Gift retailer Things Remembered is best known for its personalized line of gifts -- pens, clocks, jewelry and picture frames -- memorabilia of treasured relationships and occasions, such as weddings, birthdays and graduations.

But the company is also known in circles that have little to do with bridesmaids or bar mitzvahs.

Things Remembered, a subsidiary of Cole National Corp., is also recognized for using cutting edge Web technology to create an online store that not only lets customers order engraved gifts but also gives users suggestions on which personalized gifts to buy.

Think of the husband who has no idea what to buy his wife for their anniversary or the groom who's stumped on whether to get his groomsmen the beer stein or just a six-pack.

According to the company, a robust site-personalization feature was responsible for giving its online business a major boost in sales.

What makes the company's site unique is a feature called eSpots, personalized promotional offers driven by WebSphere Commerce that can pop up on any page of the site. Leveraging WebSphere Personalization and WebSphere Commerce Accelerator, the new solution also supports cross-selling and up-selling campaigns that business managers can design and implement themselves -- without assistance from IT staff.

The Ohio-based company was recently recognized by Search400.com as the site's IT Excellence for E-business award winner. The award recognizes developers and end-user companies

that have taken Web development for the iSeries to the next level using Java, WebSphere, RPG and other tools.

Things Remembered has 800 stores nationwide, mail order catalogs and a toll-free call-in center, but its online store has become a critical channel for business.

In 1999, the 4,000-employee company created its first Web site using Microsoft Active Server Pages and SQL Server.

The company integrated its Web site with the central fulfillment module on its IBM iSeries using IBM WebSphere MQ -- and that's when things really took off.

"We're always looking for areas to improve," says Mark Fodor, director of e-business for Cole National. "So we decided to increase our personalized, targeted marketing capabilities to drive up average dollar sales and improve our conversion rate."

To achieve its goal, Things Remembered sought a new e-commerce engine capable of providing flexible and powerful personalization functionality with Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE)-compliant technology.

Things Remembered worked with IBM business partner Eviciti Corp. (now managed by Haverstick Consulting Inc.) to port its site to J2EE-compliant WebSphere Commerce, Professional Edition, Version 5.1. Eviciti finished an initial Microsoft Windows NT-based version of the site in time for the holiday season. Holiday revenues were double the previous year's, IBM said.

Despite its initial success, however, the company's work was not done. To support a projected peak visitor load of 100,000 shoppers per day, Things Remembered migrated its Web site to an iSeries server. The company also turned day-to-day management of the site over to IBM e-business hosting.

Things Remembered projects that its hosted site at the IBM e-business hosting center will raise its conversion rate by 50% per year and that the average dollar sales amount will increase by 8% to 10% per transaction.

"WebSphere Commerce is giving us the ability to create attractive promotions that include discounts, but despite the discounts, we expect our IBM solution to help us pull in more revenue," Fodor said.

According to information on the company's Web site, the components of WebSphere Commerce, Professional Edition, run on an iSeries Model 830 server along with IBM WebSphere Application Server, Advanced Edition, Version 3.5, which functions as a runtime environment for Java code. Also, on this iSeries server, IBM DB2 Universal Database functions as a staging database to manage data for WebSphere Commerce transactions. IBM WebSphere MQ performs assured messaging between the Web site and the back-end DB2 Universal Database, which runs on a separate iSeries server and manages the company's product and inventory data.

"The flexible programming environment provided by WebSphere Commerce has enabled us to tailor the site to our own business needs and create new opportunities," said Fodor. For example, a new Java servlet-based engraving application lets the user enter a message, choose a font and view the message in that font. This popular feature has enabled Things Remembered to do business over the Web with a new partner -- 1800flowers.com -- while delivering new value to customers.