Full-scale Magento to Shopify migration for British homeware & ceramics favourite, Sophie Allport

Project Overview

Long established as a British homeware favourite, Sophie Allport specialise in nature-inspired, country-themed ceramics and homeware. As well as a beautiful online presence, the business operate a number of physical storefronts and enjoy partnerships with a national group of stockists and distributors. In addition to a sophisticated migration from one sales platform to the next, we also redesigned the site's visuals to provide a modern, more elegant customer experience.

In numbers:

1

UK-focused Shopify instance for national sales.
16

Weeks to launch from project commencement.
7

BAO project team members.
1

Comprehensive Magento > Shopify data migration.

Design summary

Sophie Allport have built a loyal customer base - a quality-focused, home-oriented buyer with a taste for a country-inspired aesthetic. An important part of the project was to ensure that the brand's national reputation was respected and built upon - helping the brand's design language evolve to stand proudly among the most highly-regarded in the sector. Sophie's hand-painted designs are celebrated and loved, and designing a store that matched that aesthetic was paramount to the success of the creative round.

Home Page

We designed a media-rich, clean, grid-based layout for the site's homepage - making sure that clear navigation and wayfinding was balanced against showcasing Sophie's beautiful products.

Collection

Top-level collections are used to refine the product offering and group products together. Again, a flexible grid was used so that the page looks great with any amount of content, and we put together a sleek filtering system to get users to products as quickly as possible.

Product

Beautiful imagery and a balanced layout creates a simple, visually interesting product page. Key eCommerce functionality remains in place on all screen sizes, using tried and tested techniques designed to force up conversion rates.

Bag

The bag page collates products, makes it simple to pay and uses subtle upselling techniques to create an elegant experience - and one that's easy to check out through.

Story

The story of Sophie Allport is key to the way that the brand was built. Starting from humble beginnings, Sophie's designs found their way onto products across the country, and with her brother Jem's business nous, became favourites in homeware and ceramics circles. The story of a British, family-owned business is a rich part of the product and brand journey and we illustrate it clearly and effectively using a timeline style.

Blog

Sophie's blog is a hub of recipes, stories, behind-the-scenes insights and giveaways, and drives a lot of natural traffic to the site. We redesigned it to be simpler to follow and easier to enjoy.

Mobile Design

Overhauling the Sophie Allport mobile experience was central to the project. The old site's mobile experience was a flat, unsophisticated sales experience, and we created a set of mobile specific templates designed to re-imagine the way the brand sell online.

Home

Filters

Collection

Recipes

Inspiration

Product Detail

Push Bag

Recipes

Technologies and providers

We used some of the more common weapons in our eCommerce arsenal to get the project over the line in a challenging time frame.

Shopify Plus is Shopify's enterprise eCommerce platform for large and growing online stores and brands. It's a hosted platform - customised, staffed, and positioned for large, demanding brands.
Google Shopping is a Google service which allows users to search for products on online shopping websites and compare prices between different vendors.
PayPal is a worldwide online payments system that supports online money transfers and serves as an electronic alternative to traditional paper methods - like cheques and money orders.
Dot Digital is a marketing automation platform that helps businesses share email and ad campaigns with clients, customers, and other interested parties.
Transportr makes creating, editing, managing and monitoring Shopify redirects hassle free. It's a key tool for successful launches, relaunches and site restructures.