HeathCeramics

ProjectFocus
  • Retail+eCommerce
  • HomeFurnishings
Heath Ceramics
/ Overview

heathceramics.com — A digital storefront inspired by brick-and-mortar retail.

  • Experience Strategy
  • Content Strategy
  • Content Guidelines
  • Creative Direction
  • UI/UX Design
  • Art Direction
  • Accessibility + SEO
  • Style Guide
  • Front-end Development
  • Back-end Development
  • Technical Consulting
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Challenge

Renowned for its thoughtfully designed household goods, the Heath Ceramics brand and its products reflect the pinnacle of creativity and craftsmanship. Since its founding in 1948, it has maintained a loyal following due to its collection of beautiful, high-quality pieces that blur the line between everyday objects and family heirlooms.

As the brand grew, it needed a digital flagship that could elevate its prestige and reach customers across the globe. So, we were engaged to help design and engineer an eCommerce experience that captured the brand’s artisanal spirit.

Approach

We partnered with Heath to build an eCommerce destination that mirrors the elegance of the showroom, exemplifies brand values, and tastefully blends content and product within a transactional funnel. All of this came to life through utility, content, and a robust technology solution.

Accolades/Press
  • The Webby Awards — Honoree — Visual Design/Function — 2019
  • The Webby Awards — Honoree — Shopping — 2019
  • Communication Arts Interactive — Shortlist — Websites — 2019
  • OMMA Awards — Finalist — UX/UI — 2018
  • OMMA Awards — Finalist — House/Home — 2018
BASIC/DEPT®
/ UX Strategy

Experience Design

The merchandising and customer experiences within Heath’s retail showrooms encourage customers to move between open discovery and singular focus.

We took these experience principles and brought them to the all-new Heath digital storefront. Our approach makes it simple for customers to navigate the site, explore categories, and find the products that best suit their needs.

Responsive Design

Combining form and function to meet customer needs.

With 44% of Heath’s site traffic coming from mobile, we established a responsive site framework that optimizes design attributes and user-experience decisions across form factors. Elements like navigation, filtration, aspect ratios, and others are tailored to deliver the ideal browsing experience on any device.

Product Presentation

Enriching product presentation to drive purchase consideration.

Throughout the customer journey, art-directed content and strategic merchandising work in tandem to promote the craftsmanship and functional attributes of the products.

Our content strategy called for storytelling and editorial content to enable inspiration-based shopping, as well—allowing users to filter by product type or collection.

Product Pages

Product detail pages that merge function and beauty.

The product display pages provide users with the functions they’ve come to expect as well as relevant information to deepen desire.

Our system enables the Heath team to cross-merchandize, upsell, and add a layer of storytelling to each product while integrating in-situ photography and editorial content.

Design System

Establishing a design system to inspire, inform, and convert.

The new experience uses intentional design to invite customers into the shopping funnel. Tactile interactions can be seen throughout the Heath brand, from its hands-on managerial style to its hand-numbered packaging.

BASIC/DEPT®
/ Engineering

Technology Solutions

Complex business models demand thoughtful and substantial technical strategies. We consulted and led a complete technology overhaul of Heath’s eCommerce operations. Our strategy included the selection of a new platform, a migration from its existing platform, and an overall plan for its digital presence.

For its ease of integration and cloud-based architecture, Shopify was chosen as the way forward for Heath’s new digital platform. Shopify offers the right amount of scalability and allowed for the customization we needed for the front end and design of the site. Platform integrations laid the foundation for content authoring and tailored the experience to Heath’s wide audience.

To support robust content publishing and operationalize content management, we designed and engineered an integrated suite of Shopify apps that allowed the Heath team to create flexible page layouts on a page-by-page basis. The apps use custom metadata and fields, allowing each page to be modified by the Heath content management team. The result is a unique site experience, different from any other Shopify store.

Problem
Solution
  1. Existing Shopify registry apps didn’t meet the needs of Heath’s business model.

    A personalized registry app that supports the Heath business model and integrates with our suite of apps to support its various user paths.

  2. The eCommerce team at Heath is small and needed a solution that would enable them to create unique and dynamic pages with ease.

    A templating Shopify app that uses custom metafields and drives the modular page system on the front end.

  3. Site performance is critical during peak shopping hours.

    Apps that utilize Shopify’s built-in rendering flow and caching utilities to ensure minimal page response time. Front-end performance is managed by a webpack-based system.

  4. User and order data from Magento needed to be retained.

    A strategy that informed how we could migrate products and data from Heath’s existing Magento instance without blocking development progress on the new framework.

BASIC/DEPT®
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