Bringing a luxury
brand to life online
How do you translate the luxury of a physical product into a D2C digital experience?
The project outcomes were great; the clarity, stakeholder alignment and prioritisation the Nile team brought will have value for months to come.
The need
Owners of a leading luxury Scottish whisky brand, Edrington, wanted to grow their direct-to-consumer online channel, but that didn’t necessarily mean growing sales. Whisky – especially high-end, aged whisky – is limited by its very nature.
We were asked to explore engagement opportunities in the digital space, designing a strategy for the future.
What we did
We could see that in order to make the next leap forward, our client needed to pivot from being product and marketing led to an experience and service led organisation. And demonstrate their values in an authentic way. To make this change sustainable, they also needed to build their own internal capability.
The first challenge was internal alignment; making sure distributed teams were pulling in the same direction. Through a facilitated creative workshop, we worked to document what was known, what was assumed, and what exactly Edrington wanted to achieve from the research and design process.
Once aligned, we instituted a 360-degree approach to our foundational insight. Using one-to-one interviews in combination with a diary study, we built an ethnographic picture of target customers’ daily lives, defining ‘luxury’ and establishing what it meant to them in a digital context.
The Edrington design team were with us throughout this process. This helped to build a deeper empathy and understanding of their consumers. What’s more, we cultivated literacy in Service Design tools and methods within the design team, giving them the techniques and abilities to run similar research themselves in the future.
After evaluating the current experience, stress-testing changes, and building a set of hypotheses and desirable digital experiences, we built a strategic design framework. A scaffold of principles, tools and communication materials within which our client would build and evaluate all of future digital services.
The team is incredibly talented and experienced, and bring real gravitas whilst still making the process of working together really easy and enjoyable.
The outcome
The Customer Experience Framework developed by Nile now serves as a strategic planning tool for the business as a whole, shaping annual priorities, team offsites, internal comms and onboarding.
The project outcomes were great; the clarity, stakeholder alignment and prioritisation the Nile team brought will have value for months to come.
Even more importantly, armed with clear customer insight and an actionable strategic design direction, the design team now has buy-in and strategic alignment across the board.
Internal assumptions about online customers have been forever changed, shifting Edrington’s business focus and opening up a space to talk about, prioritise, and execute new opportunities.
Other times we’ve made a difference
Turning ‘pub chat’ into an investable start-up
Incubating an eco start-up with little more than a mission and a spark of a concept, turning it into a business with an investable product.
Transformational customer service
Helping one of the UK’s largest commercial banks to transform their service model across all channels, designed with their customers at the core.
Customer Wednesdays
Co-creating a powerful, repeatable design research playbook that mobilised a culture of customer-centric design across an entire organisation.