SUCCESS STORY
MillerKnoll is a collective of iconic design brands—including Herman Miller and Design Within Reach—united by a belief that good design makes life better. Their products are considered investments: crafted to last, chosen with care, and researched thoroughly before purchase by a loyal base of discerning customers who prioritize quality.
In a category of premium, often high-ticket items that might sit in a home for years, customer confidence is essential. The MillerKnoll team went to great lengths to ensure shoppers are equipped with authentic validation and inspiration from satisfied customers so they know their purchases will meet their needs. The results speak volumes:
Increase in conversion when shoppers engage with reviews
Increase in conversion when shoppers engage with Q&A
Increase in reviews collected during sweepstakes campaigns
Luxury furniture is a high-consideration category. Shoppers rarely buy on impulse; they take their time to research, compare, and seek out experiences and recommendations from people who have already made the investment.
Products with at least five reviews are 270% more likely to be purchased on average than products with no reviews. For higher-priced items like many of those in the MillerKnoll catalog, that conversion rate increase grows as high as 380%.
MillerKnoll recognized that breadth of authentic review content across their product detail pages was essential to giving customers the confidence they needed to convert.
The challenge for its brands was twofold:
Research from PowerReviews by Syndigo, a leading provider of solutions for managing user-generated content like product ratings and reviews, reveals a simple yet intuitive insight: 76% of shoppers are more motivated to write a review when offered an incentive.
MillerKnoll put that insight into action. In collaboration with PowerReviews, they launched a sweepstakes campaign offering pieces of furniture in exchange for honest, high-quality customer feedback about products. They used a series of post-purchase emails to highlight the opportunity and solicit timely reviews.
To maintain transparency and customer trust, reviews accumulated via this sweepstakes program are clearly marked.
The results were immediate: a nearly 400% increase in reviews collected during the campaign window.
“During a comparable 53-day period prior to our first sweepstakes campaign, we collected 353 reviews across Herman Miller and Design Within Reach,” Rhys shared. “During our first sweepstakes campaign, the total review count across both brands increased to 1,801 reviews. This represents an increase of 1,448 reviews, or approximately 400% growth compared to the pre-sweepstakes period.”
MillerKnoll has since run the sweepstakes twice more, turning a one-time test into a reliable engine for review generation.
Many of MillerKnoll’s products appear across multiple ecommerce sites. MillerKnoll uses PowerReviews’ intrasite review syndication to get that content out of each site silo and share review content between properties. Now reviews that are generated on the Herman Miller online store can be shown on matching product pages for the same items on the Design Within Reach site, and vice versa.
“With more than 160 brands and over 150,000 products in our portfolio, scale is always a consideration, said Rhys Hall, Web Merchandiser for MillerKnoll. “For products that appear on both Herman Miller and Design Within Reach, intrasite syndication allows us to share reviews across both sites. Rather than building review content from scratch in each place, we can maximize the value of every review, helping shoppers make more informed decisions and create a consistent experience across our brands.”
MillerKnoll’s customer review program doesn’t just inspire confidence in future shoppers. It’s also a goldmine of invaluable feedback the company itself can use to improve fulfillment, product management, and R&D.
Instead of gathering dust on the product page, negative reviews are compiled and shared on a biweekly basis with procurement, merchandising, and product development teams that use the feedback to make real changes to products, shipping, and PDP presentation.
One recent example of this process in action: when a pattern of customer feedback emerged around cushion quality in one sofa collection, the Jonas Sofa line, MillerKnoll was able to act quickly to get ahead of the problem.
The web team, procurement, product development, and their vendor aligned quickly around a strategy. Customers who had purchased earlier versions were proactively offered updated cushions at no cost. The product itself underwent a full redesign, now reflected across all PDPs in the collection.
The proof showed up in the next wave of reviews. Post-update feedback reflected exactly what MillerKnoll had hoped to hear—that the changes worked. A product concern became a story of responsiveness and brand integrity.
“Reviews started as a way to build trust and help customers shop with confidence, but they’ve become much more than that,” Rhys explained. “Today, they’re one of our most valuable sources of customer insight. By putting that feedback in front of the teams responsible for our product design and customer experience, we’re able to learn from every purchase and use those insights to drive continuous improvement.”
Q&A drives even stronger results, with a 566% lift in conversion for engaged shoppers.
Even filtering for 1-star reviews—a behavior that might seem to work against purchase intent—drives a 300% increase in conversion. Transparency above all builds the kind of trust that converts.
To fulfill their ambitious goals for product feedback, MillerKnoll needed more than a ratings widget. They needed a platform that could support the full lifecycle of customer voice, from incentivized collection and cross-brand syndication to internal review routing and PDP analytics. PowerReviews delivers all of it in one place:
