PROCESS
Launching the company's first-ever e-commerce website was an important project as it centralized a variety of the organization's key initiatives from increasing sales to marketing to potential new customers (b2c & b2b), in addition to raising brand awareness and offering promotions to the brand loyalists. Behind the scenes, the website had to be intuitive and all for future scalability, so the website could evolve as the organization would in the years to come. Furthermore, a variety of different departments could maintain and build new content or launch new products or campaigns in their respective sections of the website.
As the strategic project lead for UX, UI, branding and creative direction, I immersed myself in the organization's goals, marketing initiatives as well as the consumer and competitor research. During my discovery process, I conducted internal design thinking workshops to better define and refine goals for the new website, based on purchasing behaviors, consumer habits, customer sentiment and competitor landscape.
I collaborated closely with client-side stakeholders and their marketing agency to outline a project plan and strategy. Knowledge of the ecommerce fulfillment technical capabilities and constraints was critical in order for us to properly scope and execute the project.
E-COMMERCE
Specific to e-commerce, we established key focal points throughout the experience that were key drivers to spotlight new or seasonal products, drive immediacy for promotions of new products or sales and launch marketing campaigns in new regions of the U.S. to tap into new consumer groups that were underserved. The underlying framework for the e-commerce flow was vital to reduce friction and cart abandonment to ultimately increase conversion.
MARKETING PLATFORM
The second pillar for this project is making the website a platform for story-telling to surface genuine moments and inspiration through the voice of the customers. Whether it's surfacing the everyday heroes that represent the blue-collar customer base to paying homage to the company's New England roots, family values and evolution of their coffee products.
Interwoven into this experience was a social component that pulled in all the Instagram stories that were tied to social campaigns, in addition to a blog where the company can share ideas, inspiration and additional content to further improve their SEO through meaningful content.
NEW DIGITAL BRANDING
Evolving the NEC brand began with an audit of existing multi-channel designs to understand the legacy of their visual language. Building out the new look and feel for the site was a vital opportunity to introduce a new design direction that would be implemented in various product touchpoints like point of sale, marketing deliverables for b2c/b2c and brand experiences. The strategy behind my new design direction centered on 3 key principles: honoring the extraordinary people in our lives, New England heritage and quality craftsmanship—an existing, yet underutilized narrative.
The new art direction that I proposed revamped the presentation of product shots, introduced new custom iconography and people-centric photography to drive home the visual story-telling.
