In 2016, Coastal Business supplies decided to go through some major changes including switching CMS platforms from WordPress to Magento 2. Then, in 2017 they decided to hire Atomic Dust, a well-known St. Louis area branding firm to embark on a complete company rebrand. This rebrand was a facelift on the company logo, but also, it was a facelift on the company’s entire persona.
At the beginning of my career at Coastal, as a web content specialist, I was a part of the website migration. With over 5k products my team and I managed to design, build and migrate the site just before its deadline. Once the migration was complete the marketing team and I started our rebranding journey.
Problem: new things are scary
Anyone who’s been through a redesign is familiar with the highs and lows that come with it. People don’t like change and it can be challenging to decode feedback.
Since Coastal was a marketing-driven eCommerce business we wanted to ensure that we presented the redesign to have a positive impact on the customers. We were focusing more on educating our customers and migrating the website to be able to offer an even more diverse collection of products and equipment.
Pre-launch marketing
Our rollout plan spanned several months and even more time prior in execution plan meetings. We worked as a team and had this rollout planned down to the minute.
Beta testing early
Before the site was launched officially, we gave access to internal users to test and to a small sample group of customers. We gathered feedback, looked for patterns and adjusted designs accordingly.
Categorized and voted on ideas
Since we were pushing the education side of this rebrand hard in the marketing we had to follow-through to maintain trust. We launched a series of blogs, emails and videos to support our B2B customers and help them grow.
Coastal was another company where I wore many hats. My primary role was to manage the website and the products but I was also managing the redesign project, designing marketing materials and the site, and managing and designing all email campaigns.
Explorations
Pre-launch beta testing was the saving grace of this project. We already redesigned and migrated the site over not even a year earlier. Now, we were going to rock the boat even more by launching a new logo and an entirely new look.
In beta users let us know if items were harder to find - we made adjustments to search. They told us the checkout process was slow - development cleaned up code that was slowing things down. In the end we made a lot of changes that resulted in a successful launch.
The first-pass at the new website.
Final Website Design
The final-final, seriously this time, final design.
Email Marketing Design
With branding on point emails were a combination of promotional with a sprinkle of educational.
Outcome
The rebrand and site launch was a success. Post launch was met with some hesitation and a mix of positive and negative feedback (mostly on site performance issues) but moving forward our team was able to test and gather data to support continually evolving. We spend the following year in a battle with Magento 2 - we were beta customers ourselves. As for the branding and education - we focused a good amount on continually growing our product offerings and even built a video recording studio on our warehouse to create more professional-looking video content.
Reflection
Looking back I feel like there were some things we could have done differently. Understanding the testing process a bit more and how to handle feedback was a learning experience. It was however the experience that got me motivated to seek a more UX driven career.