Case Study ~ Taylor of Old Bond Street, St James's, London
About Taylor of Old Bond Street
'Taylors' is a firmly established gentleman's barber and shaving shop in St James, London, which opened to the public for the very first time in 1854.
Taylors have for many, many years manufactured their own grooming products, such as luxury aftershave lotions, balms, colognes, natural luxury shampoos, conditioners, soaps, talcs and deodorants. All of which are available to purchase in person from the barber and shaving shop, along with an extensive range of male grooming gifts which include 'Taylor' branded shaving sets, grooming boxes, shaving cream gift boxes, aftershave gift boxes and hand soap gift boxes.
All of these male grooming and shaving products are also available for purchase online, through the recently redesigned Taylors online shop.
Project background
Barry Klein from Taylors approached Creative Heights in the Summer of 2010 with these website requirements;
- To redesign of the current Taylors online shop
The staff at Taylors and a number of regular customers were in agreement that the existing website was looking out of date and not as easy to use as competitor websites selling male grooming and shaving products. - To upgrade both the ecommerce software and payment gateway
The existing online shop had been running steadily for a number of years with Actinic ecommerce software. However, the system was very basic and did not offer current online shopping expectations such as promoting ‘related products’ during the customer online shopping experience. Furthermore, all customer payments were taken offline - thus taking valuable extra time to process - and Taylors were very keen to address this and equip the website to embrace instant secure online payments. - To apply Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) to the website to attract more sales
The Taylors online shop has been in existence since 2002 and over the years had built a loyal returning customer base. However, it was realised that investing time in optimising the website would be key in attracting valuable new customers to purchase from the website.
Results
- Creative Heights redesigned the entire website to bring it up to current website standards and expectations. These new design features include;
- A wider viewable website which allows the placement of important content higher up the pages, improving how the Taylors website is displayed on laptops and netbooks - which have shallow viewable screen space. These type of computers, along with tablet based devices (iPads for example) are becoming a very popular way to browse the internet.
- It was important for the website to retain the ‘Old English‘ look which attracts many of it’s customers, but carefully introduce an updated ‘look & feel‘ to attract younger customers. The careful use of product images and promotional features are consistent with many leading e-commerce websites aiming at a slightly younger male browsing population. However, it is still evident, that Taylors is very much an ‘established’ brand and when you buy from Taylors, you are buying a piece of English history.
- An upgrade to the latest version of Actinic which now easily allows staff at Taylors to add, delete and amend products themselves, easily tag products as out of stock (by disabling the add to basket button) and apply a range of ‘related products’ to any product on the website. Furthermore, a merchant account has been created so the website can take instant secure online payments through ‘Actinic Payments’.
- Search Engine Optimisation.
- The new website ensures it is much easier for search engines to crawl and index ‘keyword’ related content. This enables pages on the Taylors website to rank very highly in the search results pages of search engines such as Google.
- Google analytics (software which is installed to monitor the visitor numbers and browsing patterns) shows an increase of 30% in visitor numbers during the Autumn on 2010 compared to the same period in 2009.
- Sales statistics show that overall online sales are up by 25% during the Autumn on 2010 compared to the same period in 2009.
- There are more visits and sales from USA, a market Taylors is very keen to grow.
- During the first three months of launch, the ‘newsletter subscription’ list boasts over 250 willing recipients. Taylors aim to send a quarterly newsletter to promote further both new products and products on special offer.
Vist the Taylor of Old Bond Street website.