Brief
Character.com is the UK's leading brand for children's and adult nightwear and accessories. Toward we're tasked with creating a new brand identity bursting with energy, developing a custom Shopify Plus ecommerce store and ongoing design support.
Outcome
Since we started working with Character.com, the company has grown x10, becoming a leader in their market. They've won dozens of awards from the likes of Disney and has attracted major investment to fuel further growth.
Results
392% Increase in sales since launch
125% Increase in returning customers
31% Increase in average order value
Evolution not revolution
We kept their logo, font, and colours, but revamped everything else. The old style didn't mesh with our new bold and bright vision. So, we cleaned up the 'C' mark, ditched the strapline, and turned up the colour volume for a fresher look.
Bringing back the character
Instead of competing for the limelight, we decided to share it. We started by creating toolkits. These toolkits were themed on their most popular characters and brand ranges, like superheroes and princesses. By creating a selection of fonts, colours and bold illustrated elements we could inject Character.com’s own personality into their marketing, complementing and enhancing, rather than fighting with already powerful brands.
The new-look Character.com
With a revitalised brand and an arsenal of assets, we began the transformation, bringing Character to the forefront of their communications and re-establishing their presence as one of the UK’s largest retailers of licenced clothing and accessories.
As Character.com has grown, so too has its relationships with leading character brands, such as Miraculous and Peppa Pig. With the new flexible and bold brand style, we created animated social campaigns to promote exclusive clothing lines. These were also used on the brands' own social accounts creating high levels of interaction results.
Shopify Plus Online Store
Utilising the new brand identity and toolkit, we developed a new custom theme, taking advantage of new features and developments available in Shopify.
We took everything we had learned about how Character.com works and the specific functionality they needed and worked it into a brand new theme. We were able to use Shopify’s Sections API, giving them much more control of content, as well as helping to allow a much more interesting and varied design style.
Building blocks
We built a custom, standardised component library using the new brand style, including making some blocks themeable using the brand toolkits or specific characters and brands.
We combined the updates in Shopify technology and these components to create specific landing pages for characters and important promotions and sales. Character.com can now quickly add custom destinations for campaigns and characters.
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We’ve integrated Shopify’s recommendations API so that recommended products are based on actual sales information, rather than similar items. We’ve also made the add to basket/checkout flow more seamless, resulting in a higher average spend.
Leaner, cleaner code
By focusing on what Character.com needed, we’ve managed to increase the theme’s performance, reducing the amount of first-party Javascript and CSS required, as well as being able to remove some plugins that they needed for certain functionality. We’ve also been able to simplify the code base, removing a lot of inline scripts which were required for some of the functionality.
