Case Study RetailNext: WordPress Design & Development

Founded in 2007, RetailNext is the first in-store analytics platform expressly built to address the changing face of retail. Hundreds of top retailers and brands worldwide trust RetailNext for their in-store analytics. Oh, and not to mention, it was awarded the Best Company by Entrepreneur 360 in 2017.

With its presence in more than 90 countries and having more than 200 employees, it achieved rapid growth and expansion in a decade. RetailNext set out to create the best web experience for customers coming on board or wanting to come on board.

RetailNext teamed up with Seahawk to design a website aligned with its mission of improving the shopper experience by providing insights to the retailers. Seahawk assigned its best team, the project led by Ryan and Gautam, and our design and development teams in Poland and India.

The project was divided into 5 phases:

• Discovery & Objective Setting
• UI Design
• Contentful Development
• Project Reflection & Launch
• Growth

Challenges

Getting found online was a big struggle for RetailNext, and they previously worked with two other local website design companies. Still, they failed to deliver a custom website that reflected their brand’s vision. That all changed when they chose Seahawk for redesigning their website.

The RetailNext team partnered with Seahawk to develop a strategic direction to help solidify their position as the in-store analytics platform leader and communicate a leadership position to elevate RetailNext from other in-store analytics platforms. They needed a more classic and modern website that was entirely unique to their brand and would stand out from the crowd.

Solutions

The project’s goal was to design & build RetailNext, a world-class, award-winning website as one of the fastest-growing franchises. To achieve this, we broke up the project into five phases and assigned some of our industry-leading UI designers, developers, and project managers to this.

Discovery & Objective Setting

The project kick-off began with a discovery of everything relating to the RetailNext brand as a whole. We studied their brand story and voice extensively. We also did a full data audit into their analytics and built a findings report with insights.

This phase of the project also included objective setting. Ryan and Gautam scoped out the project in ClickUp by stages to ensure things stayed on track and we met our goals for the project. We not only wanted to achieve our goals for completion but to deliver the best results, even if it took love and patience.

UI Design

When Seahawk does a project, we don’t take it lightly and pride ourselves on designing for intent. Everything we do in a design has the purpose of driving conversion and evoking emotion, even simple things like elements and photo selections.

This phase was indeed a lengthy process, but we wanted to make sure RetailNext got to see many design directions and takes from different designs. We assigned 3 of our best UI designers to make a couple of creative suggestions. In total, we did about five custom designs in various directions. We ended up honing on one of them by our designer Mateusz.

Development

We started with showcasing illustrations drawn by Maria using Illustrator for the hero image, and using Mateusz’s design, Dawid began to work on realizing the design on Sketch. 

To further enhance the website’s performance, Seahawk implemented rigorous site speed optimization techniques. Through advanced optimization strategies such as image compression, minification of CSS and JavaScript files, and leveraging browser caching, we achieved significant improvements in RetailNext’s website loading speed and overall performance. These optimizations ensured a faster and more seamless browsing experience for users, reducing bounce rates and increasing user engagement.

RetailNext chose Contentful CMS for working on their 30 subpages project. It happens to be one of the most popular CMS on the market today. Since they are most familiar with it and Seahawk is CMS builder agnostic, we were able to use Contentful.

Our internal team started the development process after receiving the Sketch files from Dawid. After Mateusz created the design system and home page, Martina created and developed all the 30 subpages HTML in Contentful CMS, which were super-optimized.

Project Reflection & Launch

After a thorough QA, we launched the RetailNext! It was an inspiring event as this was one of the straightforward and big projects we have enjoyed working on. 

Here’s the link to RetailNext Figma Project & you may also visit RetailNext Website.

Testimonial

Flexible, Good work, On-time delivery
“Seahawk helped us recently with a website redesign and branding rework. We had some very specific requirements around this as part of the work was done in-house, and they were very accommodating to our needs. The deliverables were of very good quality, and arrived within the agreed timeframe. Would definitely use them again in the future and would recommend them for any design-related work.” – Arun Nair, CTO of RetailNext!

Partnership

It has been an honor to work with the RetailNext team on this project. Their brand stands for so much good, and we were honored to be a part of the project with their talented team.

Credits

Seahawk

• Ryan and Gautam – Project Lead
• Mateusz – Lead UI Designer
• Maria Keller – Illustrations