ABOUT

The brief:
Rethink the retail website for Goldsmiths, one of the most familiar and well-loved jewellers on the British high street, while also creating a separate site for the prestigious jewellery brand, Mappin & Webb.

Poke’s answer:
We created two very distinct and hard-working brand websites. Both of which now deliver multi-channel retailing on any device to very different audiences, each with unique brand challenges.

Nitty gritty:
The Aurum Group (who own both Goldsmiths and Mappin & Webb) tasked us with creating state-of-the-art shopping experiences using the increasingly popular Hybris Accelerator platform. What’s more, they needed them to run from a single instance of the application, requiring us to base our designs on a common set of customer journeys and wireframes.

The two brands occupy different market positions and have distinct challenges.

Goldsmiths is a high street favourite known for its watch and jewellery retailing, but now increasingly looking to develop its multichannel proposition.

Mappin & Webb meanwhile is a jeweller with two Royal warrants and a rich heritage stretching back hundreds of years. They offer affordable luxury and are looking to grow into new markets.

This project let us put our past experience of designing for high-end platforms like IBM Websphere to good use. We designed the customer journeys to address the different brand challenges and identified the common areas to create a shared component-based approach. This allowed each brand to shine in their own unique way, whilst creating efficiencies in design, build and on-going maintenance.

From the outset we knew how important mobile would be to the jewellery buyer. By swapping the fixed-width CSS framework normally bundled with Hybris Accelerator, and instead integrating a modern responsive framework, we were able to bring forward mobile support on the product roadmap by six months. That meant we could deliver a true digital multi-channel experience, integrating with the physical retail estate to offer ‘click & collect’ functionality.

For our style conscious Goldsmiths audience we took our design cues from fashion retailers. We modernised the brand design framework, refreshed the photography and art direction and championed an editorial approach that re-aligned their jewellery as a fashion component.

While we were at it, we also honed the checkout flows for each brand, addressed some very complex payment permutations and created new product photography and design guidelines. Finally, we developed autumn and winter retail campaigns, both online and in-store.

Highlights:
- Pushing the Hybris Accelerator to its very limits