Ted Baker
L’Objet creates designs for the home that are both luxurious and functional works of art, crafted with the highest degree of excellence and quality.
Redesigning their e-Commerce site for a more intuitive user experience and better site speed.
- UI/UX Design
- Development
Client
Ted Baker is an internationally renowned lifestyle brand based in the UK. Their strong presence in Europe, Asia, and North America makes Ted Baker a truly global brand. With a focus on quality, attention to detail, and a quirky sense of humor, Ted Baker is the epitome of British style.
Overview
Migrate and replatform Ted Baker's North American eCommerce operations from BigCommerce to Shopify Plus, with a fast turnaround for a BFCM launch, without sacrificing data accuracy, quality or style, and maintaining a look and feel that’s consistent with Ted Baker’s existing web properties.
What We Did
Total data migration off of BigCommerce and onto Shopify Plus, with custom-built storefronts that have styling and functionality that’s consistent with Ted Baker’s other web properties. The goal was to maintain as many of the existing features and content pieces as possible, on a highly accelerated timeline, with a planned launch date just two weeks before BFCM. We used custom Shopify web design and development principles to seamlessly integrate existing data, processes, tech stacks, and marketing stacks. We applied pre-launch and post-launch SEO to preserve and maintain Ted Baker’s strong organic presence throughout the replatforming process.
Project Information
There were a number of highly technical challenges that we needed to overcome in order to successfully launch TedBaker.us and TedBaker.ca on Shopify Plus. Ted Baker has a strong international presence, with retail locations and eCommerce storefronts in multiple countries worldwide. Our top priority was to maintain consistent branding, styling, and functionality, without sacrificing stability, security, or organic visibility.
Challenges
- Replatform the store on an accelerated timeline, prioritizing styling, UX, and backend functionality
- Use Geolocation to provide a seamless, location-specific UX and buying experience
- Integrate Shopify Plus with an existing international fulfillment infrastructure, encompassing fourteen vendors, dozens of retail locations, and international eCommerce sites on multiple platforms
- Create custom swatches that behave similarly to existing features on TedBaker.com (their UK site), and design custom PDPs and PLPs for upcoming promotions, sales, and marketing campaigns
- Use redirects and a complex language tag (hreflang) configuration to connect alternate language page locations across multiple international regions
- Provide operational Shopify Plus training and support for the Ted Baker team to ensure a stable transfer of services post-launch
Our Solution
With enterprise eCommerce, communication is the key to success
One of the biggest challenges in this project was maintaining the lines of communication between the BlueSwitch team, and Ted Baker’s massive international organization of stakeholders, corporate entities, team leaders, team members, and supporting agencies. Navigating the complex ecosystem of approvals, requests, and requirements, our project managers kept stakeholders in the know with detailed updates on progress, roadblocks, challenges, and victories. Prioritizing communication kept the project on-track, on-time, and on-budget, allowing us to meet the strict timeline and launch in time for BFCM.
Replatforming a massive international product catalog
Ted Baker is world renowned for their incredible catalog of luxury goods, but replatforming thousands of products from BigCommerce to Shopify Plus posed unique challenges for our development team. We used a variety of custom metaobjects, custom PDP designs, custom PLP designs, color swatches, and metafields to allow for 1:1 mapping of every unique element, for thousands of SKUs. Then we used a complex configuration of multinational redirects and language tags (hreflangs) to ensure that each location’s products could be indexed for Google search, without cannibalizing product rankings in other territories.
Design, styling, and UX take center stage for Ted Baker
Ted Baker is a global leader in fashion and lifestyle design, so it’s no surprise that the Ted Baker website build would prize style, design, and UX as core values throughout the process. Our Shopify Plus designers and developers worked directly with Ted Baker leadership to create stylish, conversion-focused North American storefronts. Through the use of Shopify’s metafields and swatches, we built in user-operated promotional functionality that can be accessed by anyone on the Ted Baker team, without prior training in Shopify development. The result is a stylish, stable, and secure storefront that is highly customizable, while remaining nimble, and easy to manage.
