WONDR is proud to be the winner of Best eCommerce Website at the 25th Annual Spider Awards.

The award recognised the beauty, uniqueness and quality of our delivery for Likha Aesthetic Clinic. This award-winning site has a rich immersive brand experience that was refined using AI testing tools during the design process.

As the longest-running digital awards programme in Ireland, the Spiders are dedicated to recognising companies and individuals delivering digital excellence.

WONDR was shortlisted for 3 awards and collected the prestigious award on the night for Best eCommerce Website in Ireland.

Serial Award Winner

This prestigious award follows on from Likha Aesthetic Clinic’s recent success at the international Vega Design Awards where it won best website in beauty & cosmetics.

LikhaAesthetic.ie has also picked up global award for ‘Mobile Excellence‘ and an Honorable Mention from Awwwards as well as a Special Kudos award from CSSDA.

Founded in 2019, the clinic has also won Best Aesthetic Clinic in Ireland two years in a row, as well as a Patient Service Award from What Clinic for outstanding customer reviews two years in a row.

WONDR are proud to share that 3 of our clients are finalists at the 25th Annual Spider Awards.

As the longest-running digital awards programme in Ireland, the Spiders are dedicated to recognising companies and individuals delivering digital excellence. 3 of WONDR’s most recent projects for KBC Bank Ireland, ESB Networks & Likha Aesthetic Clinic are now finalists at this year’s event.

The details on the finalists are as follows:

All award winners will be announced during the Gala Award Ceremony at the Mansion House, Dublin on 31st March 2022.

We’re shortlisted for 2 awards at Digital Business Ireland’s – National Digital Awards 2021.

Our own site wondr.io has been shortlisted for Best Professional Services Website, whilst our work for Likha Aesthetic Clinic has also been shortlisted for ‘Best Health, Beauty, Well-Being Website‘.

The awards recognise the very best of digital in Ireland and reward businesses, organisations, people and innovations.

👏🏼  We’re thankful for being shortlisted and we look forward to the event on the 23rd Feb 2022.

We’re proud to say that both nominated sites have also picked up global awards this year, so we’re 🤞🏽hoping to get some 🇮🇪 Irish recognition too.

WONDR està orgullós d’anunciar el llançament de La Plaça de 11Onze, la primera xarxa social privada dissenyada per atendre les necessitats financeres del poble català.

Treballant en estreta col·laboració amb 11Onze, l’equip internacional de WONDR amb seu a Dublín i Barcelona, ha desenvolupat una plataforma social per assolir l’objectiu central: la creació d’un servei fintech fundat i construït pel benefici de la comunitat catalana.

Mentre que les institucions financeres tradicionals creen plataformes digitals per vendre productes, 11Onze ha innovat per crear una xarxa social que serveixi activament el poble català i les seves necessitats. Aquesta diferenciació és el que defineix 11Onze.

El Netflix de les Fiances

“La Plaça” permet als clients tenir el control de les seves finances. A través de la plataforma, les barreres institucionals tradicionals s’han substituït aportant transparència i simplicitat en l’experiència. Els usuaris poden contactar directament amb els agents i poden veure el procés de selecció que es va realitzar a 11Onze.

“La Plaça” també és una extensa font de recursos, on els clients reben consells i visualitzen contingut útil a través de lliçons i vídeos. Es proporciona informació detallada sobre finances, inversions, estalvis, economia i sostenibilitat per tal que els usuaris puguin iniciar el seu camí cap a la sobirania financera personal.

Com s’espera d’una xarxa social, els usuaris poden comentar, marcar el contingut que els agrada, compartir articles i opinions. Respecte a la configuració de la plataforma, l’accessibilitat a la informació i el disseny impulsat per la intel·ligència artificial han ajudat a crear una experiència que s’adapta a cada individu i a les seves necessitats.

