Beata Heuman
Interior Designers' E-commerce Website
Beata Heuman is one of the UK’s most successful and sought after interior designers. Having learned her craft with the great Nicky Haslam, Beata formed her interiors business in 2013. Since then, her reputation as one of the country’s most exciting interior designers has grown in leaps and bounds.
Beata’s “playful and original” work has been displayed in various publications such as House and Home, The Sunday Times, and Vogue UK. In 2018, Beata won House and Garden’s inaugural Interior Designer of the Year award.
The Challenge
Since 2016, March has supported Beata’s Interior Design practice with online expertise. Beata first commissioned us to create her portfolio website, in order to showcase her impressive catalogue of client projects and press releases. We crafted a bespoke design and built the site on the open-source Umbraco (ASP.net) CMS platform.
Soon afterwards, Beata added a new Products section to the site, where users could complete an enquiry form to register their interest in her collection of exclusive products available at the time. This was an immediate success. By the end of 2019 and Beata’s catalogue of products had grown so large that she required a new e-commerce facility on the site.
The Solution
When considering how to bring the power of e-commerce to Beata’s business, we realised we had three options:
- Integrating e-commerce functionality into the existing Umbraco site
- Building a new, separate e-commerce site, which could be maintained separately
- Rebuilding the entire site again using WordPress and WooCommerce
We sat down with Beata and her team to talk about the best way to progress. While they were familiar with WooCommerce, they much preferred the features of the hosted e-commerce platform Shopify and didn’t want to lose the bespoke nature and powerful CMS on the existing Umbraco site. Additionally, we didn’t feel the Umbraco e-commerce platforms offered enough flexibility and control. We went with option 2; a new e-commerce sub-domain, built on Shopify. This option allowed us to leave the original site intact, focusing our efforts into the new sub-brand called Shoppa (Swedish for shop).
Beata’s team of designers, experts in their industry, provided indicative concepts for us. We used their ideas and developed them further, translating them into a working design that we could build as a custom theme on Shopify.
We migrated the entire product library from Umbraco to the new Shoppa site and added additional products to the range. We configured SKUs and prices, then integrated the platform with their financial system so their admin team could track key financials, stock levels and invoices.
On launch, we removed the old Products catalogue from the main portfolio site, adding a few additions to the main navigation to cross-link the two sites.
Beata and her team were delighted with the new site; especially its aesthetics and functionality. It showcases Beata’s unique products in a complimentary light, each page infused with her signature style.
Comparing the last two months (Apr/May 20) to the opening two months after launch we have seen a 64.5% uplift in users to the Shoppa site with a reduction in bounce rate. We also saw a progressive increase in e-commerce conversions – an increase of 14%.
Revenue has seen an increase of 20% – 52% each month for the trailing 4 months to June 2020.
If we compare the Products section on the old site to the new Shoppa site over a 5-month pre and post-launch comparison, there was an increase in pageviews of 113%, which indicates the new online store is generating more interest than the old product catalogue.
Beata Heuman continues to deliver exceptional interior and product design. We are proud to have helped her business evolve its online presence into a full e-commerce platform, yielding strong growth and increasing revenue.
March helped us build a great platform from which we can showcase our work. With their help we achieved the original and contemporary look we were after - and our clients seem to love it!Beata Heuman
Founder, Beata Heuman Ltd
