Ella’s Kitchen | Craft Commerce
Ella’s Kitchen
An ecommerce website that seamlessly combines content, commerce and community.
about
Ella’s Kitchen is the UK’s number 1 baby food brand and is the pioneering voice of early childhood nutrition.
On a mission to improve children's lives by developing healthy relationships with food, Ella's were looking for a digital agency that would work with them to digitally bring their mission to life and create the best possible online experiences for their customers.
Appointed as their digital agency last August, we’ve worked with Ella’s Kitchen's marketing team to understand the brand, personas, and current digital pain points. Then we embarked on their digital transformation, migrating them onto Craft CMS with Craft Commerce and ensuring a whole new mobile experience for mums and dads.
Planning
Initially, we put our best foot forward by facilitating a workshop to encourage discussions; what the team at Ella’s Kitchen thought about their current website and what they wanted it to look like in the future.
The importance of customer experience and the need to put the parent and their little one first was paramount. We developed digital personas for each of Ella's Kitchen's customer pen portraits: customer profiling, flow maps, data and analytics, and previous focus group findings to get to grips with the audience and ensure they got the most out of their online experience with Ella's Kitchen.
Platform selection was also a key consideration. From discussions with the Ella's Kitchen team, it was apparent that their existing solution of using one platform (Shopify) for commerce and another (proprietary) for content and community was not working for them or their audiences. We needed a platform that could seamlessly pull commerce, content and community into one ecosystem.
UX
All of the initial planning meant that decisions were made based on facts and customer behaviour. As we moved into user experience, we were able to restructure the website whilst ensuring that the protection strategy for SEO was maintained through URL structures and introducing hierarchical headings.
A major emphasis was placed on the purchasing journey and building relationships with customers through ‘Become a friend’ and the account area to offer better support to parents during weaning and beyond. Another huge factor was designing and building the new website with a mobile-first approach, as the lion’s share of Ella’s visitors is mobile-only users. We demonstrated the new user flow as we moved through to prototyping, safeguarding persona journeys before we took to design.
Digital Rebrand
Surprise and delight! Bringing the Ella's Kitchen brand to life digitally.
Our goal was to deliver a best in class digital presence that would surprise and delight browsers and shoppers alike, as exciting and vibrant as the brand. As the visual identity was previously anchored toward print, we needed to digitise the typography and colour palette to work in the digital space. It was essential that the website still looked and felt like Ella's Kitchen at every touchpoint but provided customers with a new, slicker shopping and educational experience. Working within the rules of the existing brand guidelines, we created a digital design framework that was true to the brand and was definitively Ella's Kitchen, whilst flexing where needed for digital application.
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Digital Design
Expanding on the UI kit, we built out a wide range of both page-specific and global components that worked well in isolation and together to give Ella's kitchen complete control over the pages across the site without fear that they would disrupt the flow. We then moved through to template design, skinning the wireframe with the new UI kit and digital design framework.
Ecommerce Design
As well as showcasing Ella's Kitchen's brilliant brand online, it was vital to maximise the shopping experience and support the organisation's goal of fully supporting parents and carers throughout their little one's weaning journey.
Drawing on ecommerce best practices, in combination with everything we knew about the brand's online audiences — including their approach to weaning — their shopping behaviour and their potential blockers, we architected a slick browsing and checkout journey to aid product discovery and purchase.
Ecommerce Development
Craft CMS + Craft Commerce; the perfect combination of content and commerce, seamlessly connected.
Development was twofold when it came to Ella’s. We migrated the website from Shopify and moved onto Craft Commerce. Ella’s not only wanted a streamlined, easy to use ecommerce but a website that could scale and deliver a second-to-none experience when it came to content. That’s what Craft does best and is user-friendly, both for the front-facing customer and the content manager. It has everything a modern ecommerce store needs to be robust, flexible and empower brands with control over their website.
By moving away from Shopify, our developers were able to take control of performance optimisation, build bespoke pages and give greater attention to the mobile experience. Aside from that, we created custom APIs and integrations to connect with other suppliers, whether that was for customer services, shipping or marketing. That meant that Ella’s Kitchen had one central hub for the website. Everything works seamlessly with their current providers, too - always with customer data in mind to protect their information.
Bespoke Plugin Development
Connecting Craft Commerce to OrderWise for stock control, logistics and distribution.
We created a bespoke plugin to connect Craft Commerce to OrderWise, Ella's Kitchen's distribution partner's chosen ERP, warehouse management and stock control system. Using a two way API, we ensured the safe and fast transfer of customer and order information to OrderWise and the receipt of a return feed for ordering, product and stock updates to ensure both systems were always in sync and up to date.
API Integration
Boosting customer acquisition and customer engagement with Mapp.
The integration with Mapp allowed the strengthening of Ella's Kitchen's popular 'Friends' programme. As part of the brand's always-on strategy, Ella's Friend's keeps customers engaged and parents supported through the weaning journey and beyond. Using Mapp's API, changes customers make (including edits to the preferences and little one's details), in the online account area seamlessly passed to Ella's eCRM in real-time, ensuring that relevant and personalised information is always presented.
Algolia
Increasing conversion using the leading AI-powered ecommerce search solution.
We used Algolia to offer a blazing fast and super powerful search facility, which both suggests and delivers content based on intuitive promoting and search intent. Algolia comes with a set of AI algorithms and ecommerce search tools to optimise every part of the experience, from automatically boosting the most performing results to suggesting relevant synonyms to personalisation. Algolia makes it quicker for Ella's Kitchen's customers to find what they are looking for faster, aiding the discovery journey and boosting conversion.
ELLA'S ON ABSTRAKT
Brigitta Carter, the Assistant Digital Brand Manager said, "Abstrakt have been brilliant in guiding + helping us completely transform our website design, architecture + infrastructure. Along every stage of our project, they have offered their expertise + recommendations clearly + honestly always with our brand values, parents + carers and kids first approach at the forefront of their thinking."
The result
Increase
in ecommerce conversion
Point drop in
bounce rate %
Increase
in AOV
It has been a pleasure to work with the whole team, who are all committed and hardworking and intent on delivering the very best outcome. We definitely view Abstrakt as an extension of our Friends team at Ella’s.
Brigitta Carter - Assistant Digital Brand Manager
Let's work together.
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