Com Cap Altre

11Onze vol anar més enllà del que ofereixen les institucions financeres tradicionals per oferir allò que els clients esperen, proporcionant-los una comprensió única i profunda de les seves finances, la nova economia, la sostenibilitat i l’ètica.

El resultat és una experiència digital totalment innovadora que uneix les necessitats dels usuaris, els requisits empresarials i la tecnologia d’una forma en què les institucions financeres i els clients no havien vist mai.

Arnotts are a well known Irish brand who have been around for a long time but with a little help from ourselves at WONDR, they have significantly increased their online revenue while transitioning to a new e-commerce​ system.

While many e-commerce projects focus on the system, we as a team also spent a significant amount of time focused on the role that the brand needed to play. Our Director of Creative Brand Strategy, Oisín Hurst, reflected on what it took to revamp the brand through the new ‘Salesforce E-Commerce Cloud’ platform.

Where did you start?

From a creative standpoint, working into a system like Salesforce E-Commerce Cloud is an interesting challenge. It’s a beast of system. It’s very established, robust and complex. It’s serious stuff. So one of the first things we did was to look for benchmark examples.

To see what brands and websites that had taken this technology, this platform, and created truly exceptional, branded experiences. That was our aspiration for ourselves and for Arnotts. So as a starting point yeah, benchmarking seemed to make sense.

‘Seemed to’ sounds like it didn’t pan out.

Well, it did and it didn’t. What we found was very few brands were achieving anything remarkable. Instead the platform was constricting them creatively. They were system shells. Pure merchandising and little else. The brands, even luxury ones, just poured in imagery, type and colour. It’s a little bit daunting to be honest.

When you see famous brands fall into this trap it certainly gives you pause for thought. Like, if it’s good enough for these big guys…

Why isn’t it good enough? Is it really an issue given Arnotts is a retail brand?

Absolutely. Firstly, a brand should never feel like a passenger on its own website. Premium retail experiences should have depth, not a veneer of brand presence. The UX, UI and underlying technologies need to lean into each other. From a UI perspective, the brand needs to be part of the website’s DNA, it should be a part of the building blocks, not just the paint at the end.

Also, unlike the examples we were finding, we couldn’t rely on seasonal campaign assets to do all the heavy lifting. Instead we needed to have a scaleable branding asset. Something that could work as a building block and extend into a full and rich design language. But it had to be very flexible.

It had to work during sales and promotions, integrate with imagery, act as a texture, be a box, be a pattern, be loud, be subtle, work online, work on social. It had to work for €4k earrings and a €10 potato peeler with equal credibility.

You’re talking about the ‘chisel’.

It’s an awful name for it, but yes.

Where did it come from?

From the store. Literally it came from the physical store. We were looking around for a piece of visual heritage or inspiration to help us. We couldn’t build from the brandmark because at the time that was being redesigned by another team, so we went to the store and just walked around, looking.

What did you see?

Well for the first while nothing popped out. It’s a really interesting building. On the Henry Street side its architecture is Victorian, on the Abbey Street side it was originally Art Deco, but it’s been heavily reworked.

It’s like these two different eras had been smashed together and then hollowed out. But still dotted around the store, from both sides, there was one shape that kept on repeating. This kind of chamfered, or chiseled shape.

So we decided to take it for a walk. I got back to the office with a few sketches and just started to play with it, as a ribbon, a box, a border, as glass, as 3D etc etc. As a creative solution it quickly proved its potential.

In the end I think it worked for two reasons. Firstly, because it was literally ‘of the store’ it reflects, and connects to the physical experience of Arnotts. The website feels like the brand, not an extension of it, or the digital side of it, but just the brand.

And secondly?

It was so simple.

Econsultancy recently shared a post called ‘Four online experiences that impressed me during lockdown (and what brands can learn from them)’ and our client Pet Drugs Online were listed as one of the four.

We’ve worked with this brand for a number of years to reimagine their digital brand experience which led to the design of their eCommerce platform built on Magento.

