H. L. Brown

Luxury jeweller and Rolex retailer gets digital upgrade.

H. L. Brown is a luxury jeweller with stores across the midlands and north of England. The Sheffield flagship store is also an approved Rolex retailer, offering customers access to the prestigious watch catalogue. While the business had established its physical presence, online needed some attention, which is where Emrise stepped in to support.

275%

Increase in online revenue in one year

230%

Increase in overall traffic in one year

150%

Increase in organic traffic in one year

The Challenge

Emrise originally began working with H. L. Brown to support with monthly Rolex actions, including banner changes, email newsletters and blog posts. Our partner agency, Autify, was also working closely with H. L. Brown to integrate their Pursuit POS system with the website. As the brand’s online ambitions grew, Emrise recommended a WooCommerce website retheme to improve the user experience, conversion rate and SEO foundation of the website, as the current design and usability were not up to par with customer expectations. For example, while there are multiple brands within the H. L. Brown group, each with its own unique name and image, it was not communicated clearly online. Ultimately, this was having an impact on online revenue.

At the same time, the Rolex guidelines were changing, meaning retailers had to move from an embedded iframe, which was controlled by the watch brand, to a bespoke HTML implementation, that was fully managed by retailers and their development teams.

Our Strategy

Emrise began by auditing the current website, uncovering pain points in the user journey and areas where the brand could be communicated better. We then took the time to understand H. L. Brown’s needs and goals, to ensure these would all be addressed in the new design. Our user experience experts proposed a new theme, which we worked closely with the H. L. Brown team to refine until we reached a final design that satisfied brand image and story, user experience and customer expectations, and technical and SEO considerations.

The new website theme was developed for H. L. Brown. A full SEO audit was performed, ensuring any technical issues were identified and fixed. The new bespoke Rolex section was also developed, following strict guidelines provided by the brand. We also worked closely with Autify, to ensure product data was cleaned before being added to the new theme, while improvements to the integration between the two platforms were made to allow more efficient product and order syncing and minimise the administration burden for the business’s in-house team.

The project supported a full digital upgrade for the brand, aligning in-store and online processes, functionality and expectations, in order to get greater value from the website channel.

With the upgraded website live, we referred H. L. Brown to our PPC partner, Squash, to begin online advertising to improve online visibility, and drive greater traffic and sales through the website.

Strategy Implementation

Our strategy for H. L. Brown included:

UX and CRO audit of website to identify pain points in the customer journey and areas for improvement.
WooCommerce website retheme to implement UX and CRO recommendations.
Product data clean up to improve categorisation, information for customers and filtering.
POS integration improvements, including a two-way sync, regular product and order updates and click and collect functionality.
SEO audit and technical fixes.
Building stronger SEO foundations, with a clearer site map, collection page creation from what were previously filters and better content placement for optimisation opportunities.

Development of a bespoke Rolex section, following strict guidelines from the watch brand.
Tracking set up, including GA4 and Google Tag Manager.
Cookie management implementation, including setting up a cookie management platform, categorising cookies and testing if they fire correctly.
Payment gateway migration to move from a depreciating platform to a new, supported supplier and product that offered an embedded payment journey and onsite digital wallets.
Integration with new CRM system, including building and embedding enquiry forms.
PPC advisory and referral to partner agency.

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Results

275% increase in online revenue year on year, compared to the year before the launch of the new theme.
230% increase in overall traffic year on year.
150% increase in organic traffic year on year.

Benefits

Increased online revenue
Improved website design that formed the foundation of a strong digital strategy.
Seamless ecommerce integration with POS, payment gateway and CRM.
Better and more flexible content management to give the in-house team greater autonomy.
Improved alignment between in-store and online stock and order processing for a minimised admin burden.