Retail · Omnichannel · 2018

Sleep Sold Better

Redesigned OMF's commerce architecture to serve both online shoppers and showroom buyers — without flattening the difference between them.

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01

Problem

Two Customers, One Site

Digital built for one buyer persona; showroom customers got a broken experience.

2Distinct purchase journeys
02

System

Omnichannel Architecture

Unified product story with channel-specific conversion paths.

12Weeks to revamp
03

Process

Journey Mapping

Mapped online vs in-store decision trees; redesigned information hierarchy.

USMarket focus
04

Outcome

Commerce Clarity

Website serves both discovery and conversion without compromise.

↑Cross-channel conversion
Client
OMF
Engagement
Solo Design Contributor
Duration
12 Weeks
Primary Outcome
Omnichannel Revamp
Stack / Tags
E-comm · Retail · UX

Artifacts from this engagement

ProblemChallenge BriefConstraints and context before the engagement ProcessEngagement PhasesHow the work was structured and delivered SystemSolution ArchitectureWhat was built and how it works OutcomesResults & MetricsMeasurable impact and learnings
DTC Commerce / Omnichannel / US Market

Sleep.
Sold Better.

OMF is an American mattress brand that sells the same product two completely different ways — online to someone who has never touched the mattress, and in a showroom to someone who just has. The challenge was a digital experience that had been built for one of those customers and failed the other. This engagement redesigned the website and commerce architecture to serve both — without flattening the difference between them.

0
% Increase in Online Conversion
2
Commerce Channels Unified
3
User Journeys Redesigned
2021
Year Completed
Capacity
Solo Design Contributor
Geography
US Market · Remote Engagement
Context
International Consulting Period · 2019–2022
Vertical
DTC Consumer · Omnichannel Retail
Client
OMF
Role
Solo Design Contributor
Timeline
12 Weeks
Market
United States
Outcome
Omnichannel Revamp
03
Section 01
The
Problem.
What happens when a product that demands physical trust is sold primarily through a medium that can't provide it.
A mattress isn't
a software feature.

OMF sells mattresses — a category where the dominant purchase question is "will this feel right?" and the dominant purchase anxiety is "what if it doesn't?" The US DTC mattress market is fiercely competitive. Casper, Purple, Nectar — every player had figured out that the online channel needed to compensate for the inability to lie down and feel the product before buying it. Trust architecture, trial periods, return policies designed to eliminate hesitation.

OMF had something competitors mostly didn't: physical showrooms. The digital experience, however, had not been designed with the showroom in mind. The website treated every visitor as if they had arrived cold from a Google search. The customer who had just spent 20 minutes in a showroom and was ready to buy returned home to a website that started the sales conversation from scratch — no recognition, no continuity, no bridge from the physical to the digital experience.

Core Insight · Discovery · Week 2
OMF had a physical trust advantage it was actively squandering in the digital channel. The showroom wasn't a cost — it was an unconverted asset.
01
Three disconnected user journeys treated identically. The cold online visitor (no prior context), the post-showroom online buyer (high intent, needs frictionless checkout), and the in-store assistant-supported buyer (needs a shared screen experience) arrived at the same digital interface. It was designed for none of them specifically.
02
Product page carried all the work — and failed at it. The mattress product page was the single point of decision for an $800–$2,000 purchase. It had no sensory language, no comparison architecture, no materials storytelling, and no trust signals specific to the uncertainty of buying a mattress online without feeling it.
03
Store locator was a dead end, not a bridge. The store locator existed but functioned as a one-way exit from the digital experience — find a store, go to the store, the website didn't know you came back. No digital handoff, no post-visit follow-up path, no way for showroom staff to send a customer a personalized link.
04
Checkout friction was above category average. Three-step checkout with mandatory account creation before purchase. In a category where the purchase anxiety is already high, adding administrative friction at the moment of conversion was costing the brand customers who had already decided to buy.
04
Section 02
The
Process.
12 weeks as a solo contributor. Remote engagement with a US client. Competitive benchmarking against a category that had been running DTC experiments for five years.

Category Research
Before Brand Research.

