Who is Mary Maxim?

Mary Maxim is a family-owned craft and needlework mail-order company with a long history in North America. It’s the largest such company in North America and has American and Canadian offices. Its roots can be traced back to Sifton, Manitoba, Canada, where Willard and Olive McPhedrain began a mail order company titled “Sifton Products.” In the late 1950s they became increasingly popular for their bulky, knit sweaters with designs influenced by North American Wildlife. 

The Challenge

When Mary Maxim came to us, their focus was on giving their customers as much choice as possible when it came to buying their products. Mary Maxim has a huge catalogue and thousands of products, and products that have dozens of variations. 

One of their products are bundles where a customer receives everything they need to create a piece. For example, an Afghan package comes with a set number of balls of yarn, depending on the size chosen, a bag and a pattern that the customer can purchase and use to make the Afghan/Throw.

The added challenge is that each Afghan has its own pattern and comes in a number of different colored yarns. The customer uses swatches to create their perfect Afghan based on size and color. 

How Westmount Solutions Helped

1. Replatforming from Magento to Shopify Plus

Mary Maxim was using Magento as their platform. Since Magento 1 support was officially stopped in 2020, Mary Maxim wanted to start using Shopify Plus. This, of course, required a replatforming solution. 

We took care of migrating their store to their new platform and everything that entailed, including content, customer and product data. Thinking of migrating your store from Magento to Shopify? Check out our blog on migrating from Magento to Shopify. 

2. Bold Integration

As a Bold Elite Partner, Westmount Solutions has deep knowledge of their software’s capability. Using Bold Product Options, Mary Maxim can now show the customer the swatches for each option set. 

3. Theme Customization

On Mary Maxim’s preferred Shopify theme, we edited the product template’s functionality to allow for bundle products that include yarn, tools and their variations such as colors and sizes. When a customer chooses a color, everything is bundled. We created over 400 bundles linked to 1500 individual products!

The Final Word

This project was done in several phases, as Mary Maxim required several changes, starting from theme migration, to theme customization and Bold integration. The outcome is that Mary Maxim has successfully migrated their store from Magento to Shopify and is able to give their customers product bundles, a seamless shopping and checkout experience and a clear indication of whether a product is in stock or not.