It makes complete sense that a retailer steeped in design would prioritize it when it chose to rebuild its e-commerce site on new technology. That’s exactly what modern furniture retailer Design Within Reach did earlier this year when it moved to Demandware Inc.’s e-commerce platform.

“We really wanted to show off our product in a much grander way,” says Bethany Kemp, vice president of technology and information systems at Design Within Reach, which uses the URL DWR.com for its e-retail site. “We wanted to make use of the whole page.”

The new site, which uses responsive design so it works equally well on desktop and mobile devices, is more content-driven. It has more photos than before, including lifestyle images meant to show consumers how a product can be incorporated into different settings. A product page for the Planter side table, for example, which costs $700-$1,200 depending on the finish, includes three pictures of the table by itself, but now also includes three more images of it in a traditional living room, an outdoor room and in a loft. Kemp says the stylized images are ones the retailer already takes in the course of producing its printed catalog.

The redesign included adding a library of videos to DWR.com designed to inform and entertain shoppers. The videos—which appear in the “watch” module under the “explore” module in the page header—include interviews with furniture designers talking about their influences and how they came up with their designs. “The videos tell stories,” Kemp says. “You are investing in a product that has a rich history or an interesting current story with a designer. Video brings those products to life and gets people excited about it. People are faithful and loyal to us because they like the design story.”

Other content areas include:

• Learn, where consumers can read articles about the pros and cons of different textiles and materials.
• Plan, where consumers can experiment with a 3-D room planner to see how furniture will fit in their space.
• Dream, where the retailer features a certain look, and all the products available to achieve it. For example, one primer is on Danish modern design.

Feature-rich videos help sales performance, “especially for products that have features that aren’t easily explainable through a static image,” Kemp says, adding that DWR.com has found that email marketing that includes links to video content works better than emails without it.

Kemp says it took the retailer about three months to design and build the site on the Demandware platform. It designed all the pages in-house and hired Born, a developer and implementation firm, to create the templates and get everything into Demandware’s system.

The retailer’s design touch operates behind the scenes as well. Design Within Reach has been adding technology from Salesforce.com Inc., which bought Demandware earlier this year in a $2.8 billion deal, to tie online and offline shopping information together for each consumer. (Kemp says the e-retailer’s decision to use Demandware predated the Salesforce purchase. It already was a Salesforce client.) Design Within Reach runs its call center on Salesforce.com software already and is in the process of getting its sales associates to use it to place orders in its 34 showrooms. “It is a 360-degree hub we are trying to create,” Kemp says. All online order data submitted through Demandware gets automatically logged in the consumers’ record on Salesforce.com.

When fully launched, the system will let the retailer be more attuned to the needs of its online shoppers. When the new design is completed, a consumer will be able to see her complete purchase history and be shown products that complement prior purchases. Marketing would also connect to the data to customize the emails consumers receive and determine which catalog mailers are sent. “As we get to a more personalized marketing effort, we can begin targeting based on what you purchased in the past, such as suggesting a table to go with the bed you bought last year,” Kemp says. That’s opposed to showing more beds to a consumer who previously bought a bed.

Seventy e-retailers ranked in the Internet Retailer 2016 Top 500 Guide and Second 500 Guide say they use Demandware’s e-commerce platform, making it the third-most popular e-commerce platform offered by vendors among Top 1000 e-retailers, according to the Leading Vendors to the Top 1000 report. By comparison, 123 Top 1000 e-retailers say they use one or more service Salesforce.com offers.