During a networking break today at eTail West 2014, I got the chance to sit down with Steve Weiskircher, CIO at ThinkGeek and Matthew Chwat, Director of UX at ThinkGeek to talk about the project that garnered them attention from their retail peers whom nominated ThinkGeek as finalists for the eTail Best-in-Class Awards.

Last fall, Steve met with the board members of ThinkGeek to discuss where they were planning on going with their omni-channel platforms. At that point, they already had a mobile site, but were looking to launch a tablet platform as well, considering the growth that other retailers were seeing in tablet traffic. So, Steve went about looking for a solution provider to assist his relatively small digital team on creating a successful tablet platform, which they wanted to launch before Black Friday 2013, a mere ten weeks away!

After two weeks of research, which included multiple chats with different providers and calling past clients as references, Steve and the ThinkGeek team decided to work with Mobify as their solution provider. In the next 6 weeks, Mobify and ThinkGeek worked together to create the tablet platform, with Mobify sending designs to ThinkGeek every couple of weeks for review and internal testing. They finished up their finals tests the week before Black Friday, and launched the tablet platform that week, completing their goal of launching a completely new outlet in just ten weeks. After looking at analytics for the launch and the following weeks, it was clear that the tablet site was successful.

It was a whirlwind launch, but with fantastic results, hence ThinkGeek’s nomination for the eTail Best-in-Class Awards, the winners of which will be decided today during the networking lunch at eTail West in San Antonio, TX.