William & Son – Selling Luxury

William & Son

Head of Marketing: Lou McCloud
Marketing Manager: Delphine Baz
Marketing: Chloe Sapsford
Digital & E-Commerce Executive: Alice Rivier

Material Organisation (MO)

UI Designer: Jai Sandhu
Manager: Stuart Tyson

HAVAS

Project Manager: Segun Ogunsey
Head of Development: Anton McCoy
Head of UX: James Sinclair

Background

W&S, a luxury goods company based in Mayfair, focuses on promoting Britishness. The marketing team had limited digital experience, an e-commerce platform they didn’t fully understand or utilise, and a frontend developed by MO, who excelled in print work but lacked online expertise. Additionally, there was no visibility into customer interactions with their website due to missing tracking codes.

The Challenge

Migrate W&S from Magento to a platform better suited to their needs
Empower the marketing team to make data-driven decisions, restructure product metadata, and optimise their e-commerce site using analytics
Provide a detailed design for MO to implement the user interface

Approach

Strategically, the marketing team and our team decided to separate guns from other products to improve SEO and marketing efforts
Implemented full tracking code on the existing site to gain insight and demonstrate to the marketing team how data could inform their decisions
Focused on two main problems: making products easily findable and designing a suitable interface for a luxury brand
Developed a high-fidelity prototype to make the design tangible and facilitate the marketing team’s understanding and contribution to design decisions
Exposed gaps and inconsistencies in metadata as the prototype was built on the product catalogue, allowing the marketing team to refine product filters and descriptions
Tasked W&S with modifying their product catalogue, which would later be imported into the e-commerce platform
Skipped wireframing, as e-commerce sites have well-established design patterns, and focused on reviewing best practices for luxury market designs to inform our approach
Dedicated more time to refining the design for MO’s takeover