The US DTC mattress category had accumulated five years of conversion experiments by 2021. Casper, Purple, Nectar, Saatva, and Helix had all been running A/B tests on the same fundamental problem — how do you sell a $1,500 product that people can't feel before they buy it? Before touching OMF's specific brief, two weeks went into understanding what the category had already solved, what it hadn't, and where OMF's showroom asset created genuine competitive differentiation.

Omnichannel Journey Map — Three User Types × Three Channels
Channel 01
Online Cold
Google → website
No prior context
High anxiety, high comparison
→
Channel 02
Showroom → Online
High intent
Needs frictionless bridge
Biggest unconverted gap
→
Channel 03
In-Store Digital
Staff-assisted purchase
Shared screen context
Needs streamlined checkout
Channel 02 (showroom → online) was the primary design focus — the highest-intent, lowest-served journey in the portfolio
01
Category Benchmarking
Weeks 1–2

Audited the top 8 US DTC mattress competitors across five dimensions: product page architecture, trust signal placement, trial/return policy presentation, checkout flow length, and omnichannel integration. Identified the category conventions OMF needed to meet and the areas where differentiation was possible. OMF's showroom presence was not being used by any competitor at the same scale — it was a genuine whitespace.

02
Journey Mapping + Gap Analysis
Weeks 3–5

Mapped all three user journeys from first touchpoint to post-purchase. The showroom-to-online journey had the highest intent and the worst experience — a customer who had just physically validated their purchase choice was arriving home to a website that started from zero. Identified the bridge: a post-visit email flow with a personalised product link, built on information captured during the showroom visit.

03
Product Page Architecture + Sensory Language
Weeks 6–9

Redesigned the product page as a sensory narrative rather than a spec sheet. The core design question was: how do you communicate feel through a screen? Worked on materials language (describing firmness, support, temperature regulation in experiential rather than technical terms), visual hierarchy that prioritised trust signals over features, and a comparison system that helped undecided buyers choose between models without needing to visit a store.

04
Checkout Simplification + Omnichannel Handoff
Weeks 10–12

Reduced checkout from 3 steps to 2 by moving account creation post-purchase. Designed the showroom handoff mechanism — a QR-scannable personalised link that showroom staff could send to customers after a visit, pre-loading their product selection and store confirmation into the checkout flow. Delivered full interaction specifications and responsive layout documentation for the engineering handoff.

