenart Furniture Co., Ltd, an outdoor furniture designer and manufacturer headquartered in Guangzhou with its production base in Zhaoqing.

Why the structure changed first

Gardenart has over 220 patents and 270 products, sells into 42 countries, and distributes more than 95% of its output directly to established retailers. That is an unusual position: most Chinese outdoor furniture exporters sit behind trading companies, while Gardenart sells design-led product under its own development program, with a Red Dot award and a CIFF Pyramid design award behind it.

The old site did not reflect that. Products were presented as a single scrolling grid, and a buyer who wanted to know whether a sunbed was available in a different frame finish had to email and wait. For a company whose pitch is design capability, the site was making the weakest possible argument.

So we rebuilt around product families rather than individual items. Each family — lounge seating, dining, sunbeds and loungers, accessories — got a landing page explaining the design intent, the materials used, and the range of configurations. Individual products sit underneath with their own spec tables. A retailer building an assortment can now see the whole family at once, which is how they actually buy.

Materials as a navigation path

The second change came from a pattern in the sales team's inbox. A large share of pre-sale questions were about materials: aluminum versus teak, rope weave versus flat wicker, how textilene holds up in coastal humidity. Buyers were not shopping for a chair, they were shopping for a material decision they could defend to their merchandising team.

We built a materials and care section that treats each material as a subject: where it is appropriate, what it looks like after several seasons, how to clean it, and which product families use it. Every product page links back into that section. It is not the kind of page that generates an inquiry on its own, but it is the page that makes the inquiry informed.

Showing the factory without turning it into a factory tour

Gardenart's manufacturing base in Zhaoqing was built in 2006 and covers a land area of 730,000 sq ft, with three workshops totaling 160,000 sq ft and a workforce of 260. Buyers who place private-label orders want to know a factory exists and can hold a quality standard. They do not want twelve photos of the same assembly line.

We kept the factory story to one page with four numbers — floor area, workshop area, headcount, years in production — and spent the rest of the credibility budget on process: how a sample is developed, how finishes are tested, what happens between order confirmation and container loading. Concrete process beats square footage.

What the rebuild had to protect

Gardenart has been selling since 1999, and a portion of its traffic arrives through older product pages that retailers have bookmarked or linked to over the years. Before touching anything, we mapped the existing URL structure and set redirects for every retired page to its closest equivalent in the new family structure. Nothing was deleted without a destination.

We also kept the inquiry path short. The form asks for name, company, market, and what they are looking for in a single free-text field. Category dropdowns look tidy in a demo and cost you submissions in production, especially from buyers filling it out on a phone between meetings.

What changed after launch

Pages per session went up, and the contact form started producing messages that name a product family and a target market rather than asking for a general catalog. The site now also gives the sales team something to send: instead of attaching a PDF to every first reply, they link to a family page that carries the current specification.

For a company with 270 products and a design story to tell, the site's job is narrower than most exporters assume. It does not need to close the order. It needs to make a retailer confident enough to request a sample, and give the sales team a page worth forwarding. That is what we built.