Background
Totally Home is the brainchild of a successful regional retailing group. www.totallyhome.co.uk is an online store that has recently opened a high street presence, and offers a wide range of stylish furniture, lighting, paint, designer wallpapers, DIY and garden goods.
Brief
The client approached oneagency.co with a brief to design an ‘innovative’ site that would provide an easy to use, enjoyable online experience. The site needed to be clean in its design and allow the user to navigate through thousands of available products easily and offer them a modern and stylish way of doing so.
The brief also needed the development of the brand and house style throughout, to provide a distance from the existing (and regionally well known) existing brand. A target audience of ABC1 30 – 50 year olds was confirmed. It is understood from an extensive research campaign that women were the main influencers so the site needed to be aesthetically pleasing and lifestyle driven. However, this needed to be balanced with a clear ‘task led’ DIY angle for males.
Strategy
oneagency.co set out to create a modern, yet traditional retail led e-commerce store. The creative route was steered around a bright, colourful and modern looking brand with a strapline ‘love your home’. The ‘love’ message then became an integral part of the consumer message, dictating colour schemes and iconography.
From the very beginning oneagency.co and the client saw opportunities to use cutting edge development methods to engage with the site users. Key functionality includes a series of one offs that include:
Bespoke Moodboard – allowing users to add favoured products into their own flash based Moodboard. From here they can see how certain products ‘work with one another’ and save them in groups or ‘schemes’. Users save them by room and bundle their products together for reference and purchase. This interactive facility provides the ability for everyone to become their very own interior designer and store their wish list for future use. Obviously, the system can then track and research user interest in certain product ranges – invaluable tracking info for any retailer!
Unique Colour Search System – A new method of searching for all products by colour. Research told us consumers often make their interior purchasing decisions based around a colour palette. This led us to create a flash based colour search facility that allows users to simply choose their required colour range from a designers’ colour swatch. Their chosen colour swatch then interrogates the product database for relevant matches.
Project Checklists – The system allows users to see task led products by project. For example, users can choose ‘Wallpapering’ and can instantly see what is involved in undertaking this task. A simple checklist graphic allows them to buy all or any of the related products they need to carry out the task – simple!
Result
The website saw a positive impact immediately with sales and registered user interest. Promotion has been mainly based around online promotion via organic optimisation, affiliate and tactical paid promotion.
The site also won best Website Design & Innovation at Creative East Awards 2009 – a good excuse for team champagne and celebrations!
