Case study · Retail & food

Newline: an eCommerce website for a new direction.

Newline has spent 15 years making purposeful interiors with a single focus, cushions. The business needed a website that carried its design sense and made buying a custom cushion as considered as making one.

Sector: Retail & food
Service: Website design and development
Channels: WordPress · WooCommerce

Website projectDigital experience

Newline cushions arranged in a home setting.

The challenge

What needed to change.

Newline is family owned, Australian made and fully customised to the individual, with an empowering ethos behind everything it produces. Those are strong foundations for a brand, and the only thing Newline did not already have was a fresh and engaging digital presence to match.

The website had to change in how it looked, how it sounded and how people moved through it, so that it connected with the audience Newline wanted to reach. It also needed to work fully as an online store, with a sales process that people enjoyed rather than endured. For a brand built on design and aesthetics, anything less than a beautiful website would undersell the product.

Approach

How the work took shape.

We started with the platform. WordPress and WooCommerce gave Newline a complete eCommerce foundation with the flexibility to customise to its requirements and to build closely to the designs and functionality we had planned. It is robust, reliable and easy for the admin team to work in, and it can scale to match the ambition behind the brand.

Design was bespoke from the outset. A template would not have carried the personality of a business that is all about how things look and feel.

Before designing pages, we developed brand guidelines. These set the rules for consistent visual elements and a cohesive aesthetic, and they laid out Newline’s key messages so the copy could be creative and clever without drifting from the brand.

From the headlines to the About Us page and down to the newsletter sign up call to action, every line of copy was written to work hard and give life to the brand.

The shift

The brand guidelines came first, so every headline, motif and product page spoke with the one voice.

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The work

The work, up close.

The finished website is a combination of smooth user experience, clever copy and considered design. Newline’s brand values are now highlighted up front, and the front end has a high level of polish, with animations and GIFs that reward a visitor for looking closely.

Adriana from Newline Cushions summed up the project by saying she was so grateful for all the wonderful humans who had a part in the brand refresh.

The illustrative components represent Newline’s style and help people focus on what matters, the cushions. Bespoke leaf motifs draw on natural inspiration, shape and linework to create visual elements that hold attention without competing with the product.

The customised cushions page brings the core of the business to the front, walking a customer through the options in the order they would ask about them in person.

Customised cushions page on the Newline website.

Navigation was rebuilt to be more streamlined, so the journey from browsing cushion styles through to purchase flows without interruption. Fewer decisions at each step means less fatigue and more completed orders, which is what an eCommerce website is there to do.

On mobile the same structure holds. Product imagery leads, the customisation options sit within easy reach of the thumb, and the checkout stays short. The website now looks and sounds like the brand, and it sells the way Newline always wanted it to.

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