C·Top & Natural Stone
Turning specifiers into a growth engine
The mismatch: treating designers like buyers
In Cosentino's digital ecosystem, C-Top was originally conceived as an e-commerce catalog for architects and interior designers. But that model contradicted how specifiers actually work.
Designers don't buy slabs or manage workshop inventory. Forcing them into an impulsive checkout flow made no sense. Their day-to-day job is consultative: specifying finishes, budgeting rooms, and presenting options to homeowners or developers. Because the platform treated them like industrial buyers, adoption stayed flat.
My goal was to pivot the experience from an impractical shop into a project estimator, while designing a natural stone reservation service that acts as a commercial push engine across the supply chain.
From a transactional shop to a project estimator
We redesigned C-Top around how design studios pitch projects to their clients:
Room-based estimates: Designers can calculate material requirements for specific rooms (kitchens, bathrooms, wall cladding) and save formal quotes instead of adding items to a cart.
Direct bridge to Smart Connect 360: Saved project estimates sync automatically into the commercial CRM (Smart Connect 360), alerting regional account reps to assist with pricing or follow up on specifications.
Client-ready presentations: Created an export view that strips internal trade discounts and markup jargon, producing clean specification sheets that designers can present directly to end-clients during moodboard reviews.
Before vs. after UI evolution of the project budgeting workspace
The commercial push: Natural stone reservation
Natural stone (granite, quartzite, marble) is inherently unique: every slab has distinctive veining that cannot be communicated through generic thumbnails.
Previously, when a homeowner requested natural stone, the fabricator often sourced slabs from third-party stone yards, causing Cosentino to lose the sale. We turned this dynamic around by launching a digital slab reservation service directly for kitchen studios and interior designers:
Designer & Kitchen studios browse real slab lots -> reserve specific slab IDs online for an specific fabricator -> Fabricator is instructed to buy that exact batch from Cosentino (Push effect) -> Zero margin leakage to competitor stone yards
By allowing studios to inspect high-resolution lot imagery and reserve physical slabs at the nearest regional Center, we locked in customer preference early. When the fabricator was hired to cut the kitchen, they were mandated to purchase those exact reserved slabs from Cosentino, cutting out competitor distributors.
Slab lot gallery
Validating the flow through usability testing
Because reserving raw stone carries commercial and logistical stakes, I ran usability tests with design studios and kitchen retailers to validate the prototype before development.
Core actions, discovering the section, switching regional warehouses, inspecting slab lot details, and completing a reservation, performed smoothly with minimal friction. However, the sessions surfaced two critical operational and behavioral insights:
Mental model for active reservations: When looking for their secured slabs, users did not navigate through operational tables; the vast majority instinctively clicked their top-right user profile icon, expecting "their" reservations to live in their personal account space. We iterated the global navigation to align with this standard mental model.
Indicative pricing vs. commercial autonomy: Displaying exact trade prices created tension, as specifiers feared it would interfere with the final quotes and markups stonemasons charge homeowners. Instead of an exact figure or complete opacity, we introduced indicative price tiers. This gave designers a reliable reference point to budget projects without disrupting stonemason pricing agreements.
These behavioral nuances directly shaped the release, turning an unfamiliar reservation process into an intuitive, trusted workflow.
Usability test artifact showing tested prototype
Outcomes and business impact
Aligned mental models: Replaced a rigid transactional cart with an active project estimator tailored to how architects and designers present finishes to clients.
Captured demand (Push Strategy): Empowered showrooms to reserve unique natural stone lots directly, securing specifications early and locking in material purchases through regional fabrication networks.
Evidence-based usability improvements: Usability testing validated fluid discovery and warehouse switching while surfacing key behavioral fixes: centralizing active reservations within the user profile menu and introducing indicative price tiers that provide budget guidance without compromising stonemason markups.
Connected sales operations: Created a live pipeline between specifier project estimates and commercial reps in Smart Connect 360, turning digital research into real sales leads.