Selfridges Brand Boutiques
Building compelling Brand pages for users to discover and shop
The goal of this project was to elevate the Brand pages that exist on selfridges.com.
Selfridges works with hundreds of Brands which all offer unique experiences and products but this wasn’t easily distinguishable.
The aim was to help users feel connected and inspired to each Brand, helping them to explore and shop. As well as provide Brands a more bespoke experience on selfridges.com.
The problem
When visiting a Brand Boutique in a Selfridges store, you get lost in the experience. The Brands’ personality and offering shines through, welcoming you into their space.
This wasn’t the case for the website, the Brand pages lacked creativity and individuality.
We wanted to create a similar feeling and experience that store Brand Boutiques gave.
So the question became: How do we showcase Brands on the website so customers feel immersed in their world?
Steps taken
I did numerous store walks, assessing Brands visual merchandising and way-finding.
Spoke with the Brand representatives, asking for any information they could share about the store experience and customers.
Conducted an audit of current Brand Boutique pages and assessed the user journey, hierarchy of the page and visual elements.
Met with Brand Partnerships teams to gather more information about each Brand and their requirements.
Learnt how each Brand page was setup and implemented with Optimisation, SEO and Content teams.
Researched competitors to inspire design work and ensure ours would differ in uniqueness.
Frequently presented and tested design ideas, making any necessary iterations from feedback.
Collaborated with various teams, gathering stakeholder needs and goals.
Challenges
Managing the Brands requirements and expectations. Many Brands had strong opinions on how they wanted their Brand page to look. However, a lot of their suggestions weren’t possible as they didn’t align with the Selfridges Design System or it wasn’t technically possible. Communicating this to Brands was a test of influence and negotiation skills.
The Brand Boutique pages would need to be re-built in the future due to a bigger migration project. This meant we were limited to using existing components and not creating anything new. Having little design flexibility challenged how creative we could be.
Final outcomes
We were working with big & small Brands that had a varying amount of products and assets to showcase.
Top Brands were keen to take up space on the website, whereas smaller Brands had less to offer. To meet the needs of Brand differences, we created custom Landing Pages which were content rich. Then utilised Listing Pages for smaller Brands.
In summary:
Full page takeovers for top Brands, injecting personality through inspirational imagery, pull quotes and logo embellishment.
Able to make small adjustments to current components, elevating experience and meeting Brand requirements. E.g. Adding custom colours
Created a dynamic template so component hierarchy can differ if necessary, this was essential for some top Brands.
Successfully improved the visual aesthetic of Brand pages, validated by Brand feedback.
Improved user journey with more accessible and compelling doorways/calls to action.
Created custom BLPs (Brand Listing Pages) with Hero images and pull quotes, adding Brand influence whilst shopping product.
Thank you for reading.