Turtle Doves
Replatforming Turtle Doves e-commerce website from Shopify to SelectCommerce for Refined Brands Group.
Background
Turtle Doves, a fantastic British design and manufacturing company specialising in using post-consumer cashmere jumpers to create beautiful new garments and accessories. In 2022 they were acquired by the Refined Brands group, who are a family of sustainable fashion brands with a shared vision. Webselect who have been developing and supporting e-commerce businesses since 1998 are proud to be the e-commerce development partner for Refined Brands and this project welcomed the Turtle Doves brand onto their e-commerce platform of choice, Webselect’s SelectCommerce.
“We’re really excited to launch our new Turtle Doves e-commerce website on Webselect's SelectCommerce platform.”
Chris Farrow - Head of Digital
Refined Brands Group
Objectives
Having acquired Turtle Doves in Q4 2022, Refined Brands were keen to move them from Shopify onto the same unified SelectCommerce platform as the other brands in the group: Celtic & Co, Frugi, Morlands and Kettlewell Colours. This was driven by a desire to control overall e-commerce overhead costs across the group, minimise technology divergence, having a well proven and stable platform customisable around the groups other line of business applications and processes. In addition, the team were all comfortable in the easy to use and intuitive SelectCommerce CMS and analytics.
“With all of our brands now on the Webselect platform SelectCommerce, we are now able to share functionality across the group, reduce our overall development time and leverage economies of scale with new partners.”
Chris Farrow - Head of Digital
Refined Brands Group
Refined Brands wanted to reduce the cost of ownership and operating of the e-commerce platform as they acquired new brands and businesses, SelectCommerce a custom platform developed over more than 20 years was the right solution for the expanding group. Having utilised the platform on some of the brands for the last 15 years for example Kettlewell colours migrated away from Drupel to SelectCommerce.
For Turtle Doves the features within Shopify were all available to Refined Brands via SelectCommerce including immediate integration with their Stock Management and fulfilment systems. Platform stability was also not an issue for Turtle Doves as SelectCommerce uptime is >99% as it's based on Azure Cloud Services.
Turtle Doves range and SKU’s are not large compared to other brands within the group and revenues of a much more modest range however, it was still cost effective to on-board to SelectCommerce
By bringing Turtle Doves onto the same SelectCommerce Enterprise platform, Turtle Doves are well positioned to take advantage of the advanced features of SelectCommerce and the infrastructure required to take the proposition to international markets, enabling them to sell to customers around the world.
“We’re really excited to launch our new Turtle Doves website on the Webselect SelectCommerce platform. Throughout the project the Webselect team have been great, responsive and technically very knowledgeable.”
Chris Farrow - Head of Digital
Refined Brands Group
What we did
Webselect were able to bring their 24 years of e-commerce experience to onboarding Turtle Doves to SelectCommerce with a deep industry specific understanding of the fashion and clothing online market. The site was designed and built to be light and fast with exceptional user journeys in mind to focus on conversion. Turtle Doves and Refined Brands have the security of close support and maintenance of their sites. With a dedicated SLA and 24/7 in person support issues can be raised, problems identified quickly and resolved promptly to maintain an exceptional level of service to the client to maintain site conversion, site experience and site reputation in the eyes of the end users and customers.
Before
The site before Webselect redeveloped it wasn't terrible, however, it was using standard templates and had plugins that were not lean and optimised. The result was a lower performing website with higher page weights and slower page loads. The navigation and banner information UX was suboptimal and confusing to the eye. Image optimisation was missing so some product images were too large.
After
After Webselect onboarded Turtle Doves the site was completely rebuilt and optimised. The UX of the homepage and navigation is simplified. Using insights and research data available via the Baymard Institute search was moved to top left of the navigation, basket icons simplified and floating navigation context improved. Additionally, all templates are customised and lean meaning that categories and product pages load very quickly.
Integrations with MMP/OrderActive for stock management, GrapheneHC search to support more targeted merchandising and Cloudflare for better image CDN management and security. Additionally, SEO attributes were enhanced with better meta data, 301 redirects from the old site to preserve existing ranking, descriptive URL’s at all levels to support maximum organic rankings. As with all of the SelectCommerce sites, the CMS is easy to use and intuitive to manage the site as well as having clear and simple UX.
“Webselect team have been great, responsive and technically very knowledgeable.”
Chris Farrow - Head of Digital
Refined Brands Group