Project background

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.

Our strategy

It was agreed that a quality ecommerce website was to be achieved by building it on the Magento 2 platform. This also allowed us to more easily create the configurable, personalised product pages.

In terms of design, our focus was on working to establish a true retail brand, building on their tradition, pedigree, and British quality.

Their current site was clearly quite dated. It was built on a narrow grid with small typefaces, and had an overwhelmingly complicated navigation. This severely hampered the user experience and acted as a barrier to conversion - it wasn’t immediately obvious to users that you could buy online when you landed on the home page.

In order to update this on the new site, a simplified, cleaner mega menu was created to allow users to instantly access product categories and sub-categories, as well as the use of a full-screen grid and an updated font.

As a major part of the brief, we integrated Solvitt (a piece of Accounting software with a Manufacturing Management Solution) into the new website, which allows Merrythought to continue utilising this particular software for order processing and management as part of their day to day operations.

Overall, this was a much more streamlined shopping experience and user journey, with clear Calls to Action (CTAs) on the site to encourage engagement and site interaction.

As mentioned, preserving the existing strong SEO was vital. We implemented a detailed redirect strategy to ensure there were no broken links for anyone that had previously linked to the site – backlinks are vital for maintaining and building on good authority. We also ensured meta tags were uploaded to equivalent new pages to help preserve the strong rankings. As is often the case with a new site, new pages were also created, which we focused on optimising to the same high standard. There’s always some volatility for organic rankings when a new site goes live, but taking the right steps during the go live process, helps reduce any negative impacts and sets a solid foundation for future organic growth.

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