The House of Garrard has a heritage unrivalled by any jewellery house in the world. Throughout its history, Garrard has worked closely with the British Royal Family, as well as many Royal families across the globe.
Appointed Crown Jeweller by Queen Victoria in 1843, Garrard has continued to serve each subsequent British monarch, creating many beautiful jewels, iconic tiaras and the engagement ring worn by the Duchess of Cambridge.
To continue to present the brand across a global market they embarked upon a brand redevelopment and digital transformation project. Key to the site’s redevelopment was a new look and feel.
The new site had to not only complement the Garrard brand updates, but it also had to showcase exquisite pieces, elegant designs, and the long tradition of creating bespoke jewellery. A new multi-lingual ecommerce site also had to be developed to ensure the Garrard brand reached new markets.
Filter were appointed to support this digital transformation.
The principal objective for the website’s redevelopment was to deliver a customer-centric experience. For us, this meant creating clearer user journeys – highlighting collections and individual pieces of jewellery and reducing the need to wade through content to encourage repeat visits.
It was also important to ensure that the navigation was clear, allowing users to find their way quickly and easily through the site, readily surfacing more content whilst reducing the number of user clicks required.
Built on WordPress, one of the first additions to the site was the introduction of a new Collections landing page. Although in many respects this would seem a simple recommendation, it enabled Garrard, for the first time, to present the inspiration, ethos and qualities of each collection and featured pieces.
Product landing pages, for example for jewellery type, were also created to show off the inspirational designs. The use of large imagery coupled with the sites enhanced functionality allowed users to find the products that they were looking for really easily.
This ease-of-use created the space and time for users to browse, discover, and be attracted to a call-to-action.
Despite the change to rebalance the heritage content with product, we recognised that the history of the brand provides it with its timeless appeal and legacy. Therefore, we developed new sections to talk about the Story of Garrard and added mobile-responsive timelines that emphasise the importance of Garrard’s Royal Legacy.
With the launch of the new website, we also changed how data, enquiries and feedback were collected and used internally, to understand help the client their customers better.
The next phase of development was the creation of a multilingual e-commerce site that would open up new markets for the brand.
Key content and updates needed to be quickly and easily translated into many different languages and published without increasing the overhead of managing content. Although in some cases a translation agency would be used, real time edits needed to be made on all versions of the site, so integration was important.
Using the experience gained from solving similar challenges, the team at Filter identified the correct technologies and implemented them in a way that met all client objectives.
When reviewing the data, we were delighted to see the true impact the new website had on the brand’s overall digital performance. Overall, Sessions were up by 31.28%, the number of Users went up by 31.25% with the number of Page Views increased by 39.33%.
In terms of the multilingual site performance, within 5 months of translations going live compared to the same period last year, we doubled the proportion of visitors to the site who are using Chinese. Arabic Language Sessions went up by 180%, with Russian Language Sessions up by 57% for the same 5-month period.
