Fogarty Wine Group's portfolio includes a number of well known Australian wine brands, including Deep Woods Estate, Evans & Tate, Dalwhinnie, Lake's Folly, Lowestoft, Smithbrook, Millbrook and Tasmanian Vinters.
Fogarty themselves as the parent brand wished to be more visible to its customers, a seperate brand that in itself would gain recognition rather than being eclipsed by its sibling brands. This led to an interesting information architecture (IA) challenge, as well as an interesting brand challenge.
This project came with it a number of challenges to solve. First, the sheer scale of the project meant discovery and planning we pivotal in order to stay on time and budget. We needed to plan out all aspects of this project well ahead in time, and make sure we were on the same page as the client to reduce revisions. My role in the project was to scope out requirements from the client and design the user experience across the nine domains.
Not a fantastic analogy for wine-making but it's what I got. Maybe cutting a grape vine? Regardless, for this project be successful we needed to be vigilant in scoping requirements, and planning out the execution. There was also the added pressure of a tight deadline which meant there was little to no time to take steps backwards at any stage of the project.
After initial research stages and preliminary meetings were complete, we had an in-depth design meeting with the client. In this meeting we outlined what success looked like for this project, and our plan to execute. Here we gave the client an overview of our strategy, allowing for flexibility for client contributions. Once we had universal agreement, we all felt very confident stepping into the design stages of the project. This process was very successful, mainly in part to a very visual and straight-ford process to follow for everyone in the room.
This project required us to create individual brand experiences for each of the Fogarty sub-brands, and a whole new brand story for Fogarty themselves. Our solution was to create Fogarty as the eCommerce and discovery hub, where customers could explore all of the sub-brands with ease.
This allows customers to have a more unified experience, but they can still individually discover their favourite brands outside of Fogarty. However, users that do discover these sub-brands individually will land back on Fogarty to complete their purchase. This has the added benefit of increasing brand recognition of Fogarty across these brands, while consolidating eCommerce capabilities into one site.
The design challenge here then became trying to unify the browsing experience across these brands, with users not feeling surprised when they jumped to Fogarty for purchase. This was particularly true for users that had landed on a sub-brand, and had never visited Fogarty before. For this reason we had recurring design elements across the sites, creating a co-branded experience without distraction.
At the end of the project the client was left a best-in-class eCommerce and brand experience across nine different domains. This was a great challenge to take on that really engaged the whole team. The final output was a set of designs that really spoke to the brands prestige, and provided a level customer experience.
I was very excited to work on this project, due to a number of factors. The opportunity to design for a number of household brands, many I was already very familiar with was fantastic. I felt I was very well prepared for the design challenge and was just excited to get stuck in to the process. The client had the same appreciation for the impact of design that I do, which made the process smooth and seamless.
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