Highland Chocolatier

The Challenge

The focus for this website was somewhat about the brand and then adding on the functionality as a shop, so ultimately they could reach a wider audience. Working with such a high end product, we really endeavoured to show it off and give the visitor a similar experience to what they may encounter in a physical shop with regards to the quality, effort and dedication that goes in to making these superior chocolates.

Highland Chocolatier approached us to redesign and redevelop their existing website as it didn’t reflect their reputation for excellence and passion for creating the world’s best truffles nor did it provide a scalable platform to grow their online sales.

We had to work closely with the management team to deliver a creative solution that met their brand guidelines – luxury, high quality, unique gourmet niche.

Our Solution

The initial stages were crucial to get the right feel for the website, the key goals were luxury, high quality, and unique gourmet niche.

We took the team on location to get a real feel for the company and its products, I think this was the best way to get across just how passionate they were about chocolate and their products and to give them the best idea of how to go about the designs of the website.

We had a lot of time critical parts with this site as they were in process of launching a partnership with British Airways so we had to stage the launch.

The approach was to really focus on the images of the products as they really sell themselves, but we wanted to make the buying experience as simple as possible and even after initial launch we have continued to work on this to make this as smooth as possible.

We then moved to a phase two and launched the responsive site and an updated cart which had a huge impact on converting sales on tablets and mobiles.

Having used Redback to build the site it gave us the flexibility to really give them exactly what they needed both visually and functionally.

Finally, we implemented a digital marketing strategy and this has been running for over a year now, this has included organic search optimisation, google remarketing and PPC campaigns during seasonal trends and social advertising.

Results

Since its launch in September 2013 the site has gone from strength to strength. With their previous site, they were lucky to get a few orders a month due to its cumbersome checkout and poor visual presentation of the products. Currently the new site is generating large orders on a daily basis and at certain times in the year, there are even multiple high value orders of close to £1000 per order.

They ship worldwide and the backend admin for the platform lets them manage all this with ease.

In the last year, month on month from November 2015 since implementing the digital marketing strategy on a limited budget, we have seen an increase of over 23% in visitors to the site and over 40% increase in revenue from the previous year. On top of this, phone sales and footfall for the retail stores have both increased due to the popularity of the website. These are recorded offline, but overall they have seen a big uptake since the launch of the new website.

Since the introduction of the review system 9 months ago, we have seen a large increase in conversions on the website and the feedback speaks for itself on both products and service.

What Our Client Says

E-commerce sales have doubled since our new website development and we are very pleased with the look and feel. The functionality is good, there will always be transitional issues but the process was well managed and minimised disruption to our customers.

Feedback from our customers has been extremely positive – we are delighted with the responsive site which has made mobile and tablet viewing so much quicker and easier to view.

Back office systems provide extensive functionality for content update and business reporting; remote technical support from Adeo has also been quick, reliable and efficient. A great package!

Janice Kennedy – MD