Introduction:

Hornby needed someone to support them to redesign the customer experience across their 12 brands and 27 domains. After investigating the systems they had in place, we quickly realised most of the issues stemmed from the rigid technology. To achieve what was needed from a user experience perspective, we needed to solve that issue first. 

The first phase in the digital roadmap focussed on rebuilding a bespoke and scalable platform that frees them from ongoing licensing fees and a rigid user experience, enabling us to focus on making a real difference from others in their industry and online B2C retail in general.

Key objectives:

• Reduce the barrier of entry by educating users on all brands
• Create the underlying foundations of a brand community
• Provide a great customer experience in all areas of the website, not just the shop
• Provide customers at all levels the support and guidance they need
• Develop a platform that we can monitor and build upon with as little limitation as possible
• Reduce the ongoing costs of legacy systems
• Drive revenue through the websites

Challenges:

• Onboarding new hobbyists - exploring new customer segments and, more importantly, engaging with them
• Maintaining hobbyists at all expertise levels - we need to start encouraging others to take up the hobby, but also each customer segments has a diverse level of knowledge
• Creating consistent advanced product information and photography for the 18,000 products across the sites
• Integrating international brands into the online portfolio - Electrotren, Lema, Rivarossi and Arnol, UF (international brands)- as they were badly represented previously

Solution overview:

Our approach was to investigate the architecture from each site and analyse the most valuable content from a customer perspective. This was a balance of data and anecdotes from customers, which were extremely valuable. 

Armed with this data and our eCommerce experience, we could map out an architecture that worked not only for Hornby but also for all other brands with minimal compromise and development expense. The solution needed to be universal across the 12 brands, so we created a template that would work across each of them and tweaked the visual aesthetic accordingly.

Having created an IA that can work across all brands, we have developed a visual identity that will do the same. We found a balance that would work across the multiple brands and allowed for variations to portray their unique edge.

We built a bespoke platform using Symfony and used a comprehensive CMS (Concrete5) to manage products, users, forums and give it the ability to manage 13 separate global sites (28 if you count the language variations). 

The results:

Across Hornby, Scalextric, Airfix, Corgi & Humbrol (2020 - 2021 YoY)

74%

Increase in revenue

70%

Increase in conversion rate

103%

Increase in transactions