Background

The previous incarnation of the Birkenstock Australia website was built in 2010. Digital Bridge took over management of the site in 2013 and proceeded to make many small improvements to it over the following two years. However, the website didn’t work very well on mobile devices, was hard to update and improve, was difficult for customers to use, and cumbersome for staff to manage. With these impediments in mind, Birkenstock Australia engaged Digital Bridge in mid-2015 to build a brand-new ecommerce website.

After identifying many key points of improvement, we set to work redesigning and rebuilding the site from the ground up. The aim was to launch the new website to coincide with Birkentsock's Spring/Summer collection.

The Approach

The two main objectives were to:

• improve the shopping experience for customers
• build more powerul and intuitive tools to make managing the site a breeze for Birkenstock Australia staff.

We set out to create a site that was fresh, new and had a much more friendly design. The underlying structure was rebuilt with modern technologies standards and optimised to work across devices - from phones to tablets to desktops. We also reimagined product structure to make it easier for customers to find what they were looking for and significantly streamlined the checkout process.

To make it easier for staff to manage the site, we introduced a more flexible relationship between products and attributes, improved order processes, implemented better integration with the Birkenstock Australia retail store order and stock management systems, and upgraded the tools that were used to communicate with customers. A large amount of migration of data was performed to make for easier data management.

The Results

We launched the new Birkenstock Australia website in November 2015 - just in time for Christmas shopping. As a result, many people were overjoyed to find a new pair of Birkenstocks sitting under their tree, purchased for them online by a loved one.

The people at Birkenstock Australia were similarly happy to receive a new website that was fast to load, easy to browse, quick to checkout, and super-simple to manage thanks to a new admin area. 

Websites are not static, which means the site will continue to change, but now that it has been built on a solid foundation for future improvement, changes will be much easier to apply.

Digital Bridge designs, develops and manages powerful websites and web-based applications for Australian businesses. We are based in Smith St Fitzroy, Melbourne.