Considerable thought was given on improving the whole user experience and it was a delight to see the author to pick up on the details we worked hard on and that have delivered such strong results for the brand that made them the No 1 Pet Care brand in the UK.

If you want to know a little more behind the project you can read a more detailed interview on the story behind it all. Alternatively you can view the case study where there’s plenty of lovely pictures of pets.

Experience is everything. This is the brand promise of The Loop, the Irish-owned travel retail company. They appointed us to refresh their eCommerce experience to drive online traffic and revenue. 

Dublin Airport saw a total of 32.9 million passengers in 2019, so converting those in-store browsers to online shoppers is a key challenge The Loop wanted to meet head on. 

Our team ran extensive discovery workshops to inform customer journeys resulting in refreshed UX/ UI designs to help increase conversion. These learnings are also reflected in peak-season social activations, tying together the convenience of the click-and-collect service with the wide range of luxury products on offer. 

While The Loop is synonymous with Dublin and Cork airports, we will be helping them to launch new enhanced eCommerce sites for New Zealand and Canada markets as they look to expand their business on a global scale through digital. 

They welcome you home. They purr, they bark, they chirp. Some of them get you up for a brisk walk on a crisp Winter morning when all you want to do is stay under the duvet. They’re dependent on you when they’re sick and hungry.

All across the globe, pets are cherished companions and owners do what they can to Love Them Well. This is the insight that helped us make the online pet medicine retailer, Pet Drugs Online the best performing Magento eCommerce site in the world.

Although the business was performing well as an eCommerce platform, the real challenge was to stand out in the market and build trust with new consumers. We partnered with the client team to define their digital brand & user experience design in order to build trust, make the purchase of pet medicine easier with overall goal of increasing the online revenue.

For WONDR, delivering results for eCommerce clients is all that matters.

Just a year and a half later Pet Drugs Online have seen significant revenue uplift from investment in the UK, ahead of a European roll out plan.

Defining business goals

For WONDR it started with in depth discovery sessions to understand the business, its systems & people, listening to all staff members and compiling a coherent plan to set the project in motion.

Just simply having functional digital transactions is not enough anymore, building brand trust and an emotional experience is critical as it has always been for brands, just the technology has changed.

Working with a progressive minded culture that Neil has built in PetDrugsOnline gave us the opportunity to demonstrate that setting your digital brand right is just as important as getting your UX journeys nailed. We know how to help brands deliver great customer experiences that make significant uplift to brands online revenue.

Setting the brand

As part of the process we helped define the brand positioning of ‘Love Them Well’ and created the brand system for all digital channels. This included brand mark refinement, typography, UI styling, photography guidance, patterns, eCommerce component styling, as well as a complete set of social and video templates. This set in place a simple set of guidelines for the in house creative team to implement.

Building a richer user experience

We researched this brand and user experience extensively to get a solid understanding of what the opportunities were there to deliver better customer experiences and increase revenue.

Dermot explains, “The brand had a reasonably good conversion rate, however it was clear from research that the PDP and checkout pages needed particular attention. We had to make the process of uploading prescriptions easier and remind people that this is all for the love of their pet, so finish the journey.

We carried out extensive user research which included GA analysis, user video analysis, stakeholder interviews as well as one to one sessions with customers to establish what works best for the them.

We prototyped fast, tested with the call centre staff & real customers as we went to refine and adapt the user experience. This was invaluable as it allowed us to make modifications to help us refine the checkout in particular. The financial success today as a result of this, speak for themselves.

Putting design into motion

Oisin Hurst, WONDR Creative Director says, ‘After we set the brand we created a cloud based tool kit which allowed all of the integration team and 3rd party tools to access one central library to get all the brand assets and styles. This made iterating new features and rollout of front end much faster than traditional methods.’

Setting emotion on the website was important and we did this through video, imagery, typography, copywriting and colour palette to communicate the brand proposition.

