Visual language unifies a global brand for increased sales

To solve this, Guidance had to restructure Hearst’s product organization and build it back up product by product. For each brand, Guidance created a new product taxonomy which served as the underpinnings of the navigation that was rolled out. In doing so, a single navigational pattern emerged to satisfy the product taxonomies of over 20 different brands. Furthermore, Hearst was looking for a navigational structure that would permit any customer to engage with the family of brands from one location. The Super Navigation that sits at the top of each brand site allows a Hearst customer to easily jump from brand to brand without interrupting their overall user experience. As the user navigates from brand to brand, the universal Shopping Cart and SSO (Single Sign-On) My Account area allows products from various brands to be added to a single shopping cart and purchased together.

The global navigation now unites multiple Hearst magazines and permits the customer a multi-brand experience; the customer feels immersed in the Hearst parent brand while navigating through any child company. Whereas bundled products were not possible in the legacy platforms, the new unified platform with global cart and checkout allows for unlimited upsell and cross-sell opportunities. Not only does this help the customer familiarize with Hearst’s full portfolio of brands, the multi-store solution allows crosspollination across the entire experience. Customers can easily locate products with enhanced search, discover new products recommendations and checkout through an entirely unified user experience.

Migrating from Magento EE 1.x to Magento 2.3 Commerce Cloud

Guidance upgraded Hearst from on-premise Magento EE 1.x to Magento 2.3 Commerce Cloud to take advantage of ongoing Adobe security and infrastructure maintenance. This new infrastructure includes extensions like Fastly CDN and ElasticSearch and the cloud architecture will simplify scaling of the environment services as needed. One of the most important features is the unification of all brands under one platform thereby facilitating the management of all stores under one cart and checkout solution. This drastically reduces the need to duplicate resources for each store and creates a visual language dictated by the parent company Hearst and uniquely customizable for each brand in the company’s portfolio.

Improved speed and delivery with Fastly CDN

Hearst’s legacy is in its glossy, full-page imagery and content-heavy publications but such rich graphics, while visually stunning, pose page and image load issues online. Fastly CDN (Content Delivery Network) was chosen for its world-class dynamic site acceleration so desktop and mobile content is served seamlessly to the customer with no disruptions in load speed. The cloud platform enhances delivery of large objects (video or audio) and impressive imagery by accelerating dynamic assets and caching unpredictably changing content. The improved content delivery is a game changer for companies requiring ecommerce deployment with large objects, such as Hearst.

Global cart and checkout solution for increased sales

With all brands unified on the Magento 2.3 Commerce Cloud platform, the Hearst team required a global cart and checkout solution. The new cart and checkout needed the parent company’s branding but with a look and feel that maintains each brand’s uniqueness. In redesigning the single shopping cart and checkout, Guidance had the opportunity to make huge improvements to the buying experience with a vastly improved subscription product detail page. And with mobile sales dominating ecommerce, the Guidance team ensured an efficient and sleek mobile first design resulting in a better shopping experience and increased sales.

Magento Page Builder for unparalleled flexibility

While the upgrade to Magento 2.3 Commerce Cloud permits the unification of all brands onto one platform, the Hearst team was searching for a solution for a sleek, efficient design approach to scale each brand’s web presence. Guidance created a cohesive look throughout all the brands by implementing Magento’s Page Builder with custom modules built to Hearst’s branding specifications. It allows the Hearst team to quickly and simply build pages with drag and drop functionality while maintaining the branding’s layouts and functionality. Guidance designed and developed Magento’s Page Builder modules and empowered the Hearst team with detailed on-site training to ensure success for future scalability.

The project presented an interesting challenge in that the Page Builder layout required a visual language unique to each brand (over 27 of them!) while being housed in Hearst branding. The solution required single page templates for Homepage, Product Landing Page (PLP), Product Description Page (PDP), Gift Guides, etc for over 27 brands. The Guidance creative team solved this requirement with colors and styles for each brand in addition to consistent conventions across every brand and an overarching, unifying parent brand for Hearst.