Case Study | Cleo Home Website
While working at Congoleum, an 133-year-old manufacturer of residential and commercial resilient flooring products I was part of the marketing team assigned to launch a new eco-forward limestone-based flooring product. This was the first of its kind on the market.
After being heavily involved in the branding and product launch; it was time to create the website. Since Cleo Home is geared towards millennials, a contemporary web experience was vital to the lifecycle of the product. So I wanted to build a website that was not only visually stunning but would also be a “design resource” for people and families looking for healthy new flooring.
My Role
As brand director, my role in the website was aligning the tenants of the brand while providing our customers a flawless, easy to navigate website. I oversaw a creative agency in the initial creation of the site, eventually taking it on together with a web developer and junior designer under the oversight of our CMO. Together we improved the navigation and functionality of the site, added a sample shopping cart, created a retail store locator, and created inspirational pages and design related content.
Design Process
Personally, I’m very proud of my work in building out the sample shopping cart customer experience. We needed a way to provide free or minimum cost flooring samples to our customers. Our other websites charge customers $5 per sample and we absorb the costly shipping process of mailing a full size plank or tile sample. It’s an extremely expensive and fossil fuel-heavy shipping process. And because of the proprietary digital printing process, Cleo floors have many unique planks and tiles. So one sample would never provide you with an accurate representation of the floor. So we decided to mail paper samples.
As you can imagine, color correction was imperative to the process. So I designed a paper sample format. Then I worked closely with the printer and junior designer to color correct each sample individually comparing the product and print in multiple light sources. It was an exhaustive process but once it was done we’re able to save the color profile so additional forthcoming jobs print accurately. Once the cards were printed, I selected furniture that could store and make the mailing/stocking process easy for an in-house admin to fulfill the jobs.
On the website I worked with a web developer to create a customized Shopify cart that could plug into the WordPress template easily. I then created a process to fulfill the incoming orders using another export plugin to make a mail merge easy. I troubleshooted the program for two weeks, then trained an admin to fulfill the orders by giving her limited access to the WordPress backend.
Constraints & Limitations
Because Cleo is such a new product I worked within an extremely tight budget to make this project happen, often solving problems and doing the work in-house to save time and money.
Next Steps
My next steps will be to add a variable data element to the sample mailings. I would like add the closest retail store (where they can buy Cleo) geographically directly to the postcard to facilitate the next buying steps. This also provides a lead generation tool for our affiliated distributors and retail network.