New Site Launch for Seattle's Favorite Gifting Company Compendium!
Get ready to be inspired by Seattle based publisher Compendium's new eCommerce website!
We are so excited to finally launch the live-inspired.com website for our friends at Compendium! We first met with them last year and immediately fell in love with the products and passion of the team. From their line at Target to stores throughout Seattle and all over the country, ever since this project has started we’ve been finding sprinklings of Compendium throughout the retail space. We walked the Compendium team through a branding summit, full website redesign, development and SEO strategy so we are so excited to see it all come to life!
The Design Process
Upon the brand summit, we saw that there was a disconnect between the umbrella brand of Compendium and the popular sub-brands they offer like Positively Green and Frank and Funny. This helped us understand the necessity for some hierarchy on the website between the product overview and detail pages, along with the need for faceted search on all the product pages that would allow users to search between brands, occassions, and gift types.
From there, we collaborated with the Compendium team to create a design that would tell their brand story while also leaving space for their products to speak for themselves. It was important to create the site to be mobile friendly, so our desktop design was done alongside the mobile design. With high volume of traffic from mobile users, we wanted the shopping experience to be intuitive and simple yet powerful enough for the user to be able to find any of the hundreds of amazing products that Compendium offers.
The Compendium website is the perfect combination of creative content and a powerful eCommerce engine - using FusionCMS to create beautiful and robust content pages and BigCommerce to power the shopping aspects of the site.
With this collaborative approach we got to know the Compendium team really well, and we thought it would be great to hear from them about the process. I sat down with one of our main project contacts Angeline to ask a few questions about the process, the importance of their website, and a few fun questions!
What's your role at Compendium and how long have you been there?
I’m the Marketing Manager at Compendium. I began as the Sales & Marketing intern 7 years ago. Time flies!
Why is a good website important for Compendium?
We wanted to create a space for customers to engage with us in an emotional and authentic way. Oftentimes, we hear from people who have purchased or received one of our products as a gift. They’ll share how they deeply connect with them. This site is an opportunity to share Compendium’s story and offer new ways for customers to live inspired.
Why did you decide to redesign?
It’s been several years since we first designed the site and the online retail space has changed quite a bit! We wanted a site that reflected eCommerce best practices and gives us the opportunity to grow into the future. Our team also wanted a turnkey solution that would allow us to update the site quickly and easily!
How do you think the redesign fixes these problems?
The redesign features a clean layout and is so easy to navigate. It offers customers a dynamic shopping experience – allowing them to closely explore our products and find even more things they love.
What was your favorite part of the redesign?
My favorite part of the redesign is the part you can’t see – the backend! Through BigCommerce and Fusion, we’ve got two content management systems that allow our team to nimbly respond to the retail space and update our site. I'm thrilled that we have more opportunity to continuously improve SEO and that the CMS gives us the ability to build more marketing programs in the future. Building a site that prioritizes digital marketing best practices is really exciting.
What's your favorite Compendium product?
This is like asking to pick my favorite child! Very well – I’m such a fan of our new Love Muchly greeting card line. They are just so givable. We’ve worked with over 20 different artists and writers to create greeting cards that are sincere without being saccharine. I love the playful and sweet illustrations and sentiments.
We're so excited for the Compendium team to have this new website. Not only does this site work well for their Direct to Consumer business, but we've also included a shopping space for wholesale, sales resources for their business development team, and are working on a microsite for their Green-Inspired line for Target.
Thoughtful gifts are now easy to shop online with Compendiums new eCommerce website!
If you’re wanting to make send a thoughtful gift to a loved one, make a good friend laugh from miles away with a hilarious card, or be inspired yourself every day, look no further than Compendium. Now that you know the name, you'll start seeing them everywhere you go. Inspired to create a new website for your business? Reach out to us here!