05
Section 03
The
Solution.
Four design systems — sensory product pages, a showroom-to-digital bridge, streamlined checkout, and a store experience layer — built as one coherent commerce architecture.
omf.com/mattresses
Mattresses
Pillows
Bases
Find a Store
Shop Now
365-night trial · Free delivery · Free returns
Shop Mattresses
Find a Showroom
365-night home trial
Free White Glove delivery
25-year warranty
4.8 ★ · 12,000+ reviews
Our Mattresses — Choose by Feel
Best Seller
The Original
$1,199
The Cooling
$1,499
The Firm
$1,099
The Plush
$1,299
Tried it in a showroom? Pick up where you left off — your selection is saved.
Continue from Showroom →
Homepage — sensory product names, front-loaded trust signals, showroom continuity CTA above the fold
01
01
Sensory Product
Architecture
Renamed and reframed the product line by feel rather than by model number — "The Original," "The Cooling," "The Firm," "The Plush." Each product page was rebuilt as a sensory narrative: materials described in experiential language, firmness communicated through analogies not numbers, temperature regulation explained through what it means to wake up at 3am hot versus not. Trust signals (365-night trial, White Glove delivery, 25-year warranty) moved from footer to above-fold.
02
02
Showroom Bridge
Designed the showroom-to-digital handoff: a QR-scannable link generated by showroom staff that pre-loads the customer's tested product and size into the digital checkout flow. The "Continue from Showroom" CTA on the homepage recognised returning post-visit customers. This converted OMF's physical retail presence from a cost centre into a conversion accelerator — the highest-intent customer journey in the portfolio went from worst-served to best-served.
03
03
Checkout
Simplification
Reduced checkout from 3 steps to 2 by deferring account creation to post-purchase confirmation. Removed every piece of friction that didn't directly serve the transaction: mandatory fields reduced, address validation built in, payment options expanded to include Buy Now Pay Later for a category where average order value exceeds $1,000. Guest checkout made the default path, account creation made the secondary path.
04
04
Comparison
System
Built a side-by-side comparison module for undecided buyers — comparing products across feel dimensions (support, pressure relief, temperature, motion transfer) rather than specifications (foam layers, coil count, thread count). The comparison architecture was designed to make the decision feel intuitive rather than technical, reducing the category's primary drop-off point: "I don't know which one is right for me."
06
Section 04
The
Outcome.
What changed in online conversion, checkout completion, and the showroom-to-digital hand-off rate.
28
0
%
Conversion Increase
Online conversion rate improvement post-launch across all three user journeys combined.
42
0
%
Checkout Completion ↑
Checkout completion rate improvement after removing mandatory account creation and reducing to 2 steps.
3×
0
×
Showroom Bridge Conversion
Customers arriving via the showroom handoff link converted at 3× the rate of cold online visitors.
12
12
Weeks to Delivery
Full revamp from discovery to engineering handoff as a solo contributor. No design team, no agency overhead.
The Solo
Contributor
Model
The OMF engagement was a solo contribution in every meaningful sense — research, competitive analysis, journey mapping, interaction design, visual design, and engineering specification delivered by one person over 12 weeks. This is a fundamentally different operating mode from leading a team: every decision sits with you, context doesn't need to be transferred because it was never distributed, and the quality ceiling is set by your own judgment rather than managed through review cycles. It's also a different accountability structure — there's nowhere to point when something doesn't land.
The
Showroom
Insight
The showroom bridge was not in the original brief. It emerged from the journey mapping exercise in weeks 3–4 when the gap between the showroom visitor's intent level and the digital experience's awareness of that intent became undeniable. In a consultancy context — and particularly as a solo contributor without an internal advocate to push back — surfacing a brief expansion that is genuinely in the client's interest requires both the analytical case and the professional confidence to propose it. The 3× conversion rate on showroom bridge visitors validated the diagnosis. But the harder work was recognising the gap before the data confirmed it.
07
Section 05
Key
Learnings.
What consumer DTC commerce teaches that enterprise work doesn't — and what working solo teaches that leading a team never does.
01
01
Trust Architecture
is Category-Specific.

What builds trust for a $20 software subscription is different from what builds trust for a $1,500 mattress. The DTC mattress category had solved specific trust problems through trial periods, White Glove delivery, and warranty structures. Designing without understanding those category conventions would have produced something technically competent but commercially naive. Category research is not optional in consumer commerce — it's the foundation.

02
02
Omnichannel Means
Neither Channel Alone.

The mistake in omnichannel design is building excellent individual channel experiences that don't acknowledge each other. OMF's showroom was not a marketing expense — it was a trust-building mechanism that had been allowed to evaporate the moment the customer left the building. True omnichannel thinking means asking: what does each channel know about the customer, and how does the next channel build on that knowledge rather than starting over?

03
03
Checkout Friction
is Never Neutral.

Every field, every step, every decision a customer is asked to make in a checkout flow is a conversion risk. In a category where the purchase anxiety is already high — spending $1,500 on something you're relying on feel for — administrative friction at the moment of commitment is disproportionately damaging. The design principle: make the irreversible decision (buying) as effortless as possible, defer the reversible decisions (creating an account) until after the conversion is secured.

04
04
Solo Work
Teaches Self-Reliance.

Three years of international consulting as a solo contributor, lead designer, and staff consultant taught something no team engagement can: the full weight of a design decision when there's no one else in the room. Working with Verizon, Crowley, Hempel, and OMF across different capacities and geographies compressed the feedback loops dramatically. Every assumption you can't test with a colleague, you test with the brief — and the brief always wins.

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A Commerce
Challenge?

Consumer DTC, omnichannel retail, or enterprise product — the design problems are structurally the same: understand the user's channel, meet them there, and remove every obstacle between intent and action. If that's the brief, let's talk.

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