Helping a Cosmetic Company Look And Feel Their Very Best Online
Challenge
Merle Norman is a trusted cosmetics brand that has been empowering its female franchise owners for over 85 years. At its core, it is a family-run company founded by a woman, for women who want to take control of their destiny by running their own business, and look beautiful while doing it. An old, outdated site was hampering Merle Norman’s online appearance, so our strategists and designers got out our digital makeup brushes to give the site an internal and external makeover.
Solution
Discovery Merle Norman came to us looking for a complete overhaul of their current website. Their old website had a very outdated look, was not easy for visitors to use to find what they were looking for, was even harder to update through the CMS, and was not optimized for mobile devices. The company as a whole was looking for ways to appeal to an increased number of potential franchisees, and wanted their website to play a large role in that. The website team also had a goal to integrate ecommerce in the near future, and thus were looking for a site that could grow with them through this process. We worked closely with their website team to define a complete feature set for their new site, and brainstormed ways to enhance the Franchise section of their website. Conducting a competitive audit, we gathered inspiration from how companies with similar business models were attracting future franchise owners. After loads of research and internal interviews, we had a good idea of what we had to do. UX Strategy The first step of “doing” was to finalize the site architecture. Enhancing the franchise recruitment section of the site meant that there were some major architectural changes needed. We also made several key changes in the products section that would make the user journey more intuitive to help visitors find content they were looking for. After the basic architecture was nailed down, our UX strategists jumped into building out the website blueprints through wire-framing. The wireframes gave structure to the content strategy without the distraction of style elements. Once our wireframe prototype was in place, it was time for the makeover magic to begin! Build Applying Merle Norman’s branding across the site in a new and fresh way gave our digital designers a welcome challenge. With over 85 years of business behind them, the first step during the build was to connect with the website team for a logo refresh. Our designers played around with a few new accent colors to use on the site, and a beautiful pink raspberry was selected. This new accent color helped give the site fresh energy while exuding femininity, maturity, and sophistication. Once the designs were ready, our developers got busy coding the site on top of a custom .NET platform. Since the plan to integrate ecommerce was still a little ways away, it made the most sense to build out a flexible CMS that Merle Norman’s team could use to easily manage website content until they were ready for full-blown ecommerce functionality. The CMS was structured to make it super simple for their website team to be able to upload fresh homepage content, new products, product specials, makeup tutorials, and more, by themselves. Test & Launch A thorough round of testing across multiple browsers and devices meant that Merle Norman was ready to reveal their new face to the world. When the Merle Norman team gave us the go-ahead to take everything live, we were ready! Our team handled all parts of the launch - from setting the site up on it’s hosting provider, to pointing the domain and taking care of best practices for SEO for redesigned websites.
Results
While their website makeover had a dramatically different before and after, the new site gave the website team at Merle Norman the ability to keep content fresh and up-to-date in a way they had not been able to before. The new site architecture allowed visitors to easily find what they were looking for and a fresh design has helped them get the attention they were looking for from potential franchisee owners.
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