The prescriptions journey was designed to be effortless, leading with in site search to help customers find what they needed faster. To create a richer, topical and genuinely useful experience we created an advice centre for users to discover pet-care tips and related, relevant products.

Video content is critical for mobile and we build a system to allow the brand to launch the platform and refine core propositions, guided by three pillars, Trust, Convenience and Value.

A partnership for success

Partnering with clients for product management can’t be underestimated. We helped the team to brief, document and liaise with the chosen integration partner.

Understanding the development process, we assisted the Product Owner in Pet Drugs Online, pushing as much functionality into the first release as possible and worked closely with the team using Confluence to set the project and manage its delivery.

Creating a lasting bond

The brand invests heavily in PPC and SEO but to complete the journey we needed to build audience engagement and real connection. In a move away from generic posting we devised a campaign that would build trust and emotional connection. Brought to life through some simple social video advertising that struck a cord with pet owners.

We helped set the media strategy working with Facebook API partner to build lookalike audiences based on their email database to reach new customers and revenue opportunities for tangible ROI.

See the results (and more cute pets) on the live site here.

Read our case study on the project here.

Choosing between what is right and what is easy isn’t always a straightforward choice but it doesn’t have to be an either-or situation.

Catching up with Dermot O’Shea (Founder – WONDR) and Oisin Hurst (Director of Creative Brand Strategy – WONDR) and Sarah Jane Lynch, Head of Digital Innovation at Brown Thomas/Arnotts to discuss how making the right combination of choices led to an agile 25 day User Experience project that resulted in a 100% uplift in mobile revenue for the Irish retailer.

When WONDR first started working with Arnotts over two years ago to help them transform the brand for digital there were some serious decisions to be made. The brand’s overhaul for digital required the launch of an entirely new eCommerce site that would align with the brand’s quality credentials, not to mention demanding customer expectations. But what should be done with the existing site in the meantime, particularly on mobile?

The team at WONDR came up with a plan to both redesign and re-platform the brand while also ensuring key fixes on the existing site would work alongside to significantly boost revenues.

Oisin explains “The initial plan was to look mainly at the new eCommerce website but it became apparent very quickly that there were existing opportunities — ones that would immediately generate more revenue for Arnotts. We looked at it as a win-win — start increasing sales and revenue on the live site, while developing the strategy for the new site in parallel.”

To start, WONDR convinced the Arnotts team that it could apply a “hotfix” approach to optimise the front-end of the platform without having to modify the current platform it was running on. Time is money in retail and this short and medium term approach was essential, especially considering the re-platforming project was due to take several month.

Dermot adds “WONDR already had a very strong working relationship with Arnotts, having worked on a number of projects together — but this time there was the opportunity to tap into a far wider range of techniques and tactics. It was a chance to prove that some of the techniques we planned to deploy in the wider and more ambitious re-platforming project could actually be used right away.

“When you’re working on a project like this it can be very easy to gravitate towards the ‘big ideas” he continues. “Our job was to ensure Arnotts could make the most of the existing platform whilst delivering a mobile and multi-platform brand that would be fit for the future.”

Measuring Impact

WONDR’s brand philosophy is very much in line with delivering results that matter — every idea proposed and decision made by the team was based on doing the best for the customer while also ensuring the brand remains differentiated and distinctive. As a quality retail brand with “experience” as a core principle we needed to deliver on both.”

She goes on to explain “The team at WONDR spent time analysing site analytics to get a clear picture of what was happening and how to deliver the best site experience and revenue potential. As well as their knowledge of brand building and experience design they really understood that any investment needed to deliver real financial pay-back. Putting strong measurement in place allowed us to measure this against every change made.”

The up-front analysis carried out by the Arnotts and WONDR team clearly helped avoid the costly pitfalls often associated with both hot-fix and major re-platforming projects.

