Bringing a growing lifestyle brand to life online

Uncommon James is a fashion and lifestyle brand founded by entrepreneur Kristin Cavallari, featuring jewelry, apparel, home goods and a recently launched line of skincare products.

Challenge

Already a successful, established brand, Uncommon James wanted to elevate its eCommerce site to better reflect its brand attributes, improve the user experience to help its customers more intuitively discover and shop all of its products, support the company’s future growth, and explore providing customers with new ways of purchasing.

Solution

Our solution for Uncommon James involved three key phases: realigning the brand and upgrading technology, integrating subscriptions, and launching a new product line on the new site.

Brand realignment and technology stack upgrade. Based on the Uncommon James team’s work, eHouse Studio translated the brand elements to the online store to create a customer experience that was more aligned with their social channels, offline channels and retail stores. Along with the visual design, we implemented UX and UI improvements to optimize the shopping experience for customers. This work will be foundational for helping the company achieve its future growth goals.

Redesigning information architecture and navigation. We restructured the information architecture and site navigation to bring cohesion to the overarching Uncommon James brand. We designed the menu to organize products into main categories: Jewelry, UJ Home, and Apparel + Accessories. We added calls-to-action and images to bring visual hierarchy, as well as enable the client to highlight specific collections and trending categories within the navigation itself.

Enabling more flexible content management. We developed templates for different modules and design elements that the marketing team can use without the need of a developer to modify the layout and change out marketing and lifestyle content on the fly, while maintaining a cohesive look and feel throughout the site.

Optimizing search and filtering. As Uncommon James’ catalog expands, “smart search” will become more important for an optimal customer experience. We upgraded the out-of-the-box Shopify Plus search with an advanced search app that auto-corrects, makes recommendations and displays “popular searches” in real-time based on what is being typed into the search box.

Increasing engagement. We integrated several tools to increase customer engagement at key conversion touchpoints throughout the site, including personalized product and “complete the look” recommendations on the product detail pages (PDPs) and in the shopping cart; a wishlist that allows customers to “heart” products from the category landing pages and PDPs; a widget to allow customers to reserve an item for in-store pick-up; and a tool to collect and display customer reviews on the PDP.

Subscriptions integration. We integrated ReCharge into the eCommerce site to enable the client to launch different subscription programs, starting with their line of candles. A unified, branded subscription management portal using ReCharge Theme Engine allows customers to easily self-manage their subscriptions.

New beauty brand launch with unified checkout

All of the foundational work we did enabled a smooth launch of Uncommon James’ newest product line, Uncommon Beauty, as well as confirmed for the client that the new site will be able to support future growth. 

We added a fourth category to the main navigation, featuring the Uncommon Beauty logo to help build brand recognition. We treated Uncommon Beauty as a sub-site with nuanced design choices that provide a differentiated customer experience, while still delivering a consistent shopping experience and aligning with the overarching Uncommon James brand. Additionally, we created a unified checkout experience, allowing customers to purchase from both brands in one checkout experience.

Leveraging our content module system, the client’s marketing team added education and lifestyle content, such as information about product ingredients, how-to guidance and product benefits in multiple formats, including video.

Results

Strategic design and forward-thinking choices about technology provided Uncommon James with a solid foundation to optimize customer experience and conversions for its core product lines, and then rapidly leverage this infrastructure to successfully support the launch of its newest line, Uncommon Beauty – all on one Shopify store.