Lily O’Brien’s is Irelands best-loved chocolatier, and the first to put down roots in the United States. Their wonderful collections of hand-crafted chocolates have proven as popular here as they have in the worlds most prestigious hotels, department stores and airlines.
Lily O’Brien’s Chocolate’s manufactures over 80 tons of chocolate per week and can be found in retailers all over the globe. Last year it served over 18 million chocolates on airlines such as British Airways, Delta, Virgin and Continental combined. The New York café was opened by the Irish Prime Minister when he was on a visit to New York in 2009.
Despite being such a large company and so well-known in Ireland/Europe, it was not making the desired impact across New York City. The standalone New York City Lily’s website was doing a steady, yet unspectacular, business and so the owner came to okellydesign to work together on refining the Lily’s brand for a New York audience, and creating a new, more contemporary and better functioning webstore.
Great attention was paid toward the overall user shopping experience, and on how to best define the brand, drive traffic to the physical café, and encourage sales on the online store. I decided to break from ecommerce norms and used full screen images to help envelope the user into the Lily’s world of Bryant Park and luscious chocolates, which carries across the full site then as the user goes through it. The photography shifts from full color to a rich golden duotone for the content / text pages to help the user to see and retain the information, and then reverts to full color for the product pages. I shot the New York and café images, and the brand and product images are from the Irish brand library.
The site aims at both casual and corporate customers alike. With a small range of products for sale, we wanted to make the most of each product and show them off in the best light, whilst making it easy to find them and convert views to sales. On the main product pages, the chocolates are shown up close and taking over the whole screen, highly unusual but creating a big impact in the viewers minds. All other details and information are kept out of view to heighten the impact, though it’s easy for the user to get more information as desired via the icons and prompts.
Once the desired chocolates are chosen, the shopping bag experience then was designed to be as intuitive as possible. There were many unique considerations and requirements here, such as needing cooling materials to keep chocolates fresh and unmelted in the Summer, shipping requirements and so on. The user also now has the option to create an account to speed up the process in future, track their orders, review order history and so on.
Orders are integrated with Lily’s POS system, and also with their UPS shipping accounts to ensure that each order is processed perfectly every time. The CMS allows Lily’s to control every aspect of their site, manage inventory and promotions and add or remove products as desired. They can also garner real-time data and reports of how it is being used, how products are converting from interest to sales.
The redesigned elements drew on the existing Irish Lily O’Brien’s brand palettes of type, color and imagery, but each are used in a different manner, alongside some newer, more contemporary elements such the typeface, iconography and photography. All these combine to form a contemporary, New York audience focussed, aesthetic and appeal in a site that is sure to drive traffic and business for Lily’s NYC for a long time to come.
Visit the site here and get some chocolates for yourself and your loved ones 