Sakura of America
Challenge
Sakura invented the first-ever oil pastel that combined oil and pigment and named it Cray-Pas®, a combination of the two words crayon and pastel. In 1984, Sakura surprised the pen industry with its technological breakthrough invention of the first gel-based ink. Today, our Gelly Roll® line includes six types of ink in a wide variety of unique colors and special effects. Sakura’s most recent innovations are dimensional inks. The 3-D inks can write on multiple surfaces such as paper, glass, ceramics, metals & plastics. Improving the customer experience by making it easy to explore the product catalogue was the primary objective. Sakura also wanted to inspire visitors, teach them how to use their products and connect them to a store. Sakura makes products for creators, so inspiration was the theme. The old website just didn’t portray the kind of visual punch their products can have. Everything on the old site was technical in nature and hard to digest. It was also important to build a new website on a system like WordPress so they could easily manage users, products and pages.
Solution
We combined content from multiple web properties by streamlining the architecture and creating a high-impact, mobile optimized site that focuses on products and inspires their use. Now it’s easy to discover products that customers have never tried before and to find the right tool with advanced filters. Each product page includes inspiration and information about technical qualities, how to use each one and where to buy them. Custom icons for product categories help visitors navigate, a beautiful staggered story blog layout gives Sakura a space to share activities, projects, artists, and more. The new site is built on WordPress so page, post, product and location management is simple.
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