Astound Commerce and Hobbycraft perfect the art of crafting digital transformation

Manufacturer replatform provides basis for ongoing good results as a result of improved omnichannel shopper encounter.

 Hobbycraft, the UK’s major arts and craft retailer, has partnered with major electronic commerce company, Astound Commerce, to generate a transformational ecommerce system built to electrical power enterprise advancement, when inspiring its prospects and empowering them to make. The replatforming implementation is central to the brand’s roadmap as it seeks to broaden its multichannel supplying to further fulfil its mission to ‘Get Britain Making’.

Launched in 1995, Hobbycraft has since developed to a nationwide company with over 100 outlets throughout the British isles, completely ready to guidance and encourage an at any time-growing wide variety of crafts, arts and hobbies. It presents crafting lovers with everything they need for art, knitting and crochet, haberdashery, papercraft, wedding day and get together items, baking and jewellery producing, with its Hobbycraft Club at present subscribed to by more than 5 million associates.

Next excellent ecommerce expansion all through the Covid-19 pandemic, the retailer welcomed additional than 1.3 million new clients as people today rediscovered old hobbies or observed new types all through lockdown.  Off the back again of this accelerated on the internet advancement trajectory, Hobbycraft recognized the will need to digitally change to meet the improved on the internet expectations of customers publish-pandemic, including frictionless entry to leading merchandise ranges and excellent consumer services.

Nonetheless, its legacy ecommerce system experienced arrived at its ability and couldn’t satisfy the retailer’s desire to scale or supply the seamless omnichannel ordeals its purchasers now be expecting, with 60% of all in-retail store visits presently commencing on-line. Furthermore, the Hobbycraft staff had been unable to dynamically make modifications to the internet site or very easily generate merchandising and written content necessary to elevate the digital purchasing knowledge.  Over-all, this meant customer experience was minimal, with the means to align inspiration and solutions and deliver personalisation compromised even though any alterations that required to be made to the internet site ended up typically time-consuming to apply. 

Subsequent a competitive pitch, Astound Commerce was selected to provide the new Salesforce Commerce Cloud (SFCC) platform, which it designed and executed using Astound’s best-in-class SFCC accelerator,  Velocity Reference Architecture (VRA). VRA enabled a strong baseline for Hobbycraft’s elaborate needs and was supplemented with vital 3rd-celebration technologies, including Bazaarvoice to integrate solution ratings, critiques and Q&As and cross border providing specialist, World-wide-e, to empower Hobbycraft shoppers across the entire world to pay in nearby currency and use local shipping companies for purchase success.

Bloomreach was deployed to deliver a richer and additional personalised research encounter and enhanced merchandising and net information to enhance conversion costs, whilst its CDP allows Hobbycraft to use multiple internal and external data resources to more electrical power and enrich personalisation. In addition, the comprehensive backend capabilities of the platform have enhanced effectiveness for the Hobbycraft staff, making marketing and advertising, merchandising and the administration of the internet site considerably much less time consuming.  The integration of ClassBento onto the platform indicates fanatics can now obtain workshops where by they can discover new crafts and grasp leading approaches with support from Hobbycraft’s in-household colleagues and Artisans.

By deploying MuleSoft’s open up API-pushed methods architecture, Hobbycraft now has real time visibility throughout the unique remedies it deploys to control solution, costs, retail store operations, buyer engagement, orders and inventory updates. This has also stream-lined the integration with its provider management system, Sorted, and has improved the future capacity to integrate emerging channels and options.

Matt Louth, IT Director, at Hobbycraft, commented: “Our fantastic ecommerce expansion throughout lockdown made distinct the worth of positioning digital transformation at the heart of our multichannel featuring to ensure we have the suitable capabilities in spot to support and develop the organization.  We chose to partner with Astound Commerce since of their unparalleled working experience and information and they were a trusted associate in each way – doing work as an extension of our crew and providing the highest amounts of complex and delivery abilities.”

Astound Commerce MD, Samuel Cane, commented: “Hobbycraft is a good achievement story obtaining worked tirelessly to innovate and support its local community of crafters in the course of lockdown.  It has been a satisfaction to husband or wife with the team to shape this following stage of their digital transformation with a scalable and potential proof platform that can assistance engagement with their loyal prospects and generate the business’ growth programs throughout channels and gadgets, whilst making sure customer encounters are upheld at each individual touchpoint.”