Delivering £15m in online sales for Vivienne Westwood

OVERVIEW

Global fashion brand, Vivienne Westwood entrusted Creode to manage their e-commerce infrastructure to deliver over £15m online sales each year. As a specialist Drupal agency, Creode was in its element.


OBJECTIVES
  • Create a multi-site set up on the Drupal platform, including Drupal Commerce
  • Achieve greater functionality, including allowing Vivienne Westwood’s marketing team to manage international versions of its site from one central location
  • Whilst having the capability of being managed from a single Drupal install, each site had to be managed independently by local teams and global admins.
TARGET AUDIENCE

A real mix. 30 year-old plus individuals with above average disposable incomes who appreciate high quality clothing, which has a punk but chic edge—but also quintessentially British in attitude. Also teens to mid-twenties who are into designer names, but veer to something a little more rebellious or quirkier than other designer labels.

Vivienne Westwood 1
Vivienne Westwood 2
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INSIGHT

Research showed that shoppers of fashion—even online—want more of a browsing experience. In other words, contrary to many e-commerce sites, this wasn’t a clinical direct-to-purchase journey.


CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT

The original website was a complex build, using the Drupal CMS platform including Drupal Commerce to deliver the ecommerce functionality.

We began by carrying out a full audit of the website codebase, site structure and all the dependencies. We included modules and 3rd party integrations. Our recommendation was for the site build to be refactored to make it fit for purpose.

Building on this technical aspect and based on the insight, we also felt there was an important brand story to tell as well. And after discovering a disconnect between ecommerce and content areas of the site, we reconciled this to bring out the full potential of everything that Vivienne Westwood stood for.

Based around the idea of serendipitous discovery, reflecting a physical in-store shopping experience, our team conceived and prototyped an innovative and unique user experience.

Site users could explore videos, images, articles and products on an infinite canvas, initially by gesture based interaction, and then once a topic of interest had been identified, by following overlapping themes.

The interaction allowed users to discover new aspects of the brand and understand more about the driving force behind it, as well as pushing increased interest in the product ranges associated with brand content. The whole experience helped to make more people invested in the Vivienne Westwood name.

We greatly improved the website architecture and increased site speed. This had the effect of vastly improving the ease at which users could navigate the site and ultimately make purchases.

The list of improvements included:

  • overall website performance
  • reduced hosting costs
  • faster development of new functionality
  • faster deployment times
  • increased site security
  • significant reduction in site downtime.

… plus a brand experience that brought the customers closer to Vivienne Westwood

As well as the above improvements, Creode helped Vivienne Westwood achieve annual digital sales of over £15m an increase of over 30%.

Creode has still worked with the brand to improve the site in terms of visibility, security and profitability.


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