Case Study: The Decorating Centre

 

The Decorating Centre stocks designer paint brands like Benjamin Moore, Little Greene and eicó paints, along with more mainstream paint brands like Johnstone’s and Leyland. Also included in the store’s offering are luxury wallpapers such as Clarke & Clarke, Today Interiors and Casadeco. 

 

Up until 2018, The Decorating Centre had an e-commerce website, with almost all products available online. It didn’t really gain momentum and wasn’t cost-effective, seeing as many products were available elsewhere on the internet and some products were difficult to ship. The company eventually decided to have a static website just for brand awareness and so they could concentrate on selling through their retail premises.  

 

In 2020, in light of taking on some exclusive top-end brands that aren’t currently widely available in the UK, The Decorating Centre decided to pursue e-commerce once again – but this time with a much smaller and concentrated offering that should ensure profitability. The Decorating Centre’s primary goal for their new website was to start growing revenue online, initially with two or three sales of high-end paints per day with a view to increasing sales in the future. The website needed to act as a ‘silent salesperson’ for the company. 

One of the paint brands that The Decorating Centre wanted to sell online is Benjamin Moore, an American brand that’s relatively new to the UK market. Benjamin Moore is renowned for its impressive range of paint colours – some 3,500 of them. The Decorating Centre wanted customers to be able to select any type of paint, in any finish and in any colour. This involved an enormous number of variants, especially since not all paint colours were available in all finishes. Aside from that, another complicated aspect was that The Decorating Centre wanted customers to go through a ‘journey’ to help them select the right paint for their decorating needs, after choosing their preferred colour. An extra factor to consider was how the trade would be able to search and order paints online. Decorators are typically very busy; they know exactly what they need and don’t have the time to be taken through a ‘journey’. 

 

“We wanted the customer to have the option to browse colours first, then be presented with the right paint for them, whether that was for interior walls or ceilings, woodwork, or exterior masonry. But not only that, we needed our busy trade decorators to be able to select a product by paint name or paint code quickly.”  

 

While its’eeze websites offer robust e-commerce features, the functionality to build these specific features wasn’t available as standard. To deliver on The Decorating Centre’s requirements, bespoke development was needed, which involved working closely with Benjamin Moore’s UK partner as well as The Decorating Centre and an independent consultant who project managed the redesign. 

Benjamin Moore UK provided the it’seeze development team with an API that was able to connect all the right paint colours to precisely the right finishes and deliver the unique customer journey that The Decorating Centre needed. Our developers were able to program and integrate the API into the it’seeze Shop package's functionality to create a very sophisticated and responsive ‘Colour Picker’ tool. Additionally, the developers created a brand new search function just for the Benjamin Moore landing page that would allow trade decorators to call up relevant paints by code or name. The existing search function at the top of the site works to enable retail customers to search for other paints like those in the eicó range. 

The Decorating Centre’s completed website looks highly professional, having been tailored exactly to the company’s preference of a minimal, elegant and easy-to-use interface. Just as importantly, the website’s online shop element works perfectly, taking into account the bespoke development work for the Benjamin Moore paints and the existing it’seeze functionality for eicó and other decorating products. 

 

“This website redesign was a considerable investment for The Decorating Centre and involved several complicated aspects, which meant a lot of brainstorming and problem-solving for both Garry and the it’seeze development team. They really went the extra mile to develop a solution that would tick all the boxes, and I’m thrilled at the outcome. I’ve no doubt that the new website will bring in the sales that The Decorating Centre is aiming for – and much more.” ~ Hayley Hemmings, Project Manager and Marketer.