A Digital Transformation for a 200-Year-Old Jewelry Company

The fine jewelry company Boodles was established in 1798, in Liverpool, then the heart of the British trading empire. For over two centuries, the brand has built a lasting commitment to achieving excellence in all facets of jewelry design and craftsmanship. From their flagship store on London’s Bond Street to their original historic location in Liverpool, Boodles is famous not just for their breathtaking jewelry, but for their unsurpassed customer service.

Every ribbon on their packaging is tied a certain way. Their sales assistants pour every glass of champagne a certain way. In fact, Boodles has a distinctive way of doing everything. To their customers, a major part of buying jewelry from Boodles is the experience itself. So when the company decided to redesign their website, they wanted to reflect this same level of meticulous care and customer service online. To succeed, they’d need to break away from a cookie-cutter approach to website design, and deliver a carefully considered shopping experience.

For a company steeped in history, Boodles needed to keep up with modern trends. Highly-connected Millennials and Generation Z consumers are quickly becoming the largest segment of luxury shoppers, so it was crucial for Boodles to upgrade their Magento 1 Open Source platform to Magento 2 Open Source. The upgrade would enable a mobile-first brand redesign while boosting site speed, and allowing Boodles to expand into new, global markets.

Upgrading to Magento 2.2 has provided us with the unique opportunity to combine luxury with a slick user experience, enabling us to implement changes to our website quickly and easily in-house

Bea Morrison
Digital Manager, Boodles

Boodles, together with their solution partner, LogicSpot, chose Magento Open Source to lift the technical glass ceiling of their existing website and bring new sales initiatives to life. Their existing platform was holding Boodles back, and didn’t support an omnichannel experience. The new website needed to connect the Boodles in-store and online experience, making it easy for customers to preview specific pieces online, book viewings, and make enquiries directly to store staff.

With Magento, the Boodles staff can now build new landing pages, or make sweeping changes to the homepage in minutes. Using tried and tested off-the-shelf solutions including dotmailer, ebizmarts Sage Pay Suite, Atwix Rich Snippets, and Mageworx Search Suite Autocomplete, the LogicSpot team focused on the unique customizations that create the Boodles online experience.

Native Magento 2 functionality enabled what had previously been predominantly, Boodles’ “brochure only” jewelry data to be searched and viewed online, bringing to life unique categories such as “high jewelry” in a completely immersive experience. The result was the generation of significant pageviews with uncommonly high time-per-page data. Finally, appealing to mobile-savvy Millennials, the new site also integrates Boodles’ popular Instagram feed, to engage existing and potential clients.

Launched in September 2017, the new Boodles site is now one of five key touch points for their luxury client’s decision journey: the physical store, word-of-mouth, online search, and their salespeople. In terms of business operations, it now takes less than an hour for Boodles staff to build landing pages or rearrange swathes of content across the site, instead of days. After their digital transformation, Boodles can react to market news and trends quickly and easily. Design-wise, Boodles and LogicSpot combined technical expertise with a unique vision, capturing the essence of the Boodles brand and their unique customer experience.

Customers love the elegant, fresh look and feel of the site. Magento 2 now drives Boodles users from browsing high-value jewels online to making an appointment for an in-store viewing.

The results speak for themselves: Since upgrading to Magento Open Source 2, Boodles’ total sales revenue rose by 175 percent. For the first time, Boodles is tracking online and offline experiences, including in-store appointment bookings, and requests for more information, which increased by 274 percent. Mobile now accounts for more than 50 percent of all traffic, generating a 132 percent increase in mobile average order value. Boodles is now ready for the next two centuries, with a flexible eCommerce solution that will keep them ahead of the trend.

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Originally published at magento.com.