Young-blooded, modern and relevant - Paul Valentine goes from strength to strength on Shopify Plus.

Project overview

Paul Valentine is a young, dynamic watch brand based in Germany and the USA. Founded in early 2016, the brand grew explosively during Q1 and Q2 - following a social media boom put down to a bold, creative approach to product and lifestyle photography. Initially launched using a standard Shopify theme, initial exponential growth inspired the company to pursue a transition to Shopify Plus - as well as making a significant investment in a bespoke Shopify solution by the team at BAO. In a competitive, crowded market, Paul Valentine were on a mission to give their watches the digital presence that they deserve.

Project Brief:

Paul Valentine has an impressive following on all social channels but Facebook & Instagram in particular are extremely effective for the brand. They perfectly utilise both platforms to illustrate how to style and wear their watches, blending a considered approach between both lifestyle and product photography. The brand is rapidly increasing their social reach - and leverages its huge success in social media as its primary sales channel for their business. It was our job to translate these social media marketing successes into sales by designing and developing a store that looks great, works perfectly and works as hard as possible to convert visitors to customers.
The Results:

On the website's launch weekend, the company celebrated a landmark order volume - seeing a huge 1100% upswing on their previous record weekend. We were thrilled to record huge improvements in conversion rates, as well as user engagement on the website.

A combination of product, social marketing and first-in-class digital design work created a result that we're incredibly proud of. Our bespoke Shopify solutions are designed to take brands like Paul Valentine and translate their brand capital and web traffic into tangible sales - wrapping modern, e-Commerce design principles into simple, easy to use online stores.

The project in numbers

4

Store instances launched for international territories
5000

Bespoke lines of CSS code for responsive media queries alone
90

Percent of traffic recorded as visits from mobile devices.
1100

Percent increase on total sales on their previous record weekend

Desktop design

The site's primary design approach was one of 'mobile-first' - but that wasn't a free pass to neglect desktop design. We wrote more than 5,000 lines of CSS to make the site an incredibly responsive, fluid shopping experience for every device and browser size. By using clever, minimal animations we were able to enhance those simple micro-interactions that customers perform daily on almost every e-Commerce store. These are the type of details that can't be overlooked - but it's vital they don't deter from the primary goal of any e-Commerce store - converting visitors into paying customers. For example, on product pages, our design team took advantage of the striking product photography available and paired it with bold typographic elements - illustrating the elegance and quality of every watch - while at the same time, also up-selling accessories, such as their diverse range of watch straps.

Landing Screen

Product page

Collection page

Home

Push Bag

Shop Instagram

Awwwards

Mobile design

The company recognised that more than 90% of its traffic was from mobile devices, so it was paramount that the mobile experience was highly considered and intuitive across both tablets and smartphones. It's quite usual nowadays for mobile traffic on an e-Commerce website to be relatively high, generally around 50%, but with hundreds of thousands of Instagram followers and a great social strategy, it was easy to identify how Paul Valentine was seeing these huge statistics for mobile usage. Using this data as the foundation of our decisions, our design and development teams worked together, often iterating through numerous designs and prototypes with the goal of creating an optimised user experience that was not only dynamic but highly performant for both mobile and desktop visitors.

Shop Instagram

Collections

Product

Bag

Can't recommend them enough! Our conversation rate and sales went through the roof after we launched our new bespoke Shopify site! Every dollar we invested was worth it, and we enjoyed working together with such skilled, creative and passionated people! - 5 Stars for Creativity and Design Thinking - 5 Stars for delivering very fast and on time - 5 Stars for adaptability, since we asked for a lot of additional features during the development phase.
Paul - Owner

Technology partners

Agency toolkit: The partnerships and applications that we’ve used over and over again with exceptional results.

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.
Foursixty allows Shopify merchants to turn Instagram content and UGC into shoppable galleries and other channels, track influencers and gifting programs, secure the rights to UGC, and get advanced Instagram insights and analytics.