Carluccio's

Carluccio’s wanted to grow their deli brand; retailing a wide range of authentic Italian ingredients, coffees and snacks, and to expand their base by enticing restaurant customers to try their highly regarded restaurant quality ingredients at home. Carluccio’s existing platform used the BigCommerce embedded within a Wordpress site which was proving cumbersome to manage, market and was difficult to maintain.

One of Carluccio’s key requirements was to design and build a modern website which reflected their sector, while still keeping the well known branding colours and trademark. The site needed to be straightforward to navigate, easy to “find a restaurant”, or book a table, and focus on large product images and details so consumers could get a better feel of their offerings.

We consulted with the team at Carluccio’s during a discovery phase and concluded the new site should be built on the Shopify platform. We suggested Shopify for its ease of use, 99.9% uptime and with it being a SaaS (Software as a Service) site, maintenance would happen behind the scenes without requiring site downtime. Hosting is also included in one easy to manage Shopify plan.

DESIGN

After receiving the brief and some ideas on layout and functionality, the decision was made to create a bespoke website, using a Shopify theme as a base, which would still allow Carluccio’s to retain their brand identity but have more control over their UX (User Experience) and functionality.

To assist in driving the design decisions Absolute reviewed Carluccio’s target market and with the help of their analytic insights, formed a case study on personas and user journeys to better understand the pattern of their customers and how they had evolved with time.

This proved to be a valuable process as our findings suggested that Carluccio’s customer base had significantly changed over time and was very different to what the client understood it to be prior to the discovery. This data driven insight meant we could tailor our designs to a clearly defined audience and in doing so, improve conversion.

Absolute were tasked with creating a design which brought the brand to life; the initial phase being a wireframe, so we could work collaboratively with the team at Carluccio’s to decide on what worked best and which aspects could be improved.

Once the wireframes were agreed, we moved the project into design. The design phase covered the main landing pages, product pages and specifically the Shop page to market their full range of Italian food & drink.

During the discovery stage Carluccio’s specified a few integrations which they would like to implement or migrate to the new Shopify site. Two of the integrations didn’t have existing middleware available within Shopify so they required further development by Absolute to create bespoke communication using their respective APIs.

• Toggle: The ability to continue to offer gift cards which could be redeemed online or at one of their restaurants, as they were phasing away from their current gift card provider to this new system.
• Atreemo: An enterprise hospitality CRM solution that delivers a closed-loop platform to assist with tracking marketing interactions to demonstrate and prove the effectiveness of their sales and marketing activity.

• TenKites: A feature rich solution to display, maintain and manage multiple restaurant menu options in real-time. Managed from one admin all while being able to update critical nutrition information and allergies across individual or all restaurants in an instant.
• Testing/UX: Once the site was built to specification the team at Absolute put the site through a testing phase, where all functionality across both desktop and mobile devices were checked for issues which could hinder a customer’s ability to navigate the site and/or convert basket items to a sale. Once the issues had been identified, we made the corrections to improve UX and ensure users had a seamless experience.