Merrythought are an Ironbridge-based Teddy Bear manufacturer and retailer, who specialise in making high quality, handmade, traditional teddy bears. They’ve been running as a family business since 1930, and are famous for crafting the finest, jointed, mohair teddy bears that are adored by children and adults across the world. The company is now the only by hand makers of teddy bears in the UK.
They approached us with the challenge of re-creating their website to better communicate the quality of their products and the unique personality of their brand. This was vital for building trust and empathy with the end customer, leading to high conversions and sales from visits to the website.
Although the existing website had served them well in past years, the ecommerce platform they had been using had definitely aged and lacked some modern features and elements, so an updated system was required.
Despite being a quintessentially British brand, their target market stretches much further afield. Japan and the US make up the vast proportion of their export market, so it was a crucial factor to ensure these markets were considered within the build of the new site.
One of the key features they wanted from the new site was a real-time ‘personalise your teddy bear’ function, that allows users to select specific attributes and see how it looks on the bear they order.
The one aspect of their current site that we had to retain was its good SEO – we have been working with them on SEO for a number of months before the new website was built. Holding a Domain Authority of 39 out of 100 (the average being about 25), it was crucial we built on it.
