ABOUT

The brief:
Rethink the retail website for Mappin & Webb, one of the most prestigious jewellers on the high street, while also creating an entirely separate site for high street jewellery chain, Goldsmiths.

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

Nitty gritty:
The Aurum Group (who own both Mappin & Webb and Goldsmiths) 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.

Mappin & Webb is a jeweller with two Royal warrants and a rich heritage stretching back hundreds of years. They offer luxury to a sophisticated and discerning customer.

Goldsmiths meanwhile is a high street favourite known for its watch and jewellery retailing..

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 Mappin & Webb, we focused on bringing their brand proposition to life. Greater emphasis was placed on evocative content and storytelling around occasion-based buying moments. To create a more enjoyable, luxurious experience we took a spacious and calm approach to the design.

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.
- Seeing POKE in print – adorning Mappin & Webb’s flagship Regent Street store window at Christmas time, no less.