Our website was built in 2001. This fall, twenty-five years later, we replaced it.
We designed and built it ourselves, without an agency. There are 790 products on it, 714 of them as 3D models you can turn around and recolour in any finish we make. The map holds 1,058 installations. Most of that has never been online before.
Most of it, we made with you
A large share of our catalogue started out as a solution to a specific problem. A landscape architect needed a bench to wrap a curve nobody makes a bench for. A parks department wanted a receptacle its crew could service in half the time. We drew them and we built them. Then the drawings went into a folder.
Many are on the site today for the first time. Same with the photography: roughly 3,000 images and films, far more than has ever been public. Nearly everything we sell, we designed with somebody.
Made with a client
Drawn for one project, now on the site
Mackenzie Modular Bench 11ft - Right Angle
MKSB-11R
Rutherford Heavy Duty Picnic Table with Shade and Rain Cover
RPTFS-6-SRC
Rutherford Wheelchair Accessible Planter - 28" Depth
RPLWC-72-28
Urban Form Backless Bench with Storage Pockets, Armrest & Center Armrest 6ft
UFBB-SP-ACA-6
Strataview Step Bench 6ft
SVSB-72-42
Heart Shaped Bench
HSB
Start with a photograph
There is no product grid on the front page. Instead you get photography of real installations, mixed with the products that appear
in them. So you can arrive wanting nothing more specific than “something for a waterfront path” and still land somewhere useful.
Every photograph knows what is in it. Hover or tap one and the products it contains come forward.
Filter the way you specify
Everyone arrives with the same two questions. What does this look like, in this finish, at this size? And what does the documentation say? So the filters are configurations. On seating you can ask for backless, with armrests, wall top or center armrest, and the counts update as you go. Tables, waste receptacles, planters, bike racks, bollards, site accents and buildings all work the same way.
Every product page is a configurator
This is where most of the work went.
See it in your finish. The chair below is live on this page. Spin it, look underneath, and change the lumber and powder coat while you watch: 10 lumber options, 26 powder-coat colours.
Stand it in the space. On a phone, the AR button puts the bench on the ground in front of you. Full size, before you spec it.
Every option in the open. 49 options and add-ons: plaques, anchors, armrests, custom work. The things that used to surface halfway through a phone call are on the page.
Spec sheets that match. One press gives you a one-page PDF of the product exactly as you configured it, with a link back to that configuration.
The whole family, sideways. A six-foot bench with armrests is one click from the backless five-footer.
JEM Lounge Chair
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Everything else is at Spec Sheets & Downloads: drawings, CAD and Revit files, warranties, care and installation guides, all searchable by product. We have also written up how a bench is made and what sustainability means here, in specifics.
Wishbone Studio
Studio is where a quote comes together. Every product you add from the site lands in a project, and the project has three views of the same list.
The quote
This is the heart of it. Each product sits on its own line with its configuration, finishes, add-ons and quantity, and you can change any of them. Add a note to a line, attach a drawing or a photo of the site, and tell us the date you need it. When it is ready, request the quote and it comes to our sales team with everything attached.
The 3D space planner
Lay a project out in three dimensions and move the furniture around on it. What it gives you is scale. How a bench, a receptacle and a bike rack sit next to each other at real size, before any of it is ordered. Two benches side by side in the same finish answer a question a spec sheet cannot.
If you work in CAD, you can import a SketchUp or 3D file and lay our furniture onto your real site plan. We switch that on per account, so ask us.
The board
Beside the plan is a board. Pin photographs, drop finish samples, leave notes, mark up what you like and what you do not. Share the whole project with your client and let them add to it.
Where it all ended up
2,538 installations with 16,376 products are on a public map, with around 1,270 photographs of them. A community park in Langley, a hospital courtyard in New Westminster, a schoolyard that had to move and be rebuilt. They run from Vancouver Island across the country and well into the United States. Search for your own park or school and see whether it's there.
Still a conversation
One thing to be plain about: this is not an automated quote system. Pressing Get quote does not buy anything, and no robot prices your job.
The site gathers everything before the conversation starts. The configuration, the finishes, the options, the quantities, the date you need it, your site plan and drawings. When one of our people picks it up, they already know what you are working with. The first reply is a useful one instead of a list of questions.
We have known some of our clients for twenty years. No software improves on that.
Expect a few rough edges
The new site has been live for a few weeks. We have demonstrated it on the floor at three trade shows, and a good part of what you see now came from people standing at the booth and telling us what they could not find.
It is a new platform and we built it in-house, so there was no agency test team behind it. With 790 products, 36 finishes and a 3D model on most pages, you will run into things we have not. A model might load in the wrong colour, or a drawing might be filed under the wrong bench.
When that happens, tell us. The Help us improve button is on every page and it comes straight to the people who built the site. Say what you were doing and what went wrong. We read every report, and so far they have made the site better each week.
There is more still to bring up, too, and we will keep going.
Thank you, John and Todd
The site we are replacing was built by John and Todd at The Joe Rich Project. It was the first website either of them had ever made. It went up in 2001 and carried this company for twenty-five years. Almost nothing built for the web lasts a quarter of a century. Theirs did, and a great deal of what Wishbone became was sold through it. Thank you both.