Seventh Generation

The Challenge 

When Seventh Generation needed to win new customers, they turned to Third and Grove. The goal was to grow SVG’s household penetration by attracting new users to the brand and inspiring them to switch from conventional or faux green products to their natural, equally effective products that are rooted in science, sustainability, climate justice and equity practices, and are designed to protect the next seven generations.

Tall order? Maybe. But last year, the IBM Institute for Business Value found that “93% of global respondents said the pandemic had influenced their views on sustainability. And over the past year, environmental issues have become even more important.”

The Solution

The majority of the website’s users do not visit just to buy a product. They’re trying to discern what’s in each product, if these products truly impact the environment positively or if they’re a sheep in wolf’s clothing. We supported them to learn more with less effort throughout the site, especially on product detail pages. By offering quick, consumable answers to their most common questions, championing product ingredients, and promoting transparent testimonials and reviews, users are able to understand and embrace the Seventh Generation mission quickly.

Behind the curtain

Seventh Generation’s core values of sustainability, innovation, and better business practices were front and center throughout the customer experience.

A streamlined product-finding experience keeps things as simple as possible for visitors. Some well-crafted complexity provides this simplicity. We wanted to prioritize ease of browsing the multitude of product categories and subcategories available to site visitors. We used the Search API and Facets modules to provide performant and visually appealing product results throughout the user journey. A heavy bit of extension and customization to the functionality of these modules made what you see today possible.

To further enrich the product-finding journey, we integrated Bazaar Voice and Price Spider for ratings, comments, and find-in-store functionality. These tools are integrated and used in search logic on product listings and detail pages.

Genuine. Transparent. Clean. 

The product-finding journey needed to look good across multiple devices and with multiple interaction types: we needed to support desktop, mobile, mouse users, and keyboard users, which required lots of collaboration between different teams:

• Backend developers built the custom module and set up the product detail page powered by Layout Builder.
• Frontend developers took the raw markup from the backend developers and worked with both BE/design to execute the design vision and ensure everything matched the comps.
• Quality Assurance tested the multifaceted product detail page. It ensured it met the visual acceptance criteria set by the design team and passed all aspects of accessibility testing, including color contrast, semantic compliance/clean HTML code, and keyboard navigation.
• All team members ensured that WCAG 2.1 AAA accessibility standards were being met not just at a point in time, but consistently through the iterative production process.

Taking Sustainability Offline

Transforming the world into a healthy, sustainable, and equitable place is more than just a feature on the site. It’s at the core of everything the Seventh Generation organization does. To demonstrate that Seventh Generation creates real products for real people using real plant science at the core of everything they do, we created a streamlined experience to engage new and existing customers, foster community around climate justice, and develop brand ambassadors to ultimately take action in advocacy.