Dermot explains: “Time that you would normally spend in the boardroom coming up with ideas, prepping presentations or polishing minor ideas is better spent working on the actual nuts and bolts of the project itself. It may sound pretty basic, but on projects like this it really is better to sketch out on paper rather than spend valuable time on a Mac polishing detail that may not go anywhere. This project had no time for pontificating or the stroking of crusty beards around a whiteboard — retail moves too fast and is too competitive for that.”

“Once I had a solid system in mind, I quickly moved into prototyping the key journeys that were critical for performance, testing and iterating a real mobile experience.”

“We skipped the usual presentations with exhaustive and quite frankly unnecessary explanations. We were working with a team of “digital doers” — both in WONDR and in Arnotts. It’s amazing what can be achieved by taking a mobile device — the device the customer will actually end up using — and with a savvy, motivated team testing, iterating and implementing quickly.”

A Customer-Centric, Brand-Centric Approach

As soon as ambitious timelines and the right level of investment was agreed the challenge was clearly set. Bridge the gap between the present site and the re-platform and deliver both a long-term and interim customer-centric experience worthy of the Arnotts brand.

Oisin explains the approach. “After we prototyped the ideal mobile experience, we gave our team the painstaking task of redesigning it — significantly, I might add — with CSS and JavaScript amends only,”

We set our best creative developer to lead the team, and his mission was simple: descale as little of the ideal prototype while retaining all mission critical functionality”.

Just improving design and functionality on it’s own though wouldn’t be enough. In the competitive retail category, where many brands are failing to cut-through or disappointing consumers with poor digital experiences, delivering above expectations is no longer a luxury, it’s a necessity.

Dermot adds. “We had to start with a basic mobile iteration of their current platform to allow us to build the brand for the future.

The site couldn’t just be a catalogue of products. It had to be a rewarding retail experience online.”

He continues “Anyone who knows anything about retail store design will tell you, it’s very much about understanding customer psychology. So why wouldn’t the same be true online? The big opportunity for Arnotts was transferring this to the digital shopper journey.

Key psychological truths like ‘choice anxiety,’ ‘future memory’ and ‘personal self-doubt’ are all deeply ingrained in shopping behaviour. These important human factors combined with changes in style and culture were taken into consideration during the design process.

User-design is much more than just keeping things simple. It’s about appealing to users on a deep and emotional level while being differentiated as a brand in the mind of consumers.”

Oisin agrees with this perspective. “Designing for retail in digital is much more than optimising opportunistic online transactions. You have to create a true retail destination. A place that people will want too go to because it inspires them, not just helps them carry out pre-considered tasks. People should want to come back to it naturally, like their favourite news site or social media network. That’s the real retail challenge. Brands like Arnotts see it as an opportunity and are already reaping the rewards.

Selling Success

The approach paid off. The project was delivered on time and on budget with the mobile solution delivering significant and immediate impact on revenue.
“It was agile, innovative, cost-effective and financially measurable,” says Sarah Jane, “It was a positive experience to work on too. A real partnership between the teams.”

Oisin adds, “What we’re most proud of is that we proved that properly engaging with a re-platform project, in increments, not just single goals, can bring significant benefits. Taking on a front-end only project is never the ideal solution. Yet for so many businesses in Ireland they can’t afford not to to this.” he says.

“I’m glad we were able to demonstrate in a very tangible way that investing in the proper design and people-centric experience can bring forth much more returns. You don’t have to wait for the big re-platform project to happen. Losing money on a poor site is more expensive in the interim than breaking hot fixes on an existing platform into smaller work streams to create real results from day one.”

So, if time is money in retail, then waiting for the “big new site reveal” without also making what you have work even harder through solid brand and UX thinking could be costing alot of brands more than they realise.

Dermot concludes “We established WONDR to work with progressive, businesses that want to build their brands around people in a digital world. The Arnotts team understood this from the start and we had the backing of the senior team. This is the sort of partnership that creates great work, in the immediate term as well as the long term and as we’ve seen with this project, great return for the business.”