The brief

Part of Whaleys Bradford, Whaleys Fabrics are one of the UK’s leading wholesale fabric suppliers. They came to us with a very outdated Magento site, which did not meet the brand guidelines or provide the best user experience. We proposed a holistic digital marketing strategy with a key Magento 2 upgrade.

How we made a difference

Upgrading to a simple, more secure site

As Whaleys were already on an outdated version of Magento, the Blue Digital team recommended upgrading to Magento 2. This would provide better security, an intuitive CMS, and full scalability for new product ranges. We also integrated the site with Panther, to offer a simple back-end system that would aid shipping.

 

Improving the user experience

With our expert knowledge of Magento 2, we seized this opportunity to make key changes to the user experience. This started with workshops to identify Whaleys’ key customer personas, which we then applied to usability testing. We also ran customer-facing staff interviews and carried out a full user journey analysis to streamline the experience online.

Part of this customer persona research involved analysing Whaleys’ ‘new audience’. Over the years, their key demographic has shifted to a younger age group, which would guide their growth strategy long-term. We incorporated this into our UI design, offering a fresh, responsive website interface. We also added inspiring imagery to target this audience, including lifestyle photographs from freelance dressmakers.

 

Inspiring content

This new audience also inspired our content strategy proposal. We offered an editorial calendar with themes targeted at young people and students. These blog posts would also complement our organic strategy, featuring keywords we discovered during our research process.

We identified key long-tail keywords relevant to Whaleys’ product and service pages, and further optimised existing pages prior to go-live. With a fresh new look and a better user experience, Whaleys saw marked improvements in their online performance.

The result

Whaleys now enjoy a totally secure, intuitive site with both a friendly interface and simple back-end functionality. The website upgrade led to six- figure sales, thousands of orders and a huge increase in visitor numbers – hitting their key demographic. Our organic strategy helped Whaleys rank for key terms, while a simpler transaction process led to more conversions.