Something borrowed, something new.
Kate Hines has shattered boundaries in fashion and design for 30 years. Her work has graced fashion editorial pages from Vogue to Martha Stewart Living. Through private labeling, retail and her personal collection on sale at KateHines.com, Kate has cultivated an international following. Her work continues to attract attention, including a recent social giving campaign in collaboration with Sundance Film Festival. In addition to setting a standard for modern jewelry design, Kate has valued customer feedback and touchpoints long before it was trendy in the industry to care.
There was just one problem. Kate's old website had grown tired. It didn't live-up to the elan of excellence in her work. The site had no space to tell stories about the design, materials or inspirations. The look and feel was outdated and she wasn't utilizing social media to drive traffic or broadcast links to her latest work. Their e-commerce tools and workflow were slow and outdated. Her team had to submit changes and work through the technical group to make changes to the site. There were no promo-code or wishlist functions to drive sales and promotions. In most instances, orders had to be entered by hand twice.
When Kate was referred to us, she had been working with two vendors - a designer for branding, and a technical firm for e-commerce and website maintenance. She would work with the designer to create a new look, then work with the technical firm to implement it. The workflow was time-consuming at its best and frustrating at its worst. RDI would provide Kate with branding and user-experience design, along with technical chops to back it up. Beauty and brains. Priceless.
Our project would revitalize the Kate Hines online brand experience, increase traffic and sales, and make order fulfillment a faster and easier task. Another goal for the project was to decrease the amount of print advertising Kate Hines needed to buy in order meet sales numbers. Since Kate's last website launch, Social Media had bloomed. We wanted to take advantage of traffic and branding from social media outlets - without the need to commit long hours from Kate or her studio.
Overall, we wanted to modernize the online brand experience, drive more traffic, and create opportunities to reward and interact with customers. And so it began.
In the initial planning, we conducted discovery and requirements definition sessions. These sessions created the project scope and an accurate estimate of time and budget. We decided on a three-phase approach, as follows. Phase 1: Get control of online assets and redesign the existing homepage (the Summer season was rapidly approaching). During the homepage redesign, we'd use that time to get to know Kate's business and customers more and create a design that could be extended in later phases. In Phase 2: we would completely redesign and re-deploy a new online storefront built on the Drupal content management system and using Drupal's Ubercart modules for e-commerce. Last but not least, Phase 3: Maintain the site, train the Kate Hines studio on using the Drupal storefront and consult to help bring the social media tasks in-house.
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