Ennis & Brown

Ennis & Brown make dining tables and furniture to order from a farmyard barn in Tring. Third generation, family run, started in 1989 when the grandparents converted part of a pig barn into an antique shop.

Around 95% of what they sell is made to order on a twelve-week lead time. A table runs into the thousands. And for most of the company's life, the way you bought one was to drive to the barn, walk around it, put your hands on the oak, talk to Nick or Justin, and leave a deposit.

That showroom is the best sales tool the business has. The website wasn't close to it.

The work was identifying what the showroom does that a website structurally cannot, then engineering each of those things back in. It's the same problem across all high-consideration, high-AOV category.

Four things happen in that barn:

1. Touch and feel. You hold the timber. You understand the quality of the materials and craftsmanship.

2. Trust. You meet the people who have invested so much of their time and energy into building these products.

3. Education. You learn how it's made, what the options mean, how long it takes, how it arrives, how to look after it.

4. Flexible payment. You leave a deposit and pay the balance nearer delivery. With a lead time of up to 12 weeks, payment terms act as an initial handshake between buyer and seller.

Their Shopify store did quite a lot of this well, though it mainly acted as a lead generation tool and a way for the merchant to sell in-stock items. For bespoke products, the configurator was built on Infinite Options - a third party app that was difficult for the merchant to update, and restrictive on the design front - ultimately limitting the level of experience that can be delivered online. At the time this was the best viable solution given Shopify's 100 variant limit. The variant limit has since increased, giving merchants the flexibility to explore alternative solutions that leverage Shopify's native capabilities.

We migrated Ennis & Brown off the third-party plugin and rebuilt the configurator natively in Shopify on metaobjects.

That decision did most of the heavy lifting. Options, finishes, edge profiles, sizes and rustic grades became structured, reusable data rather than app-locked settings - which is what lets the catalogue run to 150 products and roughly 20,000 variants without the merchandising team hand-maintaining it, and lets new product lines launch in hours rather than being a redevelopment job.

It also meant every downstream feature - pricing, imagery, lead time messaging, deposits - could read from one source of truth.

We designed around a mobile-first experience to make sure Ennis & Brown were able to engage with a mobile-first customer base.

Small swatch chips and dropdowns are the default pattern in configurators, and they're useless when the material is the product.

We built the selection experience around large swatches with full-screen zoom, so customers can properly inspect an oak finish, an edge shape, or a rustic level before committing. Every option carries a plain-English explainer. The goal was that a customer finishes the flow genuinely understanding what they've chosen.

We put the people back in. Merchant faces, the workshop, testimonials, and real past orders sit throughout the product experience, so customers know who they're actually buying from before they have to ask.

As you configure, you see the options explained, the price update live, the lead time stated clearly, and how the piece will be delivered - including who will be delivering it.

Many of these changes have come from listening to customers and continuously iterating on the website to enhance the customer experience.

The last gap was payment, and it's the one most people diagnose wrongly.

During early discussions we walked Ennis & Brown through the obvious routes - Shopify Payments in full, Shop Pay Instalments, Klarna. They were clear on why none of them fit. Ennis & Brown's customers don't have an affordability problem. They're typically wealthy, and actively averse to consumer finance, which is relatively new in the UK and still carries some stigma.

The deposit is a trust mechanism, not a financing product. Customers put money down and often ring up to check they haven't picked a strange combination of options - the deposit is what starts the conversation, exactly as it does in the barn.

Shopify has no native partial payment, so in May 2026 we implemented Downpay. Customers can now pay a 50% deposit at checkout, with the balance charged automatically to the card on file seven days before delivery - the same terms Ennis & Brown have used in person for years. Deposit and balance stay on a single Shopify order, so the admin side doesn't turn into a call, an invoice and a chase.

"Offering a deposit option has added a level of trust and confidence." — Nick Brown, Ennis & Brown

Downpay published their own write-up of the launch and the numbers behind it: read the Downpay case study →

June and July are normally Ennis & Brown's quietest months of the year. In 2026 they were the two strongest months in the company's history, back to back.

+267% year-on-year sales

+51% year-on-year average order value

+38% checkout conversion since the deposits launch

70% of online orders now placed with a deposit

The AOV movement matters most. Customers aren't just converting more often - they're specifying more expensive tables, because the experience gives them enough confidence to choose the upgrade.

Ennis & Brown still do the majority of their business in the showroom, and they're on the phone to customers all day. That's an advantage, not a liability - they hear the objections and the confusion first-hand.

We work to a continuous cycle: what gets learned in the barn gets ported to the site. It's why this engagement is a retainer rather than a project, and it's the reason the numbers have kept climbing since launch.