CREATING RELATABLE LUXURY IN A GLOBAL MIGRATION

One of the most obvious challenges for a business that makes a long-lasting product is repeat business. It's a factor for T3 as well, and though it wasn't the primary driver of the project that ultimately brought Guidance and T3 together, it was one of the reasons why Guidance was ultimately the perfect partner for T3.

T3 was ready for a change in their ecommerce and thinking bigger about how they would implement it. Most of their websites were on Magento, but one was on Shopify. Furthermore, not all of their Magento sites were on the same version of Magento. Their localized sites in the European Union were on Magento 2, whereas their U.S. site was on Magento 1. And if they were going to go to the effort of revamping the back end of their ecommerce, why not revamp the front end as well?

A makeover with that kind of scope, that needed to come together all at once and make for a fabulous world relaunch, would require a creative partner with a similar passion for melding design and technology. After a competitive RFP process, T3 selected Guidance on the strength of its experience with Magento ecosystem, success with complex replatforming and migration projects, and approach as a holistic ecommerce agency.

DESIGNING FROM THE
GOALS UP

T3, like any business, wanted to increase its annual revenue. Two of the ways they wanted to do that, in specific, were to increase the conversion rates on their sites, and to increase customer engagement with the brand. The former, increasing conversion rates, is easier to wrap one's head around. The right combination of design, development, and experimentation can get you there. The latter, increasing customer engagement, is a bit more complicated. Giving people a reason to come back to your site, especially when your products are built to last for years, requires longer-term strategy and the resources to fulfill the tactics.

When better conversion and increased engagement come together, you create the opportunity for repeat business. Even with durable products, repeat business is still possible. It just looks a bit different. T3 has that potential, because they sell a variety of hair styling tools. This would be one of the ways Guidance helped T3 pursue the goal of increased annual revenue growth for T3, by creating more seamless ways for customers to consider complementary tool and accessory purchases.

DEFINING WITH DATA

To come up with a design that would appeal to the ideal customer, Guidance worked with T3 to more deeply understand that customer, the "T3 Woman." Guidance conducted interviews with T3 customers, and examined their shopping patterns through heat maps and other site analytics. Guidance also conducted interviews with stakeholders at T3 to understand their own customer perceptions, key brand pillars, and what they wanted to achieve with the brand experience.

Together, they arrived at a portrait of the T3 Woman as dynamic, intelligent, and accomplished. She's confident without being too serious; she appreciates quality and understands the value of investing in it. This led Guidance to consider a design approach with a sense of being elevated, yet relatable. The brand would convey luxury and sophistication, and welcome its audience with an approachable, delightful presentation.

FASHIONING THE DETAILS

Customer and stakeholder interviews revealed agreement not just on the quality of T3's products, but the look of the products as well. T3 considers their product design to be a key brand pillar and sets out to create hair styling tools that are as beautiful to behold as the results they create. Their customers agree, with feedback repeatedly complimenting the look of the products, and especially with T3's color choices.

Informed with the fruits of thorough qualitative and quantitative research, Guidance developed a mobile-first design focused on the beauty of the hairstyling tools themselves. The layouts emphasize product imagery, in a fresh and uncluttered fashion.

T3's product catalog is very refined. They're focused on a select range of hair styling tools, and they only offer a few items in each category. Guidance takes advantage of that specialization in its design, creating an experience that starts with a UI/UX scheme where the product categories serve as the top-level site navigation. From there, the category landing pages break out of the basic grid pattern that a traditional ecommerce product listing page (PLP) tends to offer. And the product detail pages (PDPs) are rich with content and imagery.

THE SUM OF ITS PARTS

From the technical side of the project, T3's goal was to bring all of their storefronts under one figurative roof. In particular, they were very excited about the potential of Magento's Page Builder extension and wanted to take advantage of it for the management of their site content. To do that, they needed to get all 13 of their sites on the Magento 2 platform and merged into using one code base.

But at the time T3 engaged Guidance for this project, only one of the T3 sites was on Magento 2, their EU store. It was on an earlier version, though, so that would require a bit of an upgrade. Their UK site presented an entirely different challenge. They were on Shopify, and so that site had to be completely migrated onto Magento 2.

Meanwhile, the U.S. site for T3 was a very mature Magento 1 ecommerce site. They had, in Guidance's reckoning, nearly every integration an ecommerce site could have to maximize its performance, and T3 wanted to keep it that way. So not only would the U.S. site need to go through a major upgrade, it would also need those integrations to make the necessary leaps as well.

BEAUTY IS IN THE EYE OF THE SCROLLER

From a design perspective, Guidance had established a strong focus on visualization of the product imagery. From the technical perspective, implementing that kind of design requires an approach that takes scrolling behavior into account, creating smooth transitions from section to section that appeal to the eye of the consumer. Guidance took great care with the structure and layout of the template rendering, using fade-in sections to keep user attention while distracting from the image-heavy resource load happening on the backend.