Galerie 1 2 3
Cruncher and :ratio partnered to design and build a beautiful online gallery, a web shop and an inventory manager for Galerie 1 2 3, the world’s biggest restorer and reseller of vintage posters.
Gallery 1 2 3, found in the heart of the Eaux-Vives neighbourhood of Geneva, houses one of the biggest collections of vintage publicity posters in the world.
As well as managing its collection of more than 20,000 posters, the gallery has developed an expertise in restoration and conservation.
In 2016, the Galerie decided to modernise its website and to merge it with their old paper-based cataloguing system that relied on an old database, and manage everything on a single platform.
Cruncher and Ratio have brought us into the era of e-commerce. Thanks to them we have one of the most well-designed and performant websites in our industry. It's a pleasure to work with such pros.
Before developing the new site, Cruncher had to merge an Acces2 database dating back to 1994 and containing 15,000 entries each of 200 or so fields, with the database powering the existing Joomla website, migrating the data to a single relational database of around 4 million fields.
Being able to manage our catalogue on a single platform was a big challenge, but the result has given our team a new level of productivity, followed by a growth in the number of visitors and sales online.
Once complete, development moved to Django, beginning with an implementation of a fast indexing engine that enables drill-down searches through the dozens of categories in the catalogue. With the help of the information architecture, user experience and graphic design work of :ratio, Cruncher then built the new site around this new database and engine.
As a result the new site is simple and fast, taking but a few clicks to explore the entire catalogue and discover, for example, winter sports posters in Switzerland between 1914 and 1939 in a 65 x 100cm format. And of course, the link to that result is shareable.
We implemented an ad-hoc e-commerce module integrated into the site, allowing users to order and pay online, and managing the stock and transport logistics of sold items. Further modules for events and exhibitions were developed and integrated with a